Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers arrested a former Columbia University scholar over his involvement within the pro-Palestine protests that swept the campus over the previous 12 months, despite the fact 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, grew to become 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 Department to arrest its personal college students. This newest arrest alerts that the Trump administration is equally decided to punish protesters — and supplies a glimpse into the surveillance instruments it’s going to exploit to perform that.
Mahmoud Khalil, who graduated from the college’s School of International and Public Affairs final December, was picked up by ICE in his university-owned house on March 8, his legal professional, Amy Greer, advised the Associated Press. Khalil’s arrest got here simply days after Axios reported that the State Department can be utilizing AI to revoke visas for pro-Palestine scholar protesters. During the arrest, brokers from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division reportedly advised Greer — who was on the cellphone with Khalil and his spouse, a US citizen — that they had been appearing on State Department 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 had been revoking his inexperienced card, despite the fact that the company doesn’t have the authorized authority to do 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, Department of Homeland Security (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 Department 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, typically spurred by pro-Israel advocates, has equated protests towards Israel’s conflict on Gaza with each antisemitism and terrorism. While civil rights organizations have known as Khalil’s arrest a violation of the First Amendment, different teams that declare to advocate at no cost speech on school campuses have remained silent.
Greer has known 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 concentrating on college students at Columbia University for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza,” she advised CNN. “The US authorities has made clear that they are going to use immigration enforcement as a software 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 Amendment proper to free speech. “Even the specter of detention and deportation has a chilling impact on speech,” Greer wrote. On Monday night, Judge Jesse Furman prohibited DHS from deporting Khalil whereas his case is underneath judicial overview and ordered all events to satisfy for a listening to on Wednesday, March twelfth in response to Khalil’s habeas petition.
It’s not unprecedented for ICE to arrest individuals 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. But 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 typically get placed on ICE’s radar after being charged with sure legal offenses. Under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, authorized immigrants, together with these with inexperienced playing cards, might be deported for having been convicted of an unlimited array of crimes — months and even years after their conviction. But these deportations must be ordered by an immigration choose; an individual’s inexperienced card can’t be revoked with out due course of.
But there are not any studies of Khalil having a legal file, 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 turn into a everlasting resident, Khalil needed to register with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the DHS company that handles authorized migration. Under the Privacy Act, USCIS and different businesses should typically safeguard individuals’s “personally identifiable data” — together with their title, tackle, and biometric identifiers. But there are some exceptions to this. USCIS is allowed to share data with different DHS businesses “so long as there’s a mission want consistent with the requestor’s official duties.” A DHS coverage memo issued in 2007 states that the division “provides the 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 Security Digital Library, in its coverage handbook chapter on “privateness and confidentiality.” That hyperlink, nevertheless, is now useless and results in the next message: “Content on this platform is being reviewed and eliminated to align with the President’s government orders and DoD/DHS priorities. Until that overview is full, website content material just isn’t obtainable.” The memo can nonetheless be accessed through the Wayback Machine. It is 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 number of state, native, and federal authorities databases, some mixture of which can have contained Khalil’s tackle and different private data. But ICE doesn’t essentially must depend on different authorities businesses for this data, because it has entry to most Americans’ information. A 2022 Georgetown Law examine discovered that ICE can find three out of 4 adults within the US by means of their utility information, and it has entry to only as many individuals’s driver’s licenses. Almost all of this data, the report’s authors wrote, might be accessed “warrantlessly and in secret.” ICE has entry to a lot of our information that it “now operates as a home surveillance company,” the report discovered.
It’s possible that every one ICE wanted to seek out Khalil was his title — which has been publicized quite a few instances by teams whose sole function is to establish and surveil pro-Palestine scholar activists.
“HSI is a complicated investigative part of ICE so they’d be able to finding individuals’s addresses, maybe by means of conventional instruments like LexisNexis, in the event that they nonetheless contract with ICE,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst on the Migration Policy Institute’s US immigration program, advised The Verge.
