Protestors gather in Foley Square to protest the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil Monday, March 10, 2025, in Manhattan, New York. Credit: Barry Williams/New York Daily News via TNS
Recently, the U.S. government sent a chilling message to university students across the country: Speak out against its policies, and it has the right to silence you.
Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian activist, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in his university-owned apartment March 8, according to the Associated Press. Khalil, a lawful, permanent U.S. resident, is married to a permanent U.S. citizen and was detained by authorities who threatened to take away his visa.
After his wife informed the agents he didn’t have a visa and is a permanent resident with a green card, ICE authorities threatened to arrest her as well, before hauling Khalil over 1,300 miles away to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he is currently being held without charges, according to the Associated Press.
Who is Khalil, and why is he being targeted?
Khalil was born in Syria in 1995 to Palestinian refugee parents. They fled to Lebanon during the Syrian war, and Khalil later moved to the United States, where he earned his master’s degree in public administration at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, according to CNN.
Khalil eventually emerged as a key figure in on-campus activism at Columbia University, serving as a negotiator during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring, according to Politico. His peers depicted Khalil as a principled leader dedicated to nonviolence, who is adept at de-escalation.
“He would calm us down and help us through the psychological toll this university took on us since day one,” Maryam Iqbal — a fellow student activist and Barnard student who worked alongside Khalil — told The Guardian.
Khalil, a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy, was arrested for his role in Columbia’s protests against the war in Gaza.
During a March 11 press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt said “Khalil was an individual who was given the privilege of coming to this country to study at one of our nation’s finest universities and colleges,” also claiming he “took advantage of that opportunity, of that privilege, by siding with terrorists, Hamas terrorists who have killed innocent men, women and children.”
Levitt further explained Khalil is being targeted under a law that allows Secretary of State Marco Rubio to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America,” according to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.
Originally enacted during the Cold War, the act granted broad authority to the executive branch to deny entry or deport individuals suspected of communist affiliations or perceived threats to national security. Over time, its provisions have been amended and expanded, reinforcing the government’s ability to exclude or remove non-citizens based on political considerations.
As noted, Khalil is being held in an ICE detention center with no official charges, said Amy Greer, Khalil’s attorney, in a Monday ACLU press release.
The U.S. government is weaponizing its national security laws to diminish dissent. And this suppression isn’t happening in a vacuum.
The United States funds Israel and silences critics
Israel is the single largest recipient of U.S. aid in modern history, having received more U.S. foreign assistance than any other country since World War II, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. has sent over $17.9 billion to Israel via legislation, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. The government’s financial priorities reflect its deep entanglement in the Gaza Strip.
Such overreach provides a safety net for the government; if people seem too outraged by the removal of a rightful permanent resident because of their political worldview, then the government will deem the worldview itself “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.”
Here is an additional example to make this clearer. Imagine Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian-American resident, was doing the same activism, in the same way; however, it was pro-Ukraine. He would be walking freely. The U.S. government’s stance on free speech appears to depend on which side of a conflict it is funding — unless it is willing to argue a Palestinian worldview is inherently threatening.
The government isn’t just punishing activism — it is criminalizing viewpoints that challenge its fiscal policies. Nowhere in the Constitution does it state free speech is guaranteed as long as it complies with U.S. funding.
History repeats itself
Universities have long served as grounds for free and innovative thought; however, government overreach often turns them into battlegrounds for repression.
History has shown that when students challenge the government, they often face repression. Khalil’s arrest echoes past efforts to silence student activism, from the 1960s anti-war protests to the Kent State University shooting in 1970.
In the 1960s, the U.S. government viewed student activism as a national security threat, developing the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which worked to undermine anti-war movements and civil rights groups.
COINTELPRO targeted organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, also known as the SCLC and led by Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panther Party, employing tactics like surveillance, infiltration and misinformation to disrupt their activities, according to Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
This hostility toward dissent paved the way for future crackdowns on campus speech, with COINTELPRO records from the FBI revealing sustained efforts to monitor and discredit student activists.
The UC Berkeley 1964-65 Free Speech Movement, in which students protested military recruitment on campus, led to around 773 arrests, which included 735 students who were detained during their occupation of Sproul Hall, a major university building, according to the Online Archive of California.
Though officials did not explicitly call the protests a national security threat, their actions suggested they saw them as one. The FBI conducted extensive surveillance on student leaders, and university officials collaborated with federal agencies to monitor and suppress activism. The government’s fear of student dissent was evident then and remains just as clear today.
At Kent State in 1970, the National Guard killed four students who were protesting the Vietnam War, according to the Kent State University Libraries’ May 4 Collection. The demonstration was part of a nationwide wave of student protests against then-President Richard Nixon’s decision to expand the war into Cambodia.
After days of escalating tensions, the National Guard opened fire on unarmed protestors, killing four and injuring nine others. This instance epitomizes the extent of state violence against student resistance and sets a precedent for clear and comprehensive pushback when the government tries to censor campuses.
Labeling student activists as threats set the stage for more suppression — just as it does today. Once a precedent is set, more student movements become silenced and criminalized.
The more universities comply and don’t clearly denounce such actions, the more normalized these repressions become. If Khalil’s case goes unchallenged, there’s no telling which student movements will be considered “national security threats” in the near future.
Pushback is good, as it indicates people are paying attention. Every major student movement — whether it’s focused around civil rights, anti-war or labor rights — has faced concerted efforts to challenge it. These challenges, though healthy, can be embedded to diminish student movements in and of themselves.
This is why universities must take a stand now, because if they don’t, they risk becoming partners in state repression instead of being defenders of academic freedom.
What comes next?
Khalil is not an isolated event; in fact, President Trump called his arrest the “first of many to come,” during a press briefing on March 10. This precedent, whether upheld or not, poses the danger of fewer students engaging in activism for fear of retaliation.
This will lead to fewer voices being expressed, fewer voices being heard and ultimately more power being given to those who already have it. No matter one’s views on Israel and Palestine, Republican or Democrat, this fact is fundamentally bad for democracy.
Free speech is not just a constitutional right, but a pillar of a healthy democratic society. A society in which only government-approved speech is protected is not a democracy, but rather a poorly disguised authoritarian regime.
Students, universities and activists must organize to rebuild these diminishing pillars of democracy, not tear them down. The government wants to project itself as a far-away impenetrable institution. This is an illusion. The reality is the few are frightened of the many.
And let’s be clear — Khalil’s arrest isn’t a sign that students’ voices aren’t heard, but rather a message that they’re getting too loud.
