Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers arrested a former Columbia College scholar over his involvement within the pro-Palestine protests that swept the campus over the previous yr, regardless that he has a inexperienced card and was by no means charged with a criminal offense. Columbia, the positioning of a monthslong pro-Palestine encampment, turned a selected obsession for right-wingers and liberal Zionists alike, who accused the college of turning a blind eye to campus antisemitism even because it despatched the New York Police Division to arrest its personal college students. This newest arrest indicators that the Trump administration is equally decided to punish protesters — and offers a glimpse into the surveillance instruments it’s going to exploit to perform that.
Mahmoud Khalil, who graduated from the college’s Faculty of Worldwide and Public Affairs final December, was picked up by ICE in his university-owned condo on March 8, his legal professional, Amy Greer, advised the Related Press. Khalil’s arrest got here simply days after Axios reported that the State Division could be utilizing AI to revoke visas for pro-Palestine scholar protesters. Throughout the arrest, brokers from ICE’s Homeland Safety Investigations (HSI) division reportedly advised Greer — who was on the cellphone with Khalil and his spouse, a US citizen — that they have been appearing on State Division orders to revoke Khalil’s scholar visa. After Greer advised the brokers that Khalil is a everlasting resident, and Khalil’s spouse confirmed them his inexperienced card, the brokers mentioned they have been revoking his inexperienced card, regardless that the company doesn’t have the authorized authority to try this. Then the brokers threatened to arrest Khalil’s spouse regardless of her US citizenship. She is eight months pregnant.
In an emailed assertion to The Verge, Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin mentioned that Khalil had been arrested “in assist of President Trump’s government orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
The remainder of her assertion was equally imprecise: “Khalil led actions aligned to Hamas, a delegated terrorist group. ICE and the Division of State are dedicated to imposing President Trump’s government orders and to defending US nationwide safety.”
McLaughlin’s assertion and Khalil’s arrest spotlight the diploma to which the federal government, usually spurred by pro-Israel advocates, has equated protests towards Israel’s battle on Gaza with each antisemitism and terrorism. Whereas civil rights organizations have referred to as Khalil’s arrest a violation of the First Modification, different teams that declare to advocate without cost speech on faculty campuses have remained silent.
Greer has referred to as the arrest a transparent case of retaliation. “ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud follows the US authorities’s open repression of scholar activism and political speech, particularly focusing on college students at Columbia College for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza,” she advised CNN. “The US authorities has made clear that they’ll use immigration enforcement as a instrument to suppress that speech.”
An individual’s inexperienced card can’t be revoked with out due course of
In a habeas corpus petition filed within the Southern District of New York, Greer requested a federal choose to order Khalil’s launch, as soon as once more describing his immigration arrest as a violation of his First Modification proper to free speech. “Even the specter of detention and deportation has a chilling impact on speech,” Greer wrote. On Monday night, Decide Jesse Furman prohibited DHS from deporting Khalil whereas his case is underneath judicial evaluate and ordered all events to fulfill for a listening to on Wednesday, March twelfth in response to Khalil’s habeas petition.
It’s not extraordinary for ICE to arrest folks with inexperienced playing cards; anybody who’s not a US citizen, together with lawful everlasting residents, might be put into deportation proceedings for violating immigration regulation. However the onus is on ICE to show that somebody is “deportable.” Since lawful everlasting residents have authorized standing within the US, those that find yourself in deportation proceedings usually get placed on ICE’s radar after being charged with sure legal offenses. Beneath the 1996 Unlawful Immigration Reform and Immigrant Accountability Act, authorized immigrants, together with these with inexperienced playing cards, might be deported for having been convicted of an enormous array of crimes — months and even years after their conviction. However these deportations need to be ordered by an immigration choose; an individual’s inexperienced card can’t be revoked with out due course of.
However there are not any experiences of Khalil having a legal report, which raises questions on why ICE detained him — and the way they discovered him. (The NYPD didn’t reply to The Verge’s request for remark.) His arrest raises questions on ICE’s surveillance equipment and the opportunity of authorities overreach.
