Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, is currently in ICE detention facing deportation proceedings—and the future of free speech in America hangs on the outcome of his case. Khalil, who has permanent resident status, was illegally abducted by ICE agents in front of his pregnant wife on March 8, sparking national and international outrage and raising alarms about what his extrajudicial abduction and imprisonment means for the present and future of civil liberties in Trump’s America. Michael Arria, a reporter with Mondoweiss, joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the current status of Khalil’s case and the rapid escalation of Trump’s crackdown on political dissent and the movement for Palestine.

Production: David Hebden, Rosette Sewali
Post-production: Alina Nehlich

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have y’all with us. Mahmoud Khalil is in the news. 11 days ago, this father to Tobe was a student, a leading voice at Columbia University to end the war on Gaza and for the rights of Palestinian people. He’s Palestinian. Then all of a sudden, 11 days ago, federal agents burst into his apartment, taking him away, threatening him with deportation. His wife is about to give birth to their first child. Other Palestinian students have been targeted by the federal government and Trump has told Columbia he’ll withdraw $400 million of federal support. If you don’t ban masks, empower campus cops and put the school department of Middle East, south Asian, and African studies under academic receivership, which would mean they’re no longer controlled by the university or the faculty among other things. And Mahmoud Khalil languishes now in a federal lockup in Louisiana. And we’re about to have a conversation with a man who’s been covering this. Michael Arria has been covering this from Mondoweiss where he’s a US correspondent and he’s the author of Medium Blue, the Politics of MSNBC. And Michael, welcome, good to have you with us.

Michael Arria:

Thanks for having me.

Marc Steiner:

So this story, I remember when I first watched this happening, saw this happening. I was just incredulous. Lemme just take a step backwards with you for a moment and for a broader overview before we jump into this specific story and what this is emblematic for, what’s happening to our country at this moment, colleges around the country being threatened, Palestinian people, I have Palestinian friends who feel now that they’re under threat of deportation. Talk a bit about your analysis of where we think we are and what’s happening to us right now.

Michael Arria:

It’s an interesting question. I think obviously these things don’t occur in a vacuum. Unfortunately, Khalil’s detention, it was not altogether shocking. I think we all expected the Trump administration to act in some capacity. He’s been very upfront, even dating back to the campaign trail, the Washington Post reported last May that he had told a group of pro-Israel donors that if they helped elect him, he would crack down on the Palestine movement and set it back decades.

And he specifically outlined how he would do that, which is to deport students. He repeated that line throughout the campaign as did members of the new administration. Upon arriving at the White House, we saw executive orders shortly after he arrived at the White House, obviously also targeting student protestors. But I think you bring up an interesting point because some of these college investigations actually began under the Biden administration and something we cover at the site every week, especially me as the US correspondent, is this kind of war that’s been waged against the US Palestine movement domestically particularly strengthened and amplified I think in the wake of the October 7th attack, but really was going on long before that through legal means in the courts, pro-Israel organizations, pro-Israel, lawmakers criminalizing BDS attempting to adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which essentially classifies some criticisms of Israel as antisemitic.

So this has been a real push and it has to be said, although Trump is kind of amping it up to a level we have yet to see, it has largely been a bipartisan affair. We have seen these kind of attacks on the Palestine movement in the US for quite some time, and this is kind of, I think in many ways a culmination of these kind of actions that we’ve seen kind of over the past decade really since BDS emerged as a forest, we’ve really seen this attempt to criminalize descent and a lot of these Israel groups really see the campus as the terrain where that battle is going to be fought. And they’ve really fought to kind of blur the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. They’ve really fought for pro-Israel students to kind of be regarded as a civil right classification unto themself. You see this a lot with Alec where they find somebody who claims that the fact they had to join a union and fringes upon their freedom of speech or something, and then you see these big right-wing right to work groups kind of support them. And that’s kind of happened in this situation too. You’ve seen some of these pro-ISIS Israel groups like the Brandeis Center back, these pro-Israel students and try to get this stuff on the books and change the legal definition for what you can and can’t do as it relates to Palestine protests. So that’s kind of a little backstory I’d say in terms of what leads up to this arrest that we saw on March 8th.

