Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University, was detained Saturday by agents of the Department of Homeland Security and sent to a private prison in Louisiana—despite the fact that he’s a legal resident of the United States and has not been charged with a crime. Khalil’s attorney was unable to contact him; his wife, who is eight months pregnant, had no idea where he was for hours. He was being prepared for deportation when, on Monday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from doing so and scheduled a hearing for Wednesday.
President Trump, his Cabinet officials, and anyone authorized to speak on behalf of the administration have been remarkably forthright about what they are doing: Khalil, a leader of the most prominent pro-Palestinian campus protest movement, was detained for espousing opinions the administration did not like. This is the start of a larger crackdown not just on free speech but on dissent: Anyone holding an opinion deemed “un-American” by the administration will be targeted. These are the “enemies from within” that Trump has railed about for years, and now he’s delivering on his promise to persecute them. Soon, more activists like Khalil will be ensnared in this flagrantly unconstitutional and blatantly authoritarian crackdown.
We know this because the administration has explicitly said so. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.” And a White House official told The Free Press that Khalil’s detention was just the start of a larger crackdown on foreign student activists: “I suspect we’ll have other schools roped into this.” (The official also admitted that Khalil had not committed a crime. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” said the official, instead arguing that Khalil is a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”)
Even if the effort to deport Khalil fails—and it might, given that he has not apparently violated the conditions of his green card—the administration has already successfully advanced its larger mission, which is to create an environment where anyone who holds an opinion that is deemed threatening or simply contrary to the administration and its allies is terrified of speaking out. Foreigners and college students are already in the crosshairs. But this is not just about college campuses or Gaza. As Emily Tamkin argued in The New Republic, it is also not simply about antisemitism or the desire to make pro-Israel Jewish students feel safe at places like Columbia University. This is just the beginning of a larger effort to crush dissent everywhere in America.
The extralegal detention of a lawful resident on spurious grounds is alarming in and of itself. But the response to it from those who are ostensibly dedicated to protecting speech, combating the administration, and preserving the larger democratic order has transformed this into a moment of crisis.
The subject of Khalil’s activism—Palestine—has cowed nearly everyone who should be opposed to it. Most Democrats, terrified of saying anything that could possibly be construed as support for pro-Palestinian activists, have hemmed and hawed. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, issued a lengthy statement that effectively accepted the logic underpinning the Trump administration’s actions (that Khalil is a bad guy who deserves to face consequences). “To the extent his actions were inconsistent with Columbia University policy and created an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students and others, there is a serious university disciplinary process that can handle the matter,” Jeffries said, adding that DHS should “produce facts and evidence of criminal activity.”
Jeffries said nothing in Khalil’s defense—not even a shred of concern about this flagrant violation of the Constitution. Due process demands that the people arresting and deporting Khalil provide compelling evidence that justifies those actions before they do them. That Jeffries disagrees with Khalil is entirely beside the point. The point is that the administration is trying to disappear people whose beliefs it deems “un-American” and that it is doing so with no other justification than its insistence that they are “un-American.”
Jeffries’s statement sums up his larger failure to meet the moment. Like many in his party, Jeffries is so afraid of providing ammunition to critics who insist that the party is pro-Hamas (or, for that matter, pro-trans, pro-federal employee, or really pro-anything) that he misses what is so outrageous and dangerous about the Trump administration. But at least he said something. Many Democrats haven’t. Chuck Schumer, Jeffries’s counterpart in the Senate, only released a statement on Monday afternoon, after an avalanche of criticism. (It was, like the one issued by Jeffries, defined by its reluctance to say anything of substance.)
On the right, the Trump administration’s assault on free speech and due process has been largely greeted with applause (minus some grumbling about civil liberties from libertarian-leaning has-beens like Ann Coulter). That’s to be expected, given the right-wing political and media ecosystem’s slavish loyalty to Trump. But the response from supposedly “freethinking” types has been more telling—disappointingly so.
Over the last few years, a handful of ostensibly nonpartisan outlets have emerged, citing the need to defend liberalism and free speech from threats on the right (Trump) and left (college students). Khalil’s arrest checks a number of boxes important to these outlets. It is not only a clear violation of due process, a term these outlets typically throw around when discussing cancel culture, but clear evidence that free speech is under threat; that Khalil was being punished for voicing an opinion that was controversial and unpopular. If one had only read these sites’ mission statements and none of the work they published, one could reasonably expect them to adopt Khalil’s cause. That has not been the case.
In fact, the Trump administration chose the most prominent of these outlets, The Free Press, to tease its nationwide crackdown on college campuses. It was further evidence—not that we needed any—that the outlet, like its founder, former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, is not devoted to protecting free speech, but policing discourse.
Since its launch in 2022, The Free Press has devoted dozens of columns to decrying illiberalism on college campuses, the ostensibly chilling effect that activism surrounding issues like trans rights and Israel has on discourse on those issues, and the larger threat to the First Amendment it represents. And yet, after the leaders of our government ordered the detention of an activist in a blatant effort to squash dissent, the outlet produced one piece between Khalil’s arrest on Saturday and late Tuesday night: a triple-bylined report that relays the White House’s justification—and future plans—while quoting both critics and supporters of Khalil’s arrest without context or a point of view.
For an outlet like the Times to do this is frustrating but defensible; for one ostensibly founded to protect discourse and free speech it is unconscionable, especially when one compares its coverage of other issues. The Free Press has spent the past year giddily naming and shaming college protesters as illiberal radicals, if not Jacobins readying the guillotine for all those who dare disagree with them. When one of those protesters is the subject of a wildly unconstitutional deportation order while the administration lays out a plan for detaining campus activists around the country? Well, that’s complicated.
There is absolutely nothing complicated about the arrest and attempted deportation of a legal resident. It is an outrage on legal and constitutional grounds, as well as on moral grounds. Some observers have failed to recognize this because they disagree with Khalil; others have failed because they are afraid that defending him will make it seem like they support his politics. But Khalil is just the first of many cases to come. The administration has promised a nationwide crackdown, one that will begin with pro-Palestinian foreign student activists. That alone is frightening and reprehensible. But what will the “freethinkers” and weak-kneed Democrats say when Trump expands his roundup of dissidents to anyone—not just legal residents but U.S. citizens—whose opinions he deems dangerous or unacceptable? Will they continue to quibble and cower?
Trump’s ultimate goal is to make everyone in America afraid of speaking out about any of the horrific things he’s doing. So far, it’s working. And the longer he gets away with it, the worse it will get for all of us.
