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DEMOCRATS MUST DEFEND MAHMOUD KHALIL  
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Branko Marcetic
March 12, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Individual Democrats have made strong statements against the arrest
of Mahmoud Khalil. The bulk of the party and its leadership has
offered silence or mealymouthed equivocation. _

Protestors demonstrate in support of Palestinian activist Mahmoud
Kahlil Tuesday in Washington Square Park in New York., AP Photo/Yuki
Iwamura

 

Top Democratic officials spent the better part of the last decade
warning that Donald Trump must not become president, because he would
become a dictator, act like a dangerous authoritarian, and be Adolf
Hitler reincarnate. Now, as outrage builds over Trump’s attempt to
strip a permanent resident of his green card and unlawfully deport of
him over his antiwar activism, many Democratic leaders have either
been silent or offered only the weakest of objections.

It’s fair to say that the overall Democratic response so far to what
has roundly and correctly been called the most serious assault on the
First Amendment
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years has been a mixed bag. The case is the exact kind of
authoritarian overreach that high-ranking Democratic officials have
claimed to be fighting the last eight years.

On Saturday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested
Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the Columbia University student protests
against the war in Gaza who is a permanent resident and whose US
citizen wife is eight months pregnant. They then spirited him a
thousand miles away to a scandal-ridden
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facility in Louisiana, while Trump officials announced they had
summarily revoked his green card — something government officials
can’t actually do — and were getting ready to deport him. The
administration has not only not shown evidence he’s committed any
crime to justify this, they are being
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explicit that he _hasn’t_ committed one, but that he has simply
been targeted because of his political views.

It’s not that all Democrats have been MIA on the matter. The Senate
Judiciary Committee’s official Twitter/X account tweeted out
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Mahmoud Khalil” on Monday, the same day that New York attorney
general Letitia James said
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“extremely concerned” about his arrest and was keeping an eye on
it. Just yesterday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) put out a statement
straightforwardly defending
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rights, hitting Trump on his hypocrisy here, and explaining why his
targeting of Khalil is a threat to _all_ Americans’ basic civil
liberties.

“Once a citizen or a resident of America can be locked away with no
charges against them simply because they protested, there is no going
back for America,” Murphy said. “Even if you disagree with
Khalil’s views, this practice should cross the line for you.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary
Committee, condemned
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in similarly stark terms. “We cannot allow this nation to slide into
a system of presidential authoritarianism, where people are seized at
their homes, arrested, and detained simply for expressing disfavored
political viewpoints,” he said. “The detention of Mahmoud Khalil
is ripped straight from the authoritarian playbook.”

But most high-ranking Democrats couldn’t muster anything like this.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Democratic leader in the Senate and one
of two senators from New York, put out a mealymouthed statement
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Khalil and justifying _some_ kind of punishment against him, stating
that he “abhor[s] many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud
Khalil holds and supports,” and that he had “encouraged [Columbia]
to be much more robust” in cracking down on protests. The statement
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Hakeem Jeffries, another New York Democrat and the party’s leader in
the House, similarly opened by advising that “to the extent his
actions . . . created an unacceptable hostile academic environment for
Jewish students and others, there is a serious university disciplinary
process that can handle the matter.”

In fact, New York, a solid blue state and Khalil’s home, has
generally been a bleak landscape for Democratic officials willing to
robustly defend free speech. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, whose district
Khalil lives in, didn’t say anything for days, eventually
only commenting
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“expect[s] the Department of Justice to work within the confines of
the law and that due process is guaranteed.”

“Did he break the law? Not break the law? Or is it just political
punishment? I don’t know that answer right now,” Gov. Kathy Hochul
said.

“If he has a gun, he needs to go,” said
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York City mayor Eric Adams. (It was unclear what he was referring to.)
Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who is currently the
front-runner for Adams’s position, simply dodged
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question.

In equivocating themselves to death, these Democrats have somehow
ended up with less political clarity than, of all people, Ann Coulter
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who reacted to Khalil’s detention by writing
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“There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless
they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first
amendment?”

While thirty New York elected officials signed on
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a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding Khalil’s
release, they were made up largely of progressives. Likewise, only
fourteen House members signed on
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a similar congressional letter, again, most of them members of the
Squad and other progressives.

It is encouraging that there are Democratic officials with prominent
voices and in positions of power who are speaking out on Khalil’s
behalf and calling this what it is: a chilling and dangerous attack on
free speech that threatens everyone’s rights, not just those of
immigrants. But the overall Democratic response to something that is
so clearly an overstep is still lacking — and may be another sign
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the growing misalignment between rank-and-file Democrats and their
political leadership.

_Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author
of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden._

_Jacobin relies on your donations to publish. Contribute today.
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* Mahmoud Khalil
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* Democrats
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