The New Yorker:

Whatever legal rationale the Trump Administration cooks up, deporting protesters for things they say is wildly un-American—and possibly unpopular, too.

By Jay Caspian Kang

Sometimes things are straightforward: the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate who was involved in the pro-Palestine protests on the school’s campus, is an affront to freedom of speech. Regardless of what you think about Israel, Palestine, or the protests at Columbia, if you regard the First Amendment of the United States Constitution as worth protecting, you must oppose the Trump Administration’s attempt to silence speech through repressive government action. This is obvious enough that observers galaxies apartfrom one another have questioned how Khalil’s arrest could possibly align with the First Amendment. Khalil was not in the United States on a student visa but, rather, was a green-card holder, married to an American citizen, and a lawful resident. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Bill of Rights extends to all lawful residents of the United States.

On Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s personal X account, he wrote, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” (The post contained a link to an Associated Press article about Khalil’s arrest.) Rubio did not say that Khalil had been detained for planning or carrying out violent acts or materially assisting terrorist organizations; as of this writing, Khalil has not been charged with a crime. And Rubio did not specify what being a “Hamas supporter” entailed. Does it simply mean helping to organize a group of pro-Palestine students at Columbia, as Khalil is known to have done? Or does it require what is sometimes called material support—i.e., sending money or providing services to Hamas itself—which no official, to date, has accused Khalil of? Meanwhile, the White House X account indulged in some glib trolling, posting the words “shalom, mahmoud” along with a photograph of Khalil above a caption that claimed he was leading “activities aligned to Hamas.” This was, if anything, even vaguer than Rubio’s assertion. What does “activities aligned to Hamas” actually mean?

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