If the Trump Administration comes out on the wrong side of this fight, it will be because defending free speech remains a politically lucid and powerful principle.
March 16, 2025
Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs (left to right) by David Dee Delgado / Getty; Selcuk Acar / Anadolu / Getty
Last Saturday evening, a recent Columbia University graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil was greeted in the lobby of his apartment building, in Morningside Heights, by four plainclothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security. They said that his student visa had been revoked and that he was being arrested, with a plan to deport him. Khalil, a Syrian-born Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent, had been a leader of the pro-Palestine protests that consumed Columbia’s campus life last year. He called his lawyer Amy Greer, and she spoke with one of the agents. When Greer told him that Khalil did not have or need a student visa, because he is a permanent U.S. resident with a green card, the agent said that D.H.S. had revoked his green card, too. When Greer asked to see the warrant, the agent hung up.
Khalil is thirty years old, has earned a master’s degree in public administration, and once interned at the United Nations. (His wife, an American citizen of Syrian descent, is about to give birth.) Within the protests that he was associated with, a university task force found a “serious and pervasive” atmosphere of antisemitism, in which Jewish students were targeted and harassed. But Khalil had served as an interlocutor with the university administration, and in public statements he disavowed antisemitism and insisted that a change in the government of Israel would represent liberation for Palestinians and Jews alike. Was this really the fight the Trump Administration wanted to pick?
As it turned out, once the Administration explained what it was up to, this was exactly the fight it wanted. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” a White House official told the Free Press. A statement from D.H.S. said, vaguely, that Khalil had “led activities aligned to Hamas,” wording that smudges the crucial distinction between antisemitism and opposition to Israeli policy. The government’s deportation order relied on an obscure 1952 immigration statute that allows the Secretary of State to revoke permanent residency from anyone he judges to be undermining U.S. foreign policy. The Administration seemed prepared to argue that Khalil’s “continued presence in this country,” as the Times put it, made the American goal of combatting antisemitism more difficult. No specific actions were even alleged; Khalil was evidently being deported simply because the Administration did not like what he had to say.
Trump’s most radical actions tend to emerge at once from political strength and weakness. At the moment, his strength derives from the absence of any effective political opposition in Washington, which has allowed him to make deep cuts to many popular federal programs (pending court rulings, in some cases). But the relentlessness of those acts, and his never-ending tariff threats, have spooked the markets and, in an astonishingly short time, turned a bullish economic outlook into one marked by the possibility of a downturn. After Trump refused to rule out a recession, even Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked sarcastically, at a press briefing, if anyone at the White House was shorting the Dow. So it makes sense that the President would seize on a familiar campaign issue—campus protests, especially at Columbia—where he believes that public opinion is on his side.
The trouble for Trump is that Columbia, despite its history of student activism, does not really fit the right-wing image of a revolutionary institution bent on D.E.I. indoctrination. The university has reacted to the protests in part by establishing a committee whose work may include disciplining students who have, in the words of the Associated Press, “expressed criticism of Israel.” And so the political hits have been indirect. First, the Administration announced that it would rescind at least four hundred million dollars in funding—punishment, Trump said, for the university’s failure to protect Jewish students, though it has had the effect of gutting federal support for a groundbreaking system that provides world-class health care to poor New Yorkers. Then the government moved against Khalil. “We’re not doing this for the polling,” a White House adviser told Axios, explaining a new A.I.-enabled program that would search social media for antisemitic or anti-Israel statements made by international students, whose visas would then be revoked. “But it never hurts to be on the right side of an issue.”
If the Trump Administration comes out on the wrong side of this fight, it will be because defending free speech remains a politically lucid and powerful principle. During the Biden Administration, Republicans repeatedly claimed that conservatives were the victims of censorship. Now they seem especially eager to influence the flow of speech and ideas. Early this winter, Trump prevailed upon ABC to settle a lawsuit in which he accused the network of defaming him, and his aides rotated reporters from mainstream outlets (A.P., CNN) out of White House press-pool seats in favor of ideologically aligned organizations. Even the ostensibly anti-waste DOGE, as Veronique de Rugy noted in the libertarian magazine Reason, “seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington.”
Further, Trump and his political allies have been casually conflating speech that they don’t like with violence. House Speaker Mike Johnson called Khalil “an aspiring young terrorist.” Then, during a White House event seemingly designed to promote Elon Musk’s Tesla, whose sales and stock have plummeted, Trump was asked whether sporadic incidents of vandalism at Tesla dealerships should be treated as acts of domestic terrorism. “I will do that,” he said. “We gotta stop them.”
When it comes to the President’s impingements on free speech, liberals should be equally steadfast. A group of progressive members of Congress who circulated a letter condemning Khalil’s deportation could get only fourteen signatures—a sign, perhaps, of how leery Democrats are of being associated with the protests. But defending Khalil’s right to speak doesn’t require defending his views. Even Ann Coulter, the firebrand conservative commentator, can see that. “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport,” she wrote of the protesters, “but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?” It is.
On Monday, Trump said that Khalil’s arrest would be “the first of many.” By the time of his initial hearing in federal court in New York City, two days later, Khalil was being held far from the proceedings, at an ICE detention center in rural Jena, Louisiana. Outside the Manhattan courthouse, hundreds of protesters gathered. Maybe they, like Trump, understood that Khalil’s case isn’t the end of a defining constitutional fight but the beginning. ♦
