Words by Oliver Schoening PZ ’27

Graphic by Ash Dirks SC ’28

On Saturday, March 8, Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was taken into custody in his apartment by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. ICE was acting on orders from the White House to revoke his student visa and have him deported from the country, despite the fact that the Syrian-born Palestinian is a green card holder. According to the Associated Press, when informed of this, ICE agents told his attorney they intended to revoke his green card as well. Khalil, whose family was told he was being held in New Jersey, is actually being held in a facility in Louisiana.  Following his detention, the White House taunted Khalil in an official post on X headlined “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.”

He was targeted by the Trump Administration due to his involvement as a lead negotiator  in Columbia’s 2024 pro-Palestinian protests and encampment that sparked similar actions at many other institutions of higher education across the country, including here in Claremont. At this point, we are nearly one year removed from the beginning of the Columbia encampments, and it would be difficult to find someone who doesn’t have an opinion about pro-Palestine activism on college campuses. Regardless, personal beliefs aside, Khalil’s arrest marks the beginning of a dangerous crusade against free speech from the Trump Administration.

In a Truth Social post regarding the arrest, President Trump said, “This is the first arrest of many to come. 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.” In fact, on March 10, the Department of Education (DOE) issued a warning to 60 colleges and universities across the country under investigation for purported violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act related to antisemitic discrimination, including Pomona College.

While many will simply write off Khalil’s arrest and the government threatening action against these schools as accountability for sedition and terrorist sympathy, there is a frightening precedent being set. Since the Sept. 11 attacks rocked the United States, the threat of terrorism has been wielded by politicians from both parties in order to justify blatant violations of civil liberties and due process in the name of national security. Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak of the NSA’s PRISM program and the persistence of the 2001 AUMF are two that come to mind, but they are just a couple among many. 

The willingness of politicians, whether Democratic or Republican, to let these policies continue should give us pause, but these historical events are even more alarming when considered in context with Trump’s attempts to purge rank-and-file public servants from office in favor of loyalists.

The Trump administration has more recently altered their messaging regarding Khalil, justifying his detention by alleging that he failed to disclose past work with the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) and the Syria office of the British Embassy. Whether or not the allegation is true, the UNRWA and British Embassy are not institutions that pose a direct threat to national security, and are only being raised as an issue years later in order to further a political vendetta against Khalil and other activists dissenting from the views of the White House. 

It is easy to say that only those who are breaking the law should be worried, but the calculus changes when the definition of “anti-American activity” is based on a fluid and subjective conception of what it means to be American. By threatening action against many different universities largely connected to pro-Palestinian causes, the Trump administration is signaling which causes are acceptable to support for “Americans” and which ones are not, using claims of protecting against antisemitism as a means to an end. 

This is not to say that antisemitism is not a rising issue in this country, but the motives of Trump’s decision to act and the kinds of people who are being targeted has to figure in as we consider what is happening around us. With the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil we are seeing the term ‘anti-semitism’ — specifically when deployed by the Trump administration — lose its poignancy. In becoming a vague term, it loses concrete meaning, and can be applied indiscriminately.

The 2017 white supremacist Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville still lives in my head as a major flashpoint in terms of political polarization in the United States. Attendees infamously chanted “Jews will not replace us,” among other racist and xenophobic slogans. More importantly, even after the rally took a violent turn ending with the death of Heather Heyer, the rally was protected under First Amendment rights, with some participants only receiving indictments years later. President Trump reflected on the rally in 2017, saying that there were “some very fine people on both sides”. This assessment of the Charlottesville rally brings light to the hypocrisy of the Republican Party in acting as the arbiter of antisemitism in the United States, especially as more and more fringe right-wingers are being brought into the fold.

The US State Department has classified Hamas, the governing body in Gaza, as a terrorist organization since 1997. This classification is a large reason why support for Palestinian self-determination has become such a contentious issue. It is often equated with “supporting terrorism,” despite the fact that Hamas is by no means the sole representative voice of Palestine. 

The fact that the evidence to prove that Khalil “supported Hamas” is shaky at best does not matter. The legal system will hopefully do its job in reversing Khalil’s unlawful detention, and protect the clause of free speech that the right typically tends to hold onto. Beyond the First Amendment and immigration issues that play in here, the true objective is quashing political dissent. Khalil is just a dry run.

Many, if not most, colleges and universities across the United States receive federal funding of some kind. Even though Columbia complied with the wishes of many Congress members who criticized what they saw as the school’s lax approach to punishing students who participated in the protests, placing more than 70 students on interim suspension before hearings could occur, they were nevertheless hit by the DOE announcing a cancellation of federal grants and contracts worth nearly $400 million over what was described in the statement as “appalling inaction” towards cases of anti-Semitism at the university. Columbia complied with much of the order, but has kept its student judicial board intact against the White House’s wishes to have disciplinary matters regarding student protestors solely under the discretion of the university president. This concentration of punitive power might sound familiar to anyone who kept up with Claremont news this past October.

This disconnect brings up an important question for institutions like those in Claremont who receive federal funding but also must uphold a duty to protect their students as the federal government begins to clamp down on rights to freedom of speech and the basic rights of LGBTQ+ students who have found themselves targeted by the White House.

In February, Pitzer president Strom Thacker released a statement pledging to protect students and employees, writing “We remain steadfast as a community in our commitment to fostering a supportive, inclusive and respectful environment that leans strongly into our shared values. Our priority continues to be the well-being and safety of our community, particularly those most vulnerable to these changes.” 

Nevertheless, the most important thing is money. Despite the promises, when push comes to shove, we have no guarantee that the administration will not renege on their promises to protect the rights of students when their finances are under threat.

This warning issued to colleges is as much of an attempt to bring them to heel as it is about antisemitism. Higher education has long been maligned by many on the right wing as having a distinctly left-wing bias. Although the situation regarding higher education and Mahmoud Khalil is still unfolding, there is value in taking Trump directly at his word. No matter how crazy something might sound, he has repeatedly shown that he is willing to follow through. 

All this is happening in the midst of an unprecedented upheaval of the country’s education system, with the Trump administration seeking to shutter the DOE amid Trump’s claims that the agency has been overrun with “radicals, zealots, and Marxists.” The 1776 Commission and its attempt to supplant previous history curriculum in the public school system is a good example of the attempt being made to shift conceptions about what it means to be an American. The curriculum pushed by the commission sanitizes many important aspects and figures in American history, weaponizing the words of important leaders like Martin Luther King in order to reshape public consciousness and further American chauvinism. 

Make no mistake, Mahmoud Khalil is not just a single example. No matter what your political beliefs are, the fact of the matter is that his case may very well hold important implications for the 7C community, and there is no guarantee that compliance will grant relief from further scrutiny and punishment from the Trump Administration.