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department of homeland security
The End of Free Speech?
If the White House can punish anybody who engages in speech it dislikes, nobody will be free to criticize the government—and corporate criminals will be free to run amok.
Mar 22, 2025
Earlier this March, agents from the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, arrested Mahmoud Khalil at his Columbia University-owned apartment building in New York City. Khalil, a lawful permanent resident of the United States, was then promptly disappeared by federal agents, who refused to tell Khalil’s wife (a U.S. citizen) why he was being detained or where he was being held. He has since been found by his attorneys and partner in a private Louisiana detention facility notorious for abuse. His deportation was successfully, though only temporarily, halted by a federal judge.
An initial hearing in Khalil’s case was subsequently heard—without him present—in New York City. There, the Department of Justice defended the kidnapping, and backed the White House’s claimed rationale: the Trump administration doesn’t approve of Khalil’s speech, and therefore it has the right to forgo due process, revoke his green card without judicial order, and deport him.
Khalil is a prominent pro-Palestinian leader at Columbia University. He was one of students’ lead negotiators during the anti-genocide encampments that formed on its campus in 2024. It is this right to speech, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and affirmed over and over and over again, that President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are endeavoring to unilaterally, and with no constraints, gut.
Trump and his allies seemingly hope to manufacture a future in which any public critic of the administration or its friends can be defined, and prosecuted, as a “terrorist” for whom basic civil liberties can be summarily suspended.
To this end, the federal government has made no case that Khalil has committed a crime. Instead, the Trump administration has continuously boasted that Khalil is being targeted with the full force of the state for engaging in speech it doesn’t like; speech that is unambiguously guaranteed by the First Amendment, and that the White House now seeks to classify as “terrorism.”
Should Trump and Rubio succeed, as The Intercept aptly summarized, it will symbolize the death of free speech for American citizens and green-card holders alike.
Of course, it isn’t just Khalil—though if the government succeeds in his case it will be a chilling bellwether for the state of speech and protest in the Trump years and beyond. Even just in the weeks since kidnapping Khalil, it’s been reported that DHS officers have arrested another student protester at Columbia, stripped a different Columbia student of their visa status, denied a French scientist entry to the United States reportedly because of their expressed political disagreement with the administration, disappeared dozens of New Mexico residents, and more.
Of course, this playbook isn’t new, and Republicans have long sought to gut protected speech, and protected protest in particular. Indeed, dozens of Stop Cop City protesters and organizers are still navigating an abusive investigation and prosecution regime in Georgia that functionally seeks to render public displays of political dissent as violent conspiracy and “domestic terrorism,” including speech activities as mundane as handing out pamphlets.
As baseless and unconstitutional as those prosecutions were and still are, it’s this principle that is being pushed to new and even-more horrifying depths, as Trump and his allies seemingly hope to manufacture a future in which any public critic of the administration or its friends can be defined, and prosecuted, as a “terrorist” for whom basic civil liberties can be summarily suspended.
Indeed, Donald Trump, while turning the White House into a car dealership earlier this month, told reporters that people protesting Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the U.S. federal government at Tesla storefronts, or protesting “any company,” should be labeled domestic terrorists, and that was something he “will do.”
Should the political persecution of Khalil succeed, it will foster a new era of the militarized American police state that greenlights the arbitrary and capricious abduction of organizers, dissidents, and critics of the Trump administration and the corporations it serves.
It should not need to be said, but to say it anyway: If foundational constitutional rights can be unilaterally suspended by the government, with no trial or even formal documentation of so-called wrongdoing, then those rights do not actually exist for anyone.
Who stands to benefit from such a bleak future? Advocates for authoritarianism for one, and corporations for another.
While the executive branch targets protesters’ rights to speech on White House orders, Trump’s own corporate allies and donors are pursuing adjacent tactics to divest normal people of the right to criticize the corporate hegemons ruining our lives.
Greenpeace, for example, just lost the trial brought against it by Energy Transfer, which seeks to functionally sue the group out of existence in the U.S. for criticizing the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). That notorious project, controlled by Energy Transfer, is well-known for its environmental racism and for deploying extreme force against environmental advocates, Indigenous communities, and others who opposed it.
