The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil suggests that we are living in a new America | Opinion

Mahmoud Khalil is living the kind of nightmare that Americans might associate with the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin rather than the country in which we live. On March 8, as he and his wife were returning to their New York City apartment after eating out, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents descended on them without warning, arrested Khalil and took him away.

His wife, eight months pregnant and an American citizen, described the scene: “We were not shown any warrant … (and agents) whisked him away in an unmarked vehicle,” according to NBC News. Later, ICE officers refused to speak with Khalil’s lawyer about why he was taken into custody or where he was being held.

Khalil attracted ICE’s attention because of his role in the protests that occurred on the Columbia University campus in the wake of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel and the subsequent Israeli military response. He was, Politico reports, “a lead negotiator representing the student protesters to the Columbia administration during the school’s ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ last spring ... (which) made him relatively public compared with many of the other protesters.”

Khalil came to the United States on a student visa in 2022 and gained his Permanent Resident Card, or green card, two years later.

One does not have to condone Khalil’s goals and rhetoric to be troubled that he or anyone else could be targeted for exercising their First Amendment rights. Those rights are available to legal residents and citizens of this country.

Our constitutional protection of freedom of speech means that people should not have to fear government retribution if they say the “wrong thing.” Indeed, we only need the protection those rights afford so that we can say the wrong thing — the unpopular thing, the things that offended people in positions of power.

If speech were none of those things, it wouldn’t need protection. UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky gets it right when he wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times column that “no one can be punished under the law, including by deportation, for the ideas they express.”

The Supreme Court, Chemerinsky writes, “long has stressed that the Constitution protects the ability to express views that many find deeply objectionable”

“Even if Khalil’s speech was hateful, and even if it was antisemitic, it was protected by the 1st Amendment,” Chemerinsky wrote, “Support for Hamas … is an idea that can be expressed under the First Amendment.”

This is a hard but important lesson to learn. But Trump Administration officials have sent inconsistent messages about whether they think what happened to Khalil has anything at all to do with freedom of speech.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, insists that Khalil’s case is not about free speech or its limits. In his view, debating whether his protest activities fall inside or outside the zone of protected speech misses the point. He argues that it does a disservice to the administration’s efforts to crack down on those who are lending their support to a terrorist group like Hamas.

Apparently, Trump Administration’s Border Czar Tom Homan did not get the message. Unlike Rubio, Homan thinks Khalil’s case is all about freedom of speech and its limits.

On Wednesday, in a public comment, he jumped head-first into the free speech debate. Referring to Khalil, Homan said, “When you are on campuses, I hear ‘freedom of speech,’ ‘freedom of speech,’ ‘freedom of speech.’ Can you stand at a movie theater and yell ‘fire’? Can you slander? Free speech has limitations.”

In Homan’s view, Khalil crossed the line by protesting, and allegedly handing out leaflets for Hamas. Then, not missing an opportunity to score political points, he added, “You might have been able to get away with that stuff in the last administration, but you won’t under this administration.”

Khalil’s arrest sends a chilling message about the danger of getting on the wrong side of the current administration. It also reminds us that we are living in a new — but not necessarily greater — America.

This story was originally published March 14, 2025 at 12:52 PM.