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During his rambling and interminably long speech to Congress last week, Trump bragged that he had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.”
Unfortunately, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist, makes clear that devotion to free speech doesn’t include the right to protest if Trump doesn’t like it. Khalil’s green card has been revoked, and he’s currently in ICE custody.
The administration has tried to dress up Khalil’s arrest as motivated by national security concerns, but their statements about his alleged transgressions show it’s far more about suppressing speech.
Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the arrest by saying that Khalil had organized “group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish-American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda, flyers with the logo of Hamas.” White House Counselor Alina Habba’s rationale was even more transparently bogus. She claimed on Fox that foreign students are not allowed to "hand out pamphlets in our country and try to infiltrate those terroristic thoughts ... and if you bring that into our country, you can get the hell out."
But far from being a threat to national security, Khalil’s actions are the exact sort of free speech that’s supposed to be protected.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the right to assemble and protest is a cornerstone of the First Amendment. The Court has protected the hateful speech of the Westboro Baptist Church, holding they had a right to picket funerals of soldiers and display inflammatory signs like “Thank God for IEDs” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” It struck down a Minnesota ordinance that prohibited speech that “arouses anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender.” It ruled that burning the American flag is protected speech.
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Khalil’s arrest is bad on its face, but it’s also wrapped up with the administration’s fake commitment to combatting antisemitism. Indeed, Trump has trafficked in antisemitic tropes for years. The motivation behind Khalil’s arrest isn’t genuine concern for Jewish students. It’s opposition to lawful protests on campuses and elsewhere — protests Trump fears could present a challenge to his authoritarian aspirations.
Protesting is not a crime
The administration isn’t even alleging that Khalil broke any laws. In fact, an unnamed White House official told The Free Press that “the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law” but instead that he was a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”
It’s not surprising that the administration is talking to The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s website that is ostensibly dedicated to free speech but applauds police cracking down on protesters. And of course Weiss has made a career out of attacking Palestinians, starting with her time in college where she agitated to get professors fired for pro-Palestinian views.
Since there’s no way to make any criminal charges stick to Khalil, the administration has resorted to citing a law that allows deportation of “an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” This allowed Marco Rubio to revoke Khalil’s green card so he could be deported.
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The use of this provision is exceedingly rare. According to the New York Times, it’s been invoked exactly once, by former President Bill Clinton in 1995, when he tried to deport a former Mexican government official, Mario Ruiz Massieu. Massieu sued, leading to a lower court decision declaring the provision unconstitutional because it was impossible for someone to know if their “mere presence here would or could cause adverse foreign policy consequences when our foreign policy is unpublished, ever-changing, and often highly confidential.” The judge who penned those words is none other than Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s sister. The case was later overturned on unrelated grounds.
Earlier this week, Rubio said that people like Khalil “don’t have a right to be in