First They Came for Mahmoud Khalil

The Trump administration’s nationwide roundup of international students accused of holding opinions it dislikes is picking up speed, sowing fear, separating families and driving people to go underground or out of the country. This targeting appeals to President Trump and his followers as it bolsters three pillars of the MAGA movement: It attacks universities, long reviled as a source of liberal power; it fuels the anti-immigrant fervor long promoted by people like Trump advisor Stephen Miller; thirdly, by targeting Palestinian solidarity activists on campus, it amplifies the false narrative that criticizing the state of Israel is antisemitic (even though many of the protesters are Jewish) enabling the attacks on academia while providing cover for Israel’s resumed ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

History teaches us that standing by silently as others are disappeared is a failed strategy, as the next person grabbed off the street by masked agents of the state may be you.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student until last December, was the first arrested, on March 8. He was a legal permanent resident of the United States, with a green card (now revoked). His wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, is a U.S. citizen who is about to give birth to their first child. Eight months pregnant, she filmed her husband’s arrest as she spoke to his lawyer on the phone. She tried to learn the identities of the arresting plainclothes agents as they dragged Mahmoud into an unmarked car.

Mahmoud joined in the Palestine solidarity protests at Columbia University last spring, and was accepted by both the protesters and administration as a negotiator. He thus had a prominent public role in the first major protest encampment against Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which sparked similar encampments nationwide. This is very likely why he was targeted for deportation. He has been held in an ICE jail in Jena, Louisiana, since March 9. A federal judge has blocked his deportation while his legal team fights for his release.

Days after his arrest, President Donald Trump threatened on his social media site, “This is the first arrest of many to come.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, addressing the press on March 27, claimed that at least 300 student visas had been revoked.

Names of those targeted have been surfacing day by day.

Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia graduate student, left for Canada after her visa was revoked and agents came to her door. She wrote in an open letter, “With the rapidly escalating situation, the criminalization of free speech, and imminent travel bans, what has happened to me can happen to you. … We must exert maximum pressure on Columbia and other universities to protect international students from these arbitrary state actions.”

Momodou Taal, a graduate student at Cornell University and a citizen of both the U.K. and The Gambia, left the U.S. rather than risk deportation or imprisonment. Before leaving, he appeared on the Democracy Now! news hour, saying from an undisclosed location, “What we’re seeing now isn’t just a crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech … but we’re seeing that any criticism of the state of Israel, any criticism of the United States government or Trump’s administration, you can be liable for deportation.”

Those targeted include Columbia students Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the Occupied West Bank, and Yunseo Chung, a South Korean native and green card holder, who has been in the U.S. since she was 7 years old. Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University medical doctor, was deported to Lebanon. Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University has been locked up by ICE, not for his activism, but likely because his wife, a U.S. citizen and thus not deportable, is an activist.

In one of the most disturbing incidents, Tufts University Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholar Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the street outside Boston by half a dozen masked ICE agents as she was walking to iftar with friends, to break the daily fast during Ramadan. The abduction, caught on a neighbor’s doorbell camera, was a chilling demonstration of the brutal tactics being used against this vulnerable population. The day after her arrest, over 1,000 people turned out to protest near Tufts, demanding her release.

Back at Columbia University, protests continue. On Wednesday, about a dozen Jewish students chained themselves to two campus gates. Aharon Dardik, an Israeli American student, speaking to Democracy Now!, explained why:

“We, as Jewish students … said that we weren’t going to leave until the university named who it was amongst the trustees who collaborated with the fascist Trump administration to detain our classmate, Mahmoud Khalil, and try to deport him.”

Among the signs they held was one that read, “First, they came for Mahmoud,” a reference to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous saying from Nazi Germany that ends, “and I said nothing … then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out.”

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