Mahmoud Khalil, the Great Rorschach Test
Plus: Ukraine attacks Russia with drones, Newsom's revisionist history, and more...
Shit's getting very real at Columbia: On Saturday evening, federal immigration authorities arrested Columbia University protester/graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder from a refugee camp in Syria (whose family is Palestinian) who technically has Algerian citizenship. (Reason's Matthew Petti actually interviewed Khalil several months ago and has more on his story.)
Khalil has an American wife who is eight months pregnant. It's not clear which specific laws he stands accused of breaking, and immigration authorities were initially confused as to whether he was on a student visa or a green card; as a lawful permanent resident, he has greater due process rights. More on this here, from Reason's Jack Nicastro.
He has been sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Louisiana, where he is being detained. "The Trump administration's detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder studying in this country legally—is targeted, retaliatory, and an extreme attack on his First Amendment rights," the New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman declared in a statement. "Ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campus. Political speech should never be a basis of punishment, or lead to deportation."
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The Trump administration, for its part, calls Khalil a "threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States."
"The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law," an official tells The Free Press. "He was mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the U.S." The Department of Homeland Security says Khalil "led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization," which is…extremely vague. Whether they have more remains to be seen.
"This is the first arrest of many to come," wrote President Donald Trump on Truth Social. "We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.…If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here."
I for one would probably not choose to spend my time engaged in pro-Palestine protests/sit-ins/marches/blockades if I were imminently expecting a child. And if I were on a green card, I would maybe exert some extra effort to make clear how much I like my new country vs. actively antagonizing it via supporting a raping, murdering terrorist group that not only committed the atrocities of October 7 but has since 2007 denied residents of the Gaza Strip a functioning place to live, choosing to instead invest resources in building tunnels and rockets, not water desalination plants.
Still, unlike Hamas, the U.S. government tends to allow its vocal critics to build good lives here. I think this is a fundamentally good part of the American project: We provide ideological latitude to all kinds of people, allowing even those with very stupid and odious beliefs to take part in the discourse. ("I despise Khalil. Free him."—credit to Scott Greenfield—probably comes closest to my perspective.) But also, the administration may be within its rights to deport Khalil depending on what he stands accused of and what they can prove he has done. So far, they have not been terribly successful at proving they have grounds to do so: On Monday, a Manhattan federal judge reviewed a motion filed by Khalil's lawyers challenging the legal basis of his detention and ordered the government not to deport the man. ("That's how it works here, or at least how it's supposed to work here," Greenfield adds, outlining roughly the same thing on his blog.)
There's an interesting, more philosophical question raised by the Mahmoud Khalil case: Should people who have come here on visas, who are still awaiting full citizenship, be treated as guests, having their commitment to the American project weighed and judged? It strikes me as intellectually reasonable to want to engage in some amount of gatekeeping when you decide who ought to be granted the great gift of American citizenship; when a guest here indicates they don't value the same things we seek in our newcomers, does that present a problem? Khalil feels like a Rorschach, where people with the same underlying principles look at him and feel a very different moral intuition as to how we ought to greet such behavior. What type of immigrant do we seek? These questions strike me as fundamental, but totally lost in the political ferment surrounding immigration.
Rubio strikes a realist note: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, en route to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for meetings with Ukrainian officials, told reporters yesterday that Ukraine would have to make concessions if they want the war to end. "The most important thing that we have to leave here with is a strong sense that Ukraine is prepared to do difficult things, like the Russians are going to have to do difficult things to end this conflict or at least pause it in some way, shape or form," said Rubio. "I think both sides need to come to an understanding that there's no military solution to this situation," he continued. "The Russians can't conquer all of Ukraine, and obviously it'll be very difficult for Ukraine in any reasonable time period to sort of force the Russians back all the way to where they were in 2014."
These are, of course, not shocking takes for anyone who has followed this even semiclosely. But the Trump administration's focus on finding an actual, realistic deal (following the blowup in the Oval Office a week and a half ago) is a welcome sign that the bloodshed may come to an end, and that we may also be able to stem the flow of U.S. funds to the embattled nation.
"I think it's pretty clear to the Ukrainians that there is going to be some degree of territorial concession," journalist James Pogue told us on Just Asking Questions last week. "The only people who don't think that at this point are like completely braindead European think tankers. The disconnect would be going back to the start of the war, when I think a lot of people on the right-wing side of things were fairly convinced that this could have been avoided, that there could have been some kind of philosophical deal, some kind of acceptance by the West that actually, particularly America's interests do not lie on the eastern fringes of Europe."
But Ukraine sent a strong signal: Following these comments, Ukraine attacked the crap out of Russia using drones, the largest single-day attack in the last three years of fighting. Much of the bombardment was sent Moscow's way, with 91 drones intercepted there and 240 sent toward other targets elsewhere in the country. Airports in Moscow shut down, with no flights taking off or landing. "Three people were killed and 18 were injured, including three children, in the massive drone attack that spanned 10 Russian regions, officials said," reports the Associated Press.
Later Tuesday, Ukrainian officials met with the U.S. delegation in Saudi Arabia as planned to discuss deals that might be struck and pathways to ending the bloody war that's now raged for three years.
Scenes from New York: I wrote this piece on my city's padlocked playgrounds and my effort to give my son a freedom-oriented childhood full of PLAY. I hope you'll read it.
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- Lol:
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