Marc Steiner:

If the United States government uses a leverage that is using against Columbia now saying, we’re going to take away $400 million from the university if you don’t do what we tell you, if you don’t stop these anti-Israeli protests and more, I mean they could do this across the country. I mean this signals, this is kind of a bellwether for a real kind of dangerous, almost fascistic policies being instituted by Trump against higher education.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And it’s interesting, this is obviously there’s some big picture stories here, like a big picture stories obviously Trump’s deportation plans as anti-immigrant designs are not limited to student protestors or Palestinians. So that’s one big picture story. I think another big picture story is what we just discussed. This is a long time coming in terms of this blurring of what is considered antisemitism versus what is considered legitimate pro-Palestine protest. But I think the third issue is the one you bring up, which is this issue of what does the institutions of higher education, what do they stand for in the United States in the year 2025? I think shortly before the election I interviewed Mara Finkelstein, who I think you’ve had on your show. She was

The first tenured professor to lose her job over pro-Palestine speech. It had an Instagram post where she criticized Zionism and lost her job. And she said something very interesting to me when we spoke last October where she really connected this to the decades of policies that we’ve seen, education policy that we’ve seen in the United States, this neoliberal model that we’ve seen kind of emerge where we’ve seen the rolling back of federal funding of higher education. And this is another thing Trump has amped up obviously as we’ve seen in recent weeks, and we kind of have seen that replaced with a donor model, right? Schools essentially a marketplace in that regard. And I think you tap into this, Trump sent this letter to Columbia University saying that $400 million is potentially on the line. We might revisit this and give it back to you if you do the following things. And basically laid out a kind of crackdown on pro-Palestine protestors. And one of those demands was also, it’s everything you mentioned, but in addition to that was Trump administration was calling for the suspension of a number of student activists who were involved in the occupation of Hamilton Hall last April. This is a hall at Columbia that was occupied by a number of students drawing attention to what was happening, the genocidal assault

Marc Steiner:

And was occupied during the anti-war demonstrations in Vietnam as well. Exactly right.

Michael Arria:

And it should be pointed out, Columbia, we’ve seen so much news in the last week, it’s hard to keep up I realize. But something that happened is that the other day Columbia announced that they were suspending expelling and potentially taking degrees away from a number of the people who were connected to that protest. So I think part of the story here is obviously the Trump administration. The other part is how these universities have kind of either complied or just been straight up complicit in the designs of the Trump administration, presumably because they do not want to see their endowments threatened in any capacity. And now you have an announcement from Linda McMahon, the new head of Department of Education, sending out this announcement that 60 schools which have been investigated for alleged antisemitism are potentially on the verge of facing disciplinary action. Presumably similar to what happened with Columbia, where they’ll have their federal contracts and grants pulled and are put in a position where they’re really between a rock and a hard place, so to speak, and what they want to do.

And I think when it comes down to it, I mean that’s what Mara Finkelstein told me. She said, I don’t have to have sympathy for the people who fired me to acknowledge the fact that my school was put in this position where they could either get rid of an anthropology professor or have their endowment threatened. And to them it probably wasn’t a big decision. So I think that’s something that we have to keep in mind here. This isn’t only a story about immigration or Trump or McCarthyism. It also is a story about kind of what the face of higher education looks like in the United States, especially a place like Columbia, which is a private university and therefore technically isn’t beholden by the First Amendment in the same way that other places are. There’s legitimate questions here. What kind of responsibility do they have to their faculty? What kind of responsibility do they have to their students? And it’s all this stuff about freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry, all this kind of stuff that you see in the mission statements of universities like Columbia and Harvard. Does that mean anything or do these actions just kind of prove that it’s all just words that they don’t really take seriously?

Marc Steiner:

I mean this is what happened. Columbia, as I said earlier, I think is just a tip of the iceberg. This was, I think in some ways attest for the Trump administration and the right wing to see how far they could go, where they could begin this process, how they could clamp down on protest. And I think that this whole issue of antisemitism, lemme take a step back for a second. I’m Jewish. I grew up in a family of pogrom and Holocaust survivors and I’ve been involved in the movement against the occupation since the late sixties, and I think they used this bogus move to call protests against the occupation as antisemitic. I mean, I think antisemitic is there, antisemites are everywhere, but the protest movements and the movement itself is not antisemitic. And I think this is an excuse they use also to divide America and to be able to justify their clamping down on campuses and Columbia was a place they started. Before we jump back into that, let me ask you a bit more about Mahmoud, Khalil and what you know now, what you know about what his situation is, what is happening legally and where he is.

