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THE SUPREME COURT PRECEDENT THAT SHOULD FREE MAHMOUD KHALIL  
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Brad Snyder
April 3, 2025
Slate
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_ Radical labor leader Harry Bridges successfully fought the
government's attempt to deport him. In the Bridges case, the Supreme
Court held that noncitizens enjoyed the same First Amendments rights
as everyone else. _

ILWU leader Harry Bridges successfully fought an attempt to deport
him all the way to the Supreme Court,

 

Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts
University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk have become national
symbols for the Trump administration’s harsh crackdown on free
speech on college campuses
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on vulnerable people espousing ideas at odds with the
administration’s worldview.

It is unclear what Khalil’s role was in the Columbia University
protests beyond serving as a negotiator for pro-Palestinian students,
or what Ozturk has done beyond co-authoring a 2024 op-ed
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school newspaper questioning Tufts University’s refusal to divest
from companies with ties to Israel. Whatever the case, the
government’s failure to provide Khalil, Ozturk, and other green card
or student visa holders with the basic procedural safeguards of our
legal system and the Trump administration’s disregard for free
speech should give pause to every American who cherishes freedom and
democracy.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials who arrested
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that his student visa had been revoked. But Khalil was not at Columbia
on a student visa; he is a green-card holder whose pregnant wife is an
American citizen. ICE officials did not charge Khalil with any crime.
They secretly transferred him to a detention facility in Louisiana.
And they repeatedly denied him the opportunity to speak privately with
his lawyers until a federal judge
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the government let him to do so.

The six plainclothes ICE officials who arrested Ozturk
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she was on her way to break her Ramadan fast did not initially display
their badges. They did not file any charges against her. Ozturk, who
the Department of Homeland Security claimed “engaged in activities
in support of Hamas
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was taken to the same Louisiana detention facility as Khalil.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned student visa holders not to
create “a ruckus.”

The story is _not_ over, though. Khalil and Ozturk’s best hope
going forward is to rely on a Supreme Court decision won by radical
New York lawyer Carol Weiss King. King hailed from a prominent family
of New York lawyers; her brother founded the New York firm Paul Weiss.
King took a different path from her family. A lawyer from the 1920s to
early 1950s for the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the
Communist Party USA, King assisted in saving the Scottsboro
“Boys,” nine young Black men wrongfully convicted of raping two
white women in a railroad car, from the electric chair, and Angelo
Herndon, an 18-year-old Black Communist convicted for attempting to
incite insurrection under an old Georgia slave insurrection statute,
from 18 to 20 years on a Georgia chain gang.

Crucially for the current moment, King specialized in defending
radical immigrants from deportation. She had been outraged by the
Palmer Raids and the Red Scare following World War I that resulted in
mass deportations of radical immigrants. One of her highest-profile
cases established an important Supreme Court precedent about the
rights of noncitizens to due process and free speech. During the
1940s, King joined the legal team that prevented the U.S. government
from deporting Harry Bridges, the Australian-born head of the
International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union. The U.S.
government initially alleged that Bridges belonged to the Communist
Party USA, but a hearing examiner found no proof that Bridges had
officially joined the organization. Congress subsequently amended the
statute to make affiliation with the Communist Party grounds for
deportation. A second hearing examiner found that Bridges had joined
organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, and the attorney
general ordered the union leader’s deportation.

In a 1945 Supreme Court opinion known as _Bridges v. Wixon_, Justice
William O. Douglas rejected that Bridges had been “affiliated”
with the Communist Party, found that Bridges’ due process rights had
been violated because the government had introduced unsworn testimony
against him during his second hearing, and ruled that his detention
had been “unlawful.”

Most importantly for Khalil, Ozturk, and other legal residents and
student visa holders who may be facing deportation because of their
political beliefs, the court in _Bridges v. Wixon _held that
noncitizens enjoyed the same First Amendments rights as everyone else.
“Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this
country,” Douglas wrote. “So far as this record shows the
literature published by Harry Bridges, the utterances made by him were
entitled to that protection. They revealed a militant advocacy of the
cause of trade unionism. But they did not teach or advocate or advise
the subversive conduct condemned by the statute.”

Justice Frank Murphy went even further in his concurring opinion:
“The record in this case will stand forever as a monument to man’s
intolerance of man. Seldom if ever in the history of this nation has
there been such a concentrated and relentless crusade to deport an
individual because he dared to exercise the freedom that belongs to
him as a human being and that is guaranteed to him by the
Constitution.”

The court’s opinions in _Bridges v. Wixon_ built on the ideas of
Justice Louis Brandeis that free speech plays an essential role in
American democracy as well as the ideas of Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr. that free speech means “freedom for the thought that we
hate.”

It is incumbent upon the nine current justices to reaffirm _Bridges
v. Wixon _establishing due process and free speech rights for
noncitizens facing deportation and to embrace Brandeis’ and
Holmes’ ideas about free speech. The Roberts Court—in gutting
provisions of the Voting Rights Act, denying that the 14th Amendment
protects abortion rights, and outlawing affirmative action—has often
overruled or ignored precedent in high-profile cases. But the justices
should think twice before erasing the legacy of Carol Weiss King and
the other courageous lawyers who represented Harry Bridges and saved
him from deportation.

Harry Bridges lived for the rest of his life in this country and died
in 1990 in San Francisco at age 88. His memory lives on through the
important Supreme Court precedent that bears his name.

The cases of Khali, Ozturk, and many others like them represent a
fundamental challenge to our country. They are about whether the
American people want a legal system that prioritizes basic procedural
fairness and a democracy that tolerates unpopular ideas and protects
the hard-won First Amendment rights established by Carol Weiss King in
the case of Harry Bridges.

* Mahmoud Khalil
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* First Amendment
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* Harry Bridges
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* Deportation
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