In a ruling Friday afternoon, a federal immigration judge in Louisiana declared that Mahmoud Khalil, the legal permanent resident arrested last month for his activism in support of Palestinian rights at Columbia University, qualified for deportation under the law.
Let’s make absolutely clear exactly how outrageous this ruling is. The judge, Jamee Comans, had set a time limit for the Trump administration to come up with the evidence they needed to provide in order to demonstrate that Khalil must be deported. Under a functioning system, such evidence would meet the level of atrocious criminality that requires deporting someone.
However, not here and not with the Trump administration, which has deported hundreds of Venezuelan men summarily on the grounds not of any substantiated criminal behavior but purely on the grounds of their body art. To comply with the judge’s directive, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, issued a weak one-and-a-half-page memo that concedes that Khalil had no criminal activity.
Rather, the memo, invoking an esoteric law, said that Khalil’s “past, present, or future beliefs, statements, or affiliations otherwise legal … compromise a compelling US foreign policy interest”. That is to say, the government was insisting that Khalil’s opinions–even his future opinions–constituted grounds for deportation.
The government wants to deport Khalil only because of his constitutionally protected discourse, a right that all people have in the United States. If the government is allowed to withhold the fundamental right of free speech from lawful permanent residents, what’s to prevent it from going after citizens?
Do the public truly desire to live in a nation in which the government dictates what ideas are permissible and what ideas are forbidden? In a free society, open debate is the norm and necessary, and in a closed society, lists of forbidden ideas circulate and multiply, and it’s rightly obvious in what direction the public is moving.
The Trump government has already prohibited the usage of terms and phrases like “equity”, “women”, and “Native American” from government websites and public documents, demonstrating to us how the open door of American democracy is closing quicker and louder than we ever would have thought. And Khalil’s case is the litmus test of what this government is capable of.
Rubio accuses Khalil of “antisemitic demonstrations and disruptive behavior, which creates a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States”. But he offers no proof at all. Meanwhile, here’s what Khalil said to CNN last year:
“As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-in-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other. Our movement is a movement of social justice and freedom, and equality for all.”
It would appear that Rubio thinks the words “freedom and equality for all” are weakening US foreign policy interests. He might finally be correct about something. But he is incorrect about Khalil, who is obviously not antisemitic. If Rubio wanted to rid the nation of the toxic hatred of Jewish individuals, he might begin by scrutinizing members of his own party.
It’s not some mythical antisemitism that has subjected the ire of the Trump administration to pour down upon Khalil. It’s because he was protesting Palestinian rights and condemning actions of Israel, which jurists, experts and international human rights groups alike have labelled genocidal. But the US government does not want the American people to so much as consider this conversation, which entails American involvement in this human tragedy that is also US foreign policy, and so it will employ all means at its disposal to prevent the possibility.
The effort to deport Khalil is intended largely to discipline the citizens of the United States into conformity and silence. For that reason alone, the government’s action must be opposed. Free thinking and dissent form the basis of healthy societies. Unhealthy societies use fear and intimidation to control opinion and manufacture consent.
Several legal commentators were expecting today’s decision by Comans. Immigration judges are Department of Justice. Therefore, they are executive branch employees and not federal judiciary employees. The New York Times even pointed out that, if Comans had dissented against the government, she would have also “risked being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters”. The ACLU surmised that the deportation decision had been “pre-written”, as it was handed down so quickly. And Comans said the constitutional issues presented by the case will be decided in federal court in New Jersey and not immigration court in Louisiana.
That is not to say that Judge Comans could not have decided otherwise. To the contrary, the ruling is another perilous example of how much authority the executive branch in the United States always holds, how much more authority the Trump administration is willing to take on, and how deferential the institutions that might hold this administration back have become.
This institutional timidity on the part of these institutions is causing immense damage to the integrity of American democracy, usually articulated in some kind of embarrassed whisper.