To change into a everlasting resident, Khalil needed to register with US Citizenship and Immigration Companies (USCIS), the DHS company that handles authorized migration. Beneath the Privateness Act, USCIS and different companies should typically safeguard folks’s “personally identifiable data” — together with their identify, handle, and biometric identifiers. However there are some exceptions to this. USCIS is allowed to share data with different DHS companies “so long as there’s a mission want in step with the requestor’s official duties.” A DHS coverage memo issued in 2007 states that the division “offers the very best precedence to the sharing of potential terrorism, homeland safety, regulation enforcement, and associated data” and that DHS personnel “should have well timed entry to all related data they should efficiently carry out their duties.”
(USCIS hyperlinks to this memo, hosted by Homeland Safety Digital Library, in its coverage handbook chapter on “privateness and confidentiality.” That hyperlink, nonetheless, is now useless and results in the next message: “Content material on this platform is being reviewed and eliminated to align with the President’s government orders and DoD/DHS priorities. Till that evaluate is full, website content material isn’t out there.” The memo can nonetheless be accessed through the Wayback Machine. It’s unclear whether or not DHS has up to date its insurance policies.)
When requested whether or not USCIS shared any of Khalil’s data with HSI, a USCIS spokesperson directed The Verge to DHS. DHS didn’t remark.
Immigration officers have entry to a bunch of state, native, and federal authorities databases, some mixture of which can have contained Khalil’s handle and different private data. However ICE doesn’t essentially must depend on different authorities companies for this data, because it has entry to most People’ knowledge. A 2022 Georgetown Regulation examine discovered that ICE can find three out of 4 adults within the US by their utility information, and it has entry to simply as many individuals’s driver’s licenses. Nearly all of this data, the report’s authors wrote, might be accessed “warrantlessly and in secret.” ICE has entry to a lot of our knowledge that it “now operates as a home surveillance company,” the report discovered.
It’s doubtless that each one ICE wanted to search out Khalil was his identify — which has been publicized quite a lot of instances by teams whose sole function is to establish and surveil pro-Palestine scholar activists.
“HSI is a classy investigative part of ICE so they’d be able to finding folks’s addresses, maybe by conventional instruments like LexisNexis, in the event that they nonetheless contract with ICE,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst on the Migration Coverage Institute’s US immigration program, advised The Verge.
One in every of these organizations is Canary Mission, a database that has tracked pro-Palestinian scholar protesters for over a decade. Canary Mission has revealed the names, images, and different figuring out data of scholar activists throughout the nation — together with Khalil’s. Final October, the Heritage Basis, the right-wing assume tank behind Mission 2025, introduced its personal effort to surveil anti-Israel college students, which it dubbed Mission Esther. After Trump’s reelection, the right-wing Zionist group Betar mentioned it was compiling a listing of overseas critics of Israel. The group mentioned it shared the “names of lots of of terror supporters” with the Trump administration, which it hoped would goal these people for deportation.
In April 2024, amid protests that had taken over Columbia’s campus, Khalil — who was within the nation on a scholar visa on the time — advised reporters the college’s harsh response to the encampments made him fear about his authorized standing. “That’s why for the previous six months, I’ve barely appeared on the media,” Khalil mentioned at a press convention. “That’s why I’m not suspended. I didn’t take part, fearing that I can be arrested and finally deported from this nation.”
“I haven’t been capable of sleep, fearing that ICE or a harmful particular person would possibly come to my house”
Whereas different college students held down the encampments on Columbia’s garden, Khalil was amongst these negotiating with college directors on the protesters’ behalf. The scholars’ most important demand was divestment: they wished the college to divest from weapons producers and different firms that assist Israel’s battle on Gaza.
Khalil’s fears didn’t subside after he turned a everlasting resident final yr. In actual fact, Zeteo experiences that Khalil requested Columbia directors to guard him from harassment simply sooner or later earlier than his arrest. “Since yesterday, I’ve been subjected to a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing marketing campaign led by Columbia associates Shai Davidai and David Lederer who, amongst others, have labeled me a safety risk and referred to as for my deportation,” Khalil wrote in a March 7 e-mail to Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong. His e-mail cited a January publish on X from Betar. “He’s on our deport record!” the group wrote of Khalil.
“I haven’t been capable of sleep, fearing that ICE or a harmful particular person would possibly come to my house,” the e-mail learn. “I urgently want authorized assist, and I urge you to intervene and supply the mandatory protections to forestall additional hurt.”
