Of all the things that make America great – and despite my liberal politics, I do believe there are many great things about my homeland – the First Amendment to our constitution may be the greatest. It promises broad freedoms to speak without penalty, to assemble in protest, and to engage in religious practice without coercion. Today these concepts are not exactly revelatory. But when the US constitution was penned, they were – and in parts of the world today, such freedoms don’t exist.
This is why it’s so horrifying to see parts of the Maga movement tearing up a founding document of such greatness. Earlier this month, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials detained former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent, and a green card holder who is married to an American citizen and expecting their first child. Khalil was arrested at his home in New York and moved to a detention centre in Louisiana. He is not accused of any crime; in fact a White House official told the Free Press that “the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law”. Instead, the Trump administration is supposedly trying to deport him because it doesn’t like the content of his speech. Its argument is that, by protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza, Khalil is undermining the US’s national security interest in fighting anti-Semitism. Has Khalil engaged in any anti-Semitic acts or made any anti-Semitic statements? The administration has yet to produce any evidence for this.
Khalil was an active part of the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests that roiled Columbia, and America, last year. Unlike many demonstrators, he often went unmasked, believing he had nothing to fear. This has turned out to be a great irony: Khalil believed in America’s promise that he was free to speak his mind in support of a cause he wished to advocate. The Trump administration is asserting through its actions that, under this regime, there is no such promise. Khalil’s deportation, Trump said, will be “the first of many to come”.
Defending Khalil’s right to speak his mind and advocate for his cause does not require anyone to defend his positions or his statements. In fact, it is even more important for those of us who take issue with some of what he says to stand in defence of his right to say it. Many protesters at Columbia, including (perhaps especially) those affiliated with the same group as Khalil – Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) – too often went from peaceful protest into the unreasonable and at times unconscionable. The unreasonable came in not only refusing to abide by the university’s rules regulating the time, place and manner of protest, but then complaining when their rule-breaking was met with consequences. The unconscionable came from parroting the language of Hamas, a designated terrorist organisation that, no matter how righteous the Palestinian claim to freedom and statehood, is a group that holds a set of religiously fundamentalist views that would horrify American leftists in just about any other context; a group that slaughtered innocent Israeli civilians on 7 October; and one that held an iron authoritarian grip on Gaza, refusing to hold elections and using violence to punish many, from suspected Israeli collaborators to gay men. That campus groups would celebrate their crimes, justify their cruelty and spread their propaganda is repulsive.
[See also: The Trump crash]
Repulsive speech, though, is still protected speech.
Providing material support to a terrorist organisation is not legal. Khalil’s lawyers have said that no evidence has been presented that he advocated for – let alone supported – Hamas. He seems instead to have been a trusted negotiator on behalf of student groups at odds with the university administration. And if such evidence does exist, then it should be part of a criminal investigation and eventual case.
[See also: Steve Bannon interview: the godfather of the Maga right]
Breaking the law, though, doesn’t seem to be the issue, which is why the Trump administration is relying on an obscure, decades-old statute that offers them a vague national security pretext for Khalil’s arrest. Perhaps they know he hasn’t committed a crime, and so they’re taking extraordinary steps to punish him without due process of law.
Khalil’s arrest could be an early indicator of what the Trump administration is planning, in terms of curtailing both speech and expression, and also in stripping due process protections in a rush to remove immigrants. As his case winds its way through the courts, ICE has been grabbing up other foreign nationals – many of whom have visas or other legal claims to be in the US – and subjecting them to Kafka-esque ordeals. One German tourist who was travelling under an Esta (which is available to tourists from countries who do not need a visa to travel to the US but are required to declare the purpose of their visit) was detained at the border between US and Mexico for 46 days, nine of which were allegedly spent in solitary confinement. She wasn’t told when she might be released or what she had done wrong. Judges are now intervening, but the Trump administration isn’t always listening. After a federal judge ordered the administration to bring any unlawfully deported immigrants still on airplanes back into the country, they simply refused, saying that the planes were already over international waters and therefore not subject to the orders.
There is a name for countries where strongman leaders defy the courts and the constitution, and where speech they dislike is punished, and where due process is disregarded – and it’s not “democracy”.
Autocracies and other oppressive states don’t punish every single person who steps out of line. They make examples of some people in an effort to intimidate others into compliance. Right now, immigrants are no doubt among some of the most afraid. But this administration’s efforts to crush free speech and ideas – especially liberal ones – is not confined to immigrants. They have a list of verboten words that are being stripped from government documents and websites; private companies are following suit, too, particularly if they need federal dollars or approval for their projects. The aims are manifold, but they seem to include ridding America of supposed “outsiders”, and ridding everyone else of the right to their own words and ideas.
What will be left at the end of this purge? A nation of the cowed and the quiet. Not exactly the stuff of greatness.
[See also: Keir Starmer’s great gamble]
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