Greenpeace is set to appeal the verdict, but if Energy Transfer should ultimately succeed, it would not just spell the end of Greenpeace’s U.S. operations, but will also usher in a new era in which corporate money can not just silence, but wholly eradicate, organizations that are critical of corporate polluters, labor abusers, price-gougers, and more. Such a future would place a price tag on First Amendment protections, with only the most well-resourced entities in the country seemingly eligible to enjoy it, and everyone else left vulnerable to their whims and machinations.
The political kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil is an egregious attempt to undo 233 years of American constitutional law, and—regardless of what Trump or others claim—threatens to end the right to free speech, and democracy, as we know it. Should the political persecution of Khalil succeed, it will foster a new era of the militarized American police state that greenlights the arbitrary and capricious abduction of organizers, dissidents, and critics of the Trump administration and the corporations it serves. That, to be clear, would wholly cement the United States’ descent into full-fledged fascism.
Crucially, though, even if they fail to make Khalil the defining, and chilling, example of a new epoch of American political prisoners, Donald Trump and his allies in and outside of government have made it clear: They want to eliminate the First Amendment, and will do whatever it takes to do so.
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Far-Right Group Sent List of Palestine Defenders to Trump Officials for Deportation
Betar—which the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League has blacklisted after comments like "not enough" babies were killed in Gaza—says it provided "thousands of names" for possible arrest and expulsion.
Mar 14, 2025
Betar, the international far-right pro-Israel group that took credit for the Department of Homeland Security's arrest of former Columbia University graduate student and permanent U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil for protesting the annihilation of Gaza, claimed this week that it has sent "thousands of names" of Palestine defenders to Trump administration officials for possible deportation.
"Jihadis have no place in civilized nations," Betar said on social media Friday following the publication of a Guardianarticle on the extremist group's activities.
Earlier this week, Betar said: "We told you we have been working on deportations and will continue to do so. Expect naturalized citizens to start being picked up within the month. You heard it here first. Those who support jihad and intifada and originate in terrorist states will be sent back to those lands."
Betar has been gloating about last week's arrest of Khalil, the lead negotiator for the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest during the April 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
On Thursday, immigration officers arrested another Columbia Gaza protester, Leqaa Kordia—a Palestinian from the illegally occupied West Bank—for allegedly overstaying her expired student visa. Kordia was also arrested last April during one of the Columbia campus protests against the Gaza onslaught.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian doctoral student at Columbia whose visa was revoked on March 5 for alleged involvement "in activities supporting" Hamas—the Palestinian resistance group designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government—used the Customs and Border Protection's self-deportation app and, according to media reports, has left the country.
Khalil and Kordia's arrests come as the Trump administration targets Columbia and other schools over pro-Palestinian protests under the guise of combating antisemitism, despite the Ivy League university's violent crackdown on demonstrations and revocation of degrees from some pro-Palestine activists.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who in January signed an executive order authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who took part in protests against Israel's war on Gaza, called Khalil's detention "the first arrest of many to come."
The Department of Justice announced Friday that it is investigating whether pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the school violated federal anti-terrorism laws. This followed Thursday's search of two Columbia dorm rooms by DHS agents and the cancellation earlier this month of $400 million worth of funding and contracts for Columbia because the Trump administration says university officials haven't done enough to tackle alleged antisemitism on campus.
On Friday, Betar named Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian studying philosophy at Columbia, as its next target.
Critics have voiced alarm about Betar's activities, pointing to the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League's recent designation of the organization as a hate group. Founded in 1923 by the early Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Betar has a long history of extremism. Its members—who included former Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin—took part in the Zionist terror campaign against Palestinian Arabs and British forces occupying Palestine in the 1940s.
Today, Betar supports Kahanism—a Jewish supremacist and apartheid movement named after Meir Kahane, an Orthodox rabbi convicted of terrorism before being assassinated in 1990—and is linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party. The group has called for the ethnic cleansing and Israeli recolonization of Gaza. During Israel's assault on the coastal enclave, which is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case, its account on the social media site X responded to the publication of a list of thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces by saying: "Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!"
Ross Glick, who led the U.S. chapter of Betar until last month, told The Guardian that he has met with bipartisan members of Congress who support the group's efforts, naming lawmakers including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and John Fetterman (D-Pa.). Glick also claimed to have the support of "collaborators" who use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to help identify pro-Palestine activists. Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department said it was launching an AI-powered "catch and revoke" program to cancel the visas of international students deemed supportive of Hamas.