One of those organizations is Canary Mission, a database that has tracked pro-Palestinian scholar protesters for over a decade. Canary Mission has revealed the names, photographs, and different figuring out data of scholar activists throughout the nation — together with Khalil’s. Last October, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing suppose tank behind Project 2025, introduced its personal effort to surveil anti-Israel college students, which it dubbed Project Esther. After Trump’s reelection, the right-wing Zionist group Betar mentioned it was compiling a listing of international 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 shall be arrested and finally deported from this nation.”
“I haven’t been in a position to sleep, fearing that ICE or a harmful particular person would possibly come to my house”
While different college students held down the encampments on Columbia’s garden, Khalil was amongst these negotiating with college directors on the protesters’ behalf. The college students’ fundamental demand was divestment: they needed the college to divest from weapons producers and different corporations that assist Israel’s conflict on Gaza.
Khalil’s fears didn’t subside after he grew to become a everlasting resident final 12 months. In reality, Zeteo studies that Khalil requested Columbia directors to guard him from harassment simply someday 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 known as for my deportation,” Khalil wrote in a March 7 e-mail to Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong. His e-mail cited a January submit on X from Betar. “He’s on our deport record!” the group wrote of Khalil.
“I haven’t been in a position to 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 required protections to forestall additional hurt.”
Davidai, a professor at Columbia Business School, 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 staff. 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 heart in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the AP studies. But 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 consumer was being held. ICE’s detainee locator now says Khalil is being detained at LaSalle detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, a privately owned detention heart operated by the GEO Group. Khalil’s whereabouts had been first reported by Zeteo.
It’s not unusual for ICE to switch the individuals it has arrested to far-away detention facilities. Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director of the Detention Watch Network, mentioned ICE typically makes use of transfers to “goal and retaliate towards activists talking up towards the immigration and ICE detention system.” The remoteness of those amenities typically implies that detainees are removed from not solely their family and friends but in addition from attorneys and oversight teams. According to the newest Census information, lower than 5,000 individuals dwell in Jena. Meanwhile, the GEO Group’s detention heart there can maintain as much as 1,160 individuals.
“The arrest of Khalil and his subsequent detention and switch is a continuation of that apply,” Ghandehari advised The Verge. “ICE is particularly liable to transferring individuals to extra rural places, like Jena, Louisiana, that aren’t solely distant from an individual’s assist system, however are additionally arduous to entry. It’s an isolation tactic designed to punish individuals and make it more durable for them to battle their immigration instances.”
ICE has been accused of going after activists previously. In 2018, activist Ravi Ragbir sued ICE for concentrating on him and different noncitizens who criticized its enforcement practices. Ragbir, the chief director of the New York City-based New Sanctuary Coalition, had been arrested throughout a routine ICE check-in that 12 months. ICE settled the go well with with Ragbir in 2022, and the federal government gave him a three-year reprieve from deportation.
Also in 2018, members of the Vermont-based group Migrant Justice sued DHS, claiming it had retaliated towards its members by concentrating on them for immigration enforcement after they organized a marketing campaign to guard undocumented farmworkers within the state. The group additionally sued the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles, alleging that the company systematically handed alongside immigrants’ personal 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 therapy of Palestinians.
“This is just 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.”
Reports recommend that Khalil is in no way the administration’s solely goal. The Student Workers 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 house, 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.” But it’s completely constant together with his administration’s stance on pro-Palestine protests on school campuses. In reality, simply someday 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 likely one of the instruments we’re utilizing to answer this spike in anti-Semitism,” Leo Terrell, the pinnacle of the Justice Department Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, mentioned in an announcement. “This is just the start.”
Others within the administration put it extra bluntly. “SHALOM, MAHMOUD,” the official White House account posted on X. On TruthSocial, Trump promised there can be extra: “This is the primary arrest of many to come back.”
