Although Mahmoud Khalil is a legal permanent resident of the United States, the Trump administration says, he is “subject to removal” because Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has determined” that his “presence or activities” would “have serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” That vague rationale, which alludes to Khalil’s participation in anti-Israel protests as a graduate student at Columbia University, is an open-ended license to expel any of the 13 million people who share his immigration status when they engage in controversial speech.
Khalil, who was arrested in New York City on March 8 and taken to a detention center in Louisiana, has no criminal record, and the Trump administration does not claim he has broken any law. Rather, he has been deemed deportable because of his perceived “support” for Hamas, the terrorist organization that set off the war in Gaza by invading Israel on October 7, 2023.
President Donald Trump, who described Khalil as “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student,” said his detention was “the first arrest of many to come.” Students at universities across the country “have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” he said, and “the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
Trump promised to “find, identify, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country.” If “you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children,” he warned, “your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here.”
Whether Khalil actually qualifies as a “terrorist sympathizer” is a matter of dispute. His lawyers say he “has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide and characterized the United States as financing and facilitating such violence.” But Jewish friends who oppose his detention insist he is not remotely antisemitic and favors a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Khalil nevertheless played a prominent role as a negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which supports “liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” and has celebrated the barbaric attack that started the Gaza war. The group went so far as to retract an apology for the comments of a student protester who said, during a disciplinary hearing, that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” adding, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
Even such abhorrent rhetoric, however, is protected by the First Amendment, which draws no distinction between citizens and other legal residents. “Once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country,” Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy observed in a 1945 concurring opinion, “he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders,” including “the right to free speech and free press.”
That case involved a legal U.S. resident from Australia who was threatened with deportation based on the allegation that he had been affiliated with the Communist Party. As Khalil’s lawyers note, several federal courts have applied the principle that Murphy enunciated, holding that “the First Amendment protects noncitizens who are detained and threatened with deportation as a result of their protected speech.”
In 2019, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit said even an immigrant with a criminal record that made him deportable had a valid First Amendment objection when he argued that his removal had been fast-tracked in retaliation for his criticism of U.S. immigration policies and practices. Khalil, by contrast, has not been charged with any crime.
The Trump administration instead is relying on a provision that it reads as authorizing deportation of legal permanent residents whose speech relates to foreign policy in a way that the government deems contrary to the national interest. Khalil made himself deportable by “put[ting] himself in the middle” of “basically pro-Palestinian activity,” says Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Troy Edgar.
The administration, in short, is explicitly targeting people based on the opinions they express, with the avowed goal of discouraging speech that offends federal officials. Yet Rubio improbably insists “this is not about free speech.”
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