This past Saturday night, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian who recently graduated from Columbia University, was returning home with his pregnant wife when Department of Homeland Security agents detained him, reportedly without cause or providing a warrant.

His wife immediately called a lawyer, who demanded that the agents email her a copy of the warrant. The agents hung up on Mahmoud’s lawyer, according to his wife, and took him into custody.

He has since been moved to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, a place he has no connection to, hundreds of miles from his family and support system, and under a legal jurisdiction that is more likely to favor the government. President Donald Trump has already taken personal credit for Mahmoud’s detention, and if his administration succeeds in its efforts to deport him, it will have done so at the cost of the First Amendment rights and liberties of every person on American soil.

Regardless of where one stands on the issue of Israel and Palestine, we should all be deeply alarmed by this.

As an alumni organizer, I’ve long supported students, including Mahmoud, in their campaign for Columbia’s divestment from companies profiting off of Israel’s systemic violation of the human rights of Palestinians. In the conversations he and I have had and in the spaces we’ve shared, it has always been clear to me that Mahmoud is a man who is both brave and gentle, with strong principles, humility and a deep love for his people and community.

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His classmates trusted him to be one of the lead negotiators during last spring’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment because they also saw these qualities in him.

Trump’s targeting of Mahmoud Khalil is an authoritarian power grab

To be clear, the government has not charged Mahmoud with committing any crime, and has instead invoked an obscure provision of immigration law that claims – with no provided evidence – that Mahmoud’s presence in the United States would have adverse foreign policy consequences.

The Trump administration claims he was detained because he led “activities aligned to Hamas,” which is a designated terrorist organization in the United States, an extremely vague accusation that could apply to any of the tens of thousands of Americans who protested Israel’s war in Gaza or its treatment of Palestinians. 

Relying on racist tropes that depict Arab men as national security threats, President Trump has detained and defamed Mahmoud and denied him due process. Any effort that denies the judiciary its checks and balances must be understood as an authoritarian power grab.

I believe Mahmoud was targeted by Trump because he was a lead negotiator with the university administration and a prominent student organizer.

He demanded that the school he pays tuition to stop investing its funds in the companies that produce the weapons, technology and institutions that have allowed Israel to establish a decades-long apartheid system in his homeland and carry out its brutal war on Gaza, which human rights groups and other experts have concluded is a genocide.

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Mahmoud’s family was dispossessed from their home and forced to flee to Syria, a country that has since also faced the horrors of war.

Had he and his family been able to stay in their homes in Palestine, Mahmoud would have been forced to live under Israel’s brutal military rule and might have become among the thousands of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel’s occupying army without charge or trial.

The oppression he avoided through the tragedy of his family’s exile from their homeland has now found him in Trump’s kangaroo immigration courts. He has been arbitrarily detained without charge here in the United States, at the behest of right-wing backers of Israel that have stalked, harassed and doxxed him relentlessly and won the ear of President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

Immigration courts are an abuse of power. Trump takes it to a new level.

Over the past 17 months, Mahmoud has been forced to watch the Israeli military relentlessly bomb his people in Gaza in their homes, mosques, churches, schools and hospitals.

Like the rest of us, he has seen the images of the charred and decapitated bodies of children, listened to emaciated men, women and children recount the deliberate starvation, torture and sexual violence they were subjected to in Israeli prisons, watched Israel lay siege to the region and target humanitarian aid trucks, forcing families living in tents to break their Ramadan fasts with grass and dirty water.

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Mahmoud has been forced to endure the infuriating excuses our elected officials continue to make to absolve Israel of these crimes against humanity, crimes that the International Court of Justice has condemned and the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for.

Immigration courts and detention centers have, for decades, been an abuse of administrative power. By targeting Mahmoud, Trump is now taking this abuse of power to a whole new level and making an example of him to silence those speaking out for the lives and human rights of Palestinians.

When I first learned of Mahmoud’s detainment, among the many things that stuck out in my mind was a 1971 open letter in which writer James Baldwin explained why freeing the academic and political activist Angela Davis was a moral imperative of their time: “For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

Now we face yet another moral and constitutional imperative because they have taken our friend Mahmoud, and Trump has threatened he is just the “first of many” to come. 

We cannot make the dangerous mistake of thinking that those of us with citizenship are safe. If we allow the Trump administration to violate Mahmoud’s First Amendment rights by threatening him with deportation, they will violate ours, too, with the threat of incarceration for expressing any view Trump disagrees with.

Palestine has become the litmus for the legitimacy of our entire Constitution; we all owe it to ourselves to defend the freedoms it affords us. That fight now begins with demanding the freedom of Mahmoud Khalil. For if we fail to protect our neighbors when they come in the night, who will we turn to when they come for us in the morning? 

Darializa Avila Chevalier is an alumna of Columbia University’s Class of 2016 where she was an active member of Students for Justice in Palestine and co-founded the student campaign to divest Columbia’s endowment from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid. She is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her doctoral research examines criminal deportation, race and national security policy.