Davidai, a professor at Columbia Enterprise Faculty, is understood for harassing pro-Palestine college students on X. The college briefly suspended him from campus final fall for “repeatedly harassing and intimidating” college workers. Davidai has praised Khalil’s arrest, whereas Lederer, an engineering scholar, has accused Khalil of distributing “Hamas propaganda.”
After Khalil was arrested, ICE advised his spouse and legal professional that he was being held at an ICE detention middle in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the AP experiences. However he wasn’t there when his spouse tried to go to the detention facility on March 9. As of Monday morning, Greer didn’t know the place her shopper was being held. ICE’s detainee locator now says Khalil is being detained at LaSalle detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, a privately owned detention middle operated by the GEO Group. Khalil’s whereabouts have been first reported by Zeteo.
It’s not unusual for ICE to switch the folks it has arrested to far-away detention facilities. Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director of the Detention Watch Community, mentioned ICE usually makes use of transfers to “goal and retaliate towards activists talking up towards the immigration and ICE detention system.” The remoteness of those amenities usually signifies that detainees are removed from not solely their family and friends but additionally from attorneys and oversight teams. In response to the newest Census knowledge, lower than 5,000 folks reside in Jena. In the meantime, the GEO Group’s detention middle there can maintain as much as 1,160 folks.
“The arrest of Khalil and his subsequent detention and switch is a continuation of that follow,” Ghandehari advised The Verge. “ICE is very susceptible to transferring folks to extra rural places, like Jena, Louisiana, that aren’t solely far-off from an individual’s assist system, however are additionally arduous to entry. It’s an isolation tactic designed to punish folks and make it tougher for them to battle their immigration circumstances.”
ICE has been accused of going after activists previously. In 2018, activist Ravi Ragbir sued ICE for focusing on him and different noncitizens who criticized its enforcement practices. Ragbir, the chief director of the New York Metropolis-based New Sanctuary Coalition, had been arrested throughout a routine ICE check-in that yr. ICE settled the swimsuit with Ragbir in 2022, and the federal government gave him a three-year reprieve from deportation.
Additionally in 2018, members of the Vermont-based group Migrant Justice sued DHS, claiming it had retaliated towards its members by focusing on them for immigration enforcement after they organized a marketing campaign to guard undocumented farmworkers within the state. The group additionally sued the Vermont Division of Motor Automobiles, alleging that the company systematically handed alongside immigrants’ non-public data to ICE for enforcement functions. Vermont’s DMV settled with Migrant Justice in 2020.
Immigrant advocacy organizations have equally decried Khalil’s arrest, calling it a transparent case of retaliation. To them, Khalil is being punished for exercising his proper to free speech in criticizing Israel’s remedy of Palestinians.
“That is solely the start”
“The illegal detention of Mr. Khalil reeks of McCarthyism,” Donna Lieberman, the chief director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, mentioned in an announcement. “It’s clear that the Trump administration is selectively punishing Mr. Khalil for expressing views that aren’t MAGA-approved — which is a daunting escalation of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, and an aggressive abuse of immigration regulation.”
Studies recommend that Khalil is not at all the administration’s solely goal. The Pupil Staff of Columbia advised Reuters that one other scholar had obtained an e-mail from the US consulate of their house nation saying their US visa had been revoked with out giving any motive. A day after the scholar, who the union declined to call, obtained the e-mail, three ICE brokers entered the scholar’s constructing and tried to get into their condo, representatives from the union advised Reuters.
Khalil’s arrest is seemingly at odds with Trump’s current boasts that he’s “stopped all authorities censorship and introduced again free speech in America.” However it’s completely constant along with his administration’s stance on pro-Palestine protests on faculty campuses. In actual fact, simply sooner or later earlier than Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration pulled $400 million in funding from Columbia, claiming the college had didn’t confront antisemitism on campus. “Freezing the funds is without doubt one of the instruments we’re utilizing to reply to this spike in anti-Semitism,” Leo Terrell, the top of the Justice Division Activity Drive to Fight Antisemitism, mentioned in an announcement. “That is solely the start.”
Others within the administration put it extra bluntly. “SHALOM, MAHMOUD,” the official White Home account posted on X. On TruthSocial, Trump promised there could be extra: “That is the primary arrest of many to come back.”