Khalil Case Shows How Migrant Justice and Palestine Solidarity Are Tied Together
The detention of Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil was made possible by the normalization of deportation.
Silky Shah
This story was originally published by Truthout.
When news broke that Mahmoud Khalil — a recently graduated Palestinian student activist at Columbia University — was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a firestorm of media coverage, social media posts and protests followed.
Groups focused on issues ranging from Palestine solidarity to immigrant justice and civil rights are organizing to demand his immediate release. Khalil’s detention is an attack on free speech masquerading as an immigration enforcement action that should be seen as an inflection point in the rising authoritarianism of Donald Trump’s regime. It also reflects the everyday realities of ICE’s detention and deportation machinery, underscoring why cross movement organizing and solidarity is critical to combating this administration’s war on immigrants.
What happened to Khalil should alarm every single one of us, not only because it portends the ways Trump is ramping up the targeting of activists to silence political opposition, but also because Khalil’s encounter with ICE is all too familiar to the thousands of people who come into contact with the agency every week.
Khalil was arrested outside his home, detained in New Jersey and then swiftly transferred to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center (Jena) in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away from his eight-months pregnant wife.
This story is sadly common — ICE routinely arrests immigrants at their homes, their places of worship and their workplaces. ICE also purposefully transfers people from immigration jail to immigration jail to disconnect them from their loved ones and community support.
Khalil’s arrest has also been called a disappearance or kidnapping. While he was soon located, the language of “kidnapping” is not hyperbolic — in reality that is what it feels like to be abducted by ICE, and for families who spend hours or days not knowing where their loved ones have been taken or when they will see them again (if ever).
Many people have also expressed outraged surprise at the fact that Khalil was taken without a warrant. This terrible and illegal practice is actually widespread: The Department of Homeland Security routinely lies about having warrants during raids. Just this week, ICE agents scooped up two brothers, Jeison and Cesar Ruiz Rodriguez, in Spokane Valley, Washington, by violently breaking their car windows with Jeison’s seven-months pregnant wife also in the car. When asked if they had a warrant, the agents “said they had an ‘order,’ but they did not produce it.”
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Khalil’s arrest is that he is a legal permanent resident with a green card, but unfortunately green cards do not fully protect someone from deportation. Since 1996, immigrants with legal permanent residency have increasingly been detained and put in deportation proceedings. Clinton-era changes to immigration and criminal law widened the scope of who could be detained and deported and eliminated due process rights for large categories of immigrants, meaning they were no longer entitled to a fair trial. Like Khalil, other immigrants swept up into the detention system have family and community ties and, as noted above, can be detained even if they are pregnant or are an expectant parent.
With all of this in mind, it is still important to underscore that Khalil’s story deviates from daily ICE actions in a significant and alarming way: The Trump regime is now using the immigration enforcement apparatus to target people who criticize its policies or support ideas that it doesn’t approve of. It is indeed terrible that Khalil was arrested and detained despite not having been charged with a crime, but that part of his story is not a departure from the violent status quo that existed before Trump. What is new here is the way in which Trump is attempting to change the scope of what is considered “criminal” in order to target and detain (i.e. jail) more people, particularly those who oppose his agenda.
Over the last several decades both Republicans and Democrats have built and expanded the immigration enforcement system, including the largest immigration jail system in the world. Both parties have largely accepted a hyper-enforcement mentality that has only resulted in more and more dehumanization of immigrant communities, and in turn harsher anti-immigrant laws. Some people accept ICE’s tactics because of their belief that it is “legal” to arrest and lock up someone who is an immigrant, especially if they “broke the law.” Now, Trump is capitalizing on this normalization of incarcerating immigrants to enforce his creeping fascist agenda. This moment implores us to recognize how the existing deportation machine and prison-industrial complex enable Trump’s agenda, in addition to calling out the attacks on free speech and political dissent. As abolitionist scholars have pointed out, “Fascism is maintained by force, and in the contemporary U.S. that force is implemented through the prison industrial complex.” In the modern age, prisons aren’t merely sites of punishment for an ever-expanding list of criminal offenses, they are a machinery of repression that can be unleashed on those who hold unpopular opinions.
Trump ran his campaign by repeating lies about “migrant crime” and scapegoating immigrants for myriad problems, including the housing crisis, opioid crisis and inflation. From demonizing Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, to exploiting the tragic killing of Laken Riley, the entire goal was to push immigrants out of the public sphere and out of public life. Now he and his administration are extending the framework to target Palestinians over thought crimes under the guise of immigration enforcement. Marco Rubio even told reporters, “This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with.” It is no coincidence that both groups in question, immigrants and Palestinians, have been heavily and grossly demonized. Going after immigrants and pro-Palestine activists is a strategy to appeal to Trump’s base, eroding the inclusion and rights of immigrants and others on the receiving end of American foreign policy — such as Palestinians (or Haitians).
Similar to the response to the Muslim ban in 2017, the outrage over Khalil’s arrest has been palpable and inspiring. The heightened attention provides an opportunity to deepen our analysis and bridge across our movements for social change. In the early days of the war on Gaza over 100 immigrant justice organizations signed on to a statement calling for a ceasefire, noting the connections between these struggles, including “that many surveillance technologies and other ‘systems of control’ originally designed by the state of Israel for the occupied Palestinian territories have been deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
In recent news, the Trump administration’s announcement of a registration requirement for immigrants harkens back to the post 9/11 “Special Registration” program that required predominantly Arab and Muslim men to register with the federal government, leading to 13,000 people being placed in deportation proceedings.
These examples barely scratch the surface of how the war on immigrants and “war on terror” created the conditions for Mahmoud Khalil’s detention. This case reinforces why we must fight for everyone, regardless of their immigration status or whether they’ve had contact with the criminal legal system. When you accept that some people are deserving of detention and deportation, the scope of who is eligible is always under threat of expanding. We must see immigration and abolition struggles as interconnected and organize to undo systems of state violence as we fight against Trump’s agenda.
