[[link removed]]

THIS IS THE GREATEST THREAT TO FREE SPEECH SINCE THE RED SCARE  
[[link removed]]


 

Michelle Goldberg
March 10, 2025
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump made it clear that Mahmoud
Khalil was snatched because of his activism. “This is the first
arrest of many to come,” wrote Trump. _

A gate closing off the College Walk on the Columbia campus.Credit...,
Dave Sanders for The New York Times

 

On Saturday, immigration agents showed at the apartment building of
Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s pro-Palestinian protests at
Columbia University, and told him his student visa had been revoked
and that he was being detained. Khalil is married to an American, and
his lawyer, speaking to the agents by phone, informed them that he had
a green card, but they said that had been revoked as well. He was
taken away, and as of this writing appears to be in a detention
facility in Louisiana
[[link removed]].

In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump made it clear that Khalil was
snatched because of his activism. “This is the first arrest of many
to come,” wrote Trump. “We know there are more students at
Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in
pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump
Administration will not tolerate it.”

Like many things done by Trump’s administration, Khalil’s arrest
was shocking but not surprising. On the campaign trail, Trump
repeatedly said he was going to deport anti-Israel student activists.
Just last week, Axios reported
[[link removed]] on
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to use A.I. to comb the social
media accounts of student visa holders in a search for ostensible
terrorist sympathies. The administration seems particularly determined
to make an example of Columbia, announcing last week that it was
canceling $400 million in grants and contracts with the school due to
claims of ongoing anti-Jewish harassment.

But the fact that it was easy to see this ideological crackdown coming
shouldn’t obscure how serious Khalil’s detention is. If someone
legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging
in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a
drastically different country from the one we inhabited before
Trump’s inauguration.

“This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not _the_ biggest
threats to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years,” said Brian Hauss,
a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.
“It’s a direct attempt to punish speech because of the viewpoint
it espouses.”

Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, hasn’t
been charged with any crime. A dossier
[[link removed]] on him compiled
by Canary Mission, a right-wing group that tracks anti-Zionist campus
activists, includes no examples of threatening or violent speech, just
demands for divestment from Israel. Last year Khalil was suspended
from his graduate program for his role in the campus demonstrations,
but the suspension was reversed soon after, apparently for lack of
evidence, and he completed his degree. The Department of Homeland
Security claimed he “led activities aligned to Hamas,” but
that’s an impossibly vague, legally meaningless charge.

Know someone who would want to read this? Share the column.

It’s true that, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, any
foreigner who “endorses or espouses” terrorist activity is
considered inadmissible to the United States. But Margo Schlanger, a
law professor who served as head of civil rights in the Department of
Homeland Security under Barack Obama, points out that that provision
is hardly ever used, especially against people already in the country,
who largely have the same free speech protections as citizens.

You don’t need to take this from a liberal law scholar: During
Trump’s first term, a legal analysis from Immigration and Customs
Enforcement concluded the same thing. “Generally, aliens who reside
within the territory of the United States stand on equal footing with
U.S. citizens to assert First Amendment liberties,” it said
[[link removed]]. Khalil’s arrest,
said Schlanger, “seems like an incredible overreach in light of the
First Amendment concerns that even the government in the last Trump
administration documented.”

During periods of nationalist hysteria, however, overreach is common.
The closest analogue to this squalid moment is the Red Scare of the
late 1940s and 1950s, when the right exploited widespread fear of
communist infiltration to purge leftists from government and cultural
institutions. In his new book “Red Scare,” my colleague Clay Risen
writes about a 1952 Supreme Court case allowing for the deportation of
three immigrants who had each joined but later left the Communist
Party. Justice Hugo Black, who had dissented in the case, said that
the country at that moment was in “more desperate trouble on the
First Amendment than it has ever been in.”

For decades afterward, that era — when Senator Joseph McCarthy, the
audaciously dishonest, headline-dominating demagogue, set the agenda
— served as a cautionary tale, with members of both parties invoking
the horrors of “McCarthyism” to denounce political witch hunts.
Even though some Americans really did spy for the Soviet Union, it
became clear that domestic subversives did less damage to America than
the desperate, fevered campaign to root them out.

Today, pro-Palestinian campus demonstrators are widely despised, just
as leftists were during the Red Scare. I wouldn’t be surprised if
Khalil’s arrest proves popular, but that won’t make it any less
shameful or alarming. The nearly 13 million green card holders in the
United States — not to mention foreign students and professors —
have been put on notice that they need to watch what they say. “Any
foreign student here, I think, has to be worried if they’ve engaged
in pro-Palestine protests over the past couple of years,” said
Hauss. Nor can citizens rest easy; a government this willing to
disregard the First Amendment is a danger to us all.

I asked Schlanger just how freaked out we should be by Khalil’s
apprehension. “I teach constitutional law,” she said. “And I’m
freaking out.”

_Michelle Goldberg has been an opinion columnist at The New York Times
since 2017._

* Mahmoud Khalil
[[link removed]]
* Columbia University
[[link removed]]
* pro-Palestine protests
[[link removed]]
* Free Speech
[[link removed]]
* ICE arrests;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]