Activist arrest: A threat to free speech?

People hold up posters asking for the release of Mahmoud Khalil

Trump administration officials said Khalil was arrested in support of Trump’s executive orders 'prohibiting antisemitism'

(Image credit: Getty Images)

By The Week US

published 17 March 2025

“Mahmoud Khalil is the first activist to be disappeared by President Trump,” said Laura Jedeed in The Nation. He may not be the last. A former Columbia University grad student who helped lead campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, Khalil was arrested by federal immigration agents at his New York City apartment last week and told his student visa had been revoked. But the Palestinian activist doesn’t hold such a visa—he’s a legal permanent resident and so enjoys many of the same rights as a U.S. citizen. The agents didn’t care. They “abducted” Khalil in front of his pregnant wife and shipped him to a detention facility in Louisiana. Trump administration officials said Khalil was arrested in support of Trump’s executive orders “prohibiting antisemitism,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed that more “Hamas supporters in America” would be stripped of visas and green cards “so they can be deported.” Permanent residents can lose their green cards if they incite or engage in terrorism, but Khalil has no connection to Hamas. His only crime was using his free speech rights to condemn “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza.

This isn’t a free speech issue, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. Immigration law grants the secretary of state the power to deport immigrants whose presence in the U.S. could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” While a federal judge in New York has temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting Khalil, his removal from the country seems inevitable. The Supreme Court surely won’t abide a lower court judge who decides to replace the secretary of state’s foreign policy decisions with his own. This should be a learning moment, said William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal. The administration has shown that it won’t tolerate protest groups that harass Jewish students and faculty, or the elite universities that turn a blind eye to such behavior, with Trump last week canceling some $400 million in federal funding for Columbia. “It will be interesting to see how defiant others will be” after this crackdown.

America hasn’t faced such a grave threat to free speech since the Red Scare, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. The country’s nearly 13 million green-card holders “have been put on notice” to watch their words—the State Department is using AI to scour visa holders’ social media accounts for pro-Palestinian posts. Foreigners in the U.S. must now worry that voicing opposition to Trump’s immigration policies or handling of the Ukraine war could get them detained. “Nor can citizens rest easy; a government this willing to disregard the First Amendment is a danger to us all.”