Betar isn't alone in aggressively targeting Palestine defenders. The group Canary Mission—which said it is "delighted" about Khalil's "deserved consequences"—publishes an online database containing personal information about people it deems antisemitic, and this week released a video naming five other international students it says are "linked to campus extremism at Columbia."
Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia who was temporarily banned from campus last year after harassing university employees, and Columbia student David Lederer, have waged what Khalil called "a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign" against him and other activists.
Meanwhile, opponents of the Trump administration's crackdown on constitutionally protected protest rights have rallied in defense of Khalil and the First Amendment. Nearly 100 Jewish-led demonstrators were arrested Thursday during a protest in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City demanding Khalil's release.
"We know what happens when an autocratic regime starts taking away our rights and scapegoating and we will not be silent," said Sonya Meyerson-Knox, the communications director for Jewish Voice for Peace. "Come for one—face us all."
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After Khalil Abduction by ICE, Jeffries and Schumer 'Not the Men for This Moment In History'
Democratic leaders "helped create the conditions for this framing anti-genocide speech as antisemitic/terrorism," said one journalist.
Mar 11, 2025
The two highest-ranking Democratic members of Congress both call New York City home, but even with their personal connection to the city where immigration agents abducted a recent Columbia University graduate for his involvement in pro-Palestinian protests, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have had little to say about Saturday night's arrest.
Amid mounting calls from House progressives and advocacy groups for the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil on Monday evening, Jeffries released a statement that one local rights group derided as "word salad," starting by accepting the Trump administration's narrative about the former student who helped organize last year's Palestinian solidarity encampment.
"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," said Jeffries, calling on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to "produce facts and evidence of criminal activity... such as providing material support for a terrorist organization."
Jeffries noted that the Trump administration's arrest and detention of Khalil—which were carried out under the State Department's "catch and revoke" program—"are wildly inconsistent with the United States Constitution." His statement contrasted starkly with those of his progressive colleagues including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who warned that the Trump administration is signaling "they can disappear US citizens too," and demanded Khalil's release.
The House leader's statement came after a federal judge blocked the administration from removing Khalil from the U.S. and reviewed a petition saying his detention is unlawful. Khalil is a legal resident with a green card and a citizen of Algeria.
The statement from Jeffries—who has faced condemnation for suggesting Democrats are powerless to stop President Donald Trump from imposing his agenda and has privately complained about demands for action from advocacy groups—offered the latest evidence that "he is impressively unsuited to the moment," as writer Noah Kulwin said.
Schumer, who is "the most powerful politician in New York State, and the highest ranking American Jewish elected official—locally famous for his retail politics and shaking everyone's hands at local events," had not released a statement on Khalil's detention at press time, noted local historian and community organizer Asad Dandia.
"Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are not the men for this moment in history," saidNew Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang. "So obvious and gets more obvious by the day."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) abduction of Khalil and efforts to have him deported—with Trump warning his arrest will be the "first of many"—came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that under the "catch and revoke" program, the administration "will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported." On Sunday, DHS said the arrest was carried out "in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting antisemitism."
Supporters of Trump's actions have pointed to videos of Khalil being interviewed last year about the Columbia encampment and organizers' negotiations with Columbia officials to push for divestment from companies that have profited from Israel's policies in Gaza and the West Bank.
"Our demands are clear, our demands are regarding divestment from the Israeli occupation, the companies that are profiting and contributing to the genocide of our people," said Khalil in one video.
Adalah-NY, which supports calls for a boycott of Israel to protest its oppression and violence against Palestinians, said it was "no coincidence" that Jeffries offered tacit approval of the accusations against Khalil, considering his longtime vocal support for Israel.
"Fire Hakeem Jeffries," said Track AIPAC, which keeps track of donations lawmakers receive from the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Jeffries has taken $1.6 million from the lobbying group.
Musician Soul Khan asked whether Jeffries and Schumer are "trying to get Mahmoud Khalil out of ICE detention and ensure the security of his green card status," calling his abduction "the most urgent domestic crisis happening right now."
Journalist Kylie Cheung called Khalil's abduction, along with the order to "single out, detain, persecute someone for their political speech" coming directly from the president, "the purest distillation of fascism."
But with Democratic leaders, including former President Joe Biden, joining Republicans in claiming that student-led protests against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza were endangering Jewish students, said Cheung, the party "helped create the conditions for this framing [of] anti-genocide speech as antisemitic/terrorism."
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