Michael Arria:

Sure. So as we mentioned at the top, Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by ice agents on March 8th. These are ice agents that were in plain clothes agents who followed him into his home alongside his wife, who as you mentioned is eight months pregnant. They did not initially produce a warrant. There had been reporting initially that the ice agents themselves were a little confused because we should point out Mahmoud A is a permanent resident with a active green card. So

When his wife produced the green card, reportedly the ICE agents had called presumably their supervisor or the office and had basically said this might be some sort of mistake. He has a green card and were told that the state department had revoked the green card as well as his student visa. So he is taken into custody by the ICE agents. There was a period of about 24 hours where nobody including his attorneys were able to figure out where he was. I should point out that sadly that is not altogether shocking when you look at ice, how they operate in the history of our immigration detention system, but it is nonetheless very concerning. They couldn’t get in touch with him. A judge in New York, we eventually figured out that he was in a detention facility in Louisiana. So he’s moved thousands of miles away from his family to this detention facility.

A judge in New York blocks the deportation order that was issued by the Trump administration and calls everybody into court. This is last Wednesday. And the Trump administration, the Trump lawyers were trying to get this thrown out of the New York court. They’re essentially arguing that it has no jurisdiction, that everything should go to Louisiana where Mahmoud is being held. At that hearing, we found out that his lawyers had still had no communication with him. They had no way to get in touch with him. So the judge actually some news shortly before we got on this call today, the judge ruled that the proceedings continue, will happen, will occur in New Jersey.

Marc Steiner:

And that hasn’t happened yet.

Michael Arria:

That hasn’t happened yet. It was just announced. And the lawyers, some of his attorneys put out statements that basically said, this isn’t necessarily a cause to celebrate, but it is something of a small victory because it is a setback for the Trump administration, which is trying to have this moved. So that’s kind of where we’re at now. And as you point out, this is just the first, I mean Trump has said as soon as it happened, he celebrated on social media and said that there were many more to come. There has since been more than one Columbia, additional Columbia students that have been one who was detained, who we know very little about detained in, similar in Newark and ended up in, is currently at a facility in Texas, a detention facility. And then there’s another Indian student who actually a doctoral student architect from India who is actually set to finish a doctoral program in urban planning this May of Columbia and learned that she was being targeted by the Department of Homeland Security, so actually fled the country trying to escape this targeting by the Trump administration. So his arrest has really kicked off, I think further arrest. We’ve seen it at Columbia, but unfortunately I have no reason to believe he won’t start seeing it at other places and the administration’s being very explicit about the fact that these will continue, that this is not an isolated incident.

Marc Steiner:

You mentioned, just to put their names out there, Leqaa Kordia is the Palestinian student, the woman who was from the West Bank, and the other is Ranjani Srinivasan, the Indian National who was targeted. And you’re right, I mean because Trump now has this kind of rhetoric and history of ignoring the courts saying he can do what he wants to do.

Michael Arria:

Yes.

Marc Steiner:

It’s almost difficult to kind of put your hands around this in terms of what the potential is for the strengthening of this neofascist kind of regime in Washington, because if they win this battle, they don’t stop there, they’ll continue.

Michael Arria:

Right, that’s absolutely true. I think when Mahmoud was first attained, I think there was a belief from many people that the Trump administration would be relying on some of the anti-terrorism measures that came out of the Bush administration. For those of us who remember the immediate aftermath after nine 11, things like the Patriot Act, like many situations, and I just talked about how Biden kind of paved the way a lot of the war on terror legislation, some of the groundwork had really been done in previous administration. So the anti-terrorism bill that Bill Clinton passed in 1995 had a provision in it about material support for terrorist groups. It’s interesting that legislation came in response to the Oklahoma City bombing, and he was pressured by pro-Israel groups to really include this provision in it in order to go after Palestinian organizations. I think a lot of people, when Mahmoud was originally arrested, a lot of people assumed this was going to be the root of the Trump administration. They were going to try to prove in some capacity, although it still seemed like a legally shaky argument that student protestors had somehow supported Hamas. Hamas is of course regarded as a terrorist group by the United States government.

What we learned pretty quickly through the court documents and some people connected to this case that had spoken to places like the New York Times is that they are not relying on that type of framework. They’re relying on a provision from the Immigration and Nationality Act from back in 1952. The dark irony of this is, as you say, they’re invoking this issue of antisemitism. The last time this provision was wielded was the height of the red scare, and it was used to target Holocaust survivors who were suspected of being Soviet agents.

So it was actually used to go to target Jewish people in the United States, and there’s a provision in there that basically says if you’re an alien whose presence or activities create reasonable grounds to believe that they would potentially seriously impact the foreign policy objectives of the United States, then you can be deported. And that is very troubling. I think this is potentially a scary thing. I think that even goes beyond some of the stuff we saw on the War on Terror because in the War on Terror, we really saw these esteemed legal minds in the Bush administration kind of pour over the Constitution and try to find these little loopholes or reinterpret it in a way where they could justify all these kind of draconian measures or unconstitutional measures. In this case, the Trump administration is not even pretending that Mahmoud committed a crime. They’re not pointing to anything. We had this one comment from the White House press Atory where she said she had some photos in her office that showed he had handed out literature that was Pearl Hamas. They’ve never returned to this, which makes me think it doesn’t exist.

Marc Steiner:

Doesn’t exist.

Michael Arria:

It doesn’t exist. And even if it did, we should point out that is not illegal. It’s not grounds for Mahmoud still has protections of the First Amendment regardless of whether or not he had the green card. So we’ve seen nothing in terms of the administration coming out and claiming that he actually committed a crime. And that’s very, I think, terrifying for people who are looking at this case because it basically sets up a situation where people can be targeted and deported much in a similar way that they were during periods of time like the red scare, without having to prove that they committed any sort of crime whatsoever. It really opens up, as you say, a very dangerous can of worms going forward, and I think what happens here will potentially have massive repercussions for the next three years.

Marc Steiner:

You quote a friend of mine who I’ve done work in the media with before Jelani Cobb, who’s now the dean of journalism at Columbia saying, nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times. I mean, when I read that knowing Jelani Cobb, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, who’s not easily intimidated, who’s got great analysis to say something like that is something that America should listen to understand what it is we face.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, absolutely. That is a quote from a New York Times article that ran about a week and a half ago.

It was in response to the fact that another professor, an adjunct professor, Stuart Carl, had basically told a group of students, stop posting on your social media about the Middle East. If you have a social media page, make sure it doesn’t have commentary about the Middle East. And a Palestinian student had basically objected to that and brought up the fact that the school was promoting censorship and kind of bowing to the Trump administration. And that’s when Cobb made the statement that you said allegedly or was reported to the times, nobody can protect you. He said, these are dangerous times. So yeah, I think it’s very ominous. I mean, to hear this kind of stuff from this institution, I think it’s worth pointing out. Also, shortly before Mahmoud was apprehended by ICE agents, the administration of Columbia sent out a statement to faculty and staff notifying them that their protocol as it relates to ICE had shifted.

And prior to that point, they had been regarded as what’s a sanctuary university, which is similar to a sanctuary city. Basically it said, ICE shows up on campus, we’re not going to assist them. They had modified that to basically say, in some circumstances we have to let ice on campus without a warrant. So we see that. We see, as I mentioned before, the suspensions of the students. Again, this is not happening in a vacuum. We’re seeing it across the university in many ways. We’re seeing this inability to, not just inability to stand up to the Trump administration, but also we see them aligned with them when it comes to this type of behavior. The in interim president Trina Armstrong had sent out an email when ICE agents showed up at campus the other day saying she was heartbroken that this had occurred, but she wanted to inform everybody. I think it’s really hard for students probably who are engaged in these protests to take those sentiments seriously when they look at the sequence of events here and they look at how Columbia and other higher education institutions have acted over the past few months.

Marc Steiner:

I’m going to read another quote here and come back to Mahmoud before we have to go. You have a quote here from Halal D’S attorney who was a scholar, international law at Yale, was placed administrative leave. And the quote is this from Eric Lee, his attorney, future Historians will treat the role of American universities as an example of collaboration, like we review the Vichy government today, the role played by the vast majority of professors is absolutely shameful. I mean, I want to talk about that for a minute before we go back to Mahmoud because I think we’re on a very dangerous precipice if this is allowed to happen. If they’re allowed to go into universities, arrest Palestinian students, arrest students who are protesting anything threatening universities with lack of taking away their federal dollars. I mean either universities find backbone and join the fight or they actually get what they want. I mean, I’m talking about the Trump government.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, it’s a very scary situation. The lawyer that you quote there, Eric Lee, he’s actually the attorney for a student at Yale Law School who has also caught up in a similar situation where she was placed on administrative leave following an AI generated article, falsely accusing her of terrorist connections. Rubio had kind of announced this was going to happen,

Marc Steiner:

Which is insane describing that for that moment. I mean, alleged not even proven.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, we are in a real dystopian, I think with some of the stuff situation, this announcement from the Trump administration that they’re going to use AI in order to determine whether or not students support Hamas. It’s really incredible. But to your point, we’re seeing this across all kinds of universities, not just Columbia. I think all eyes are on Columbia for very obvious reasons, but I think I mentioned that piece. Swarthmore College just suspended student for their involvement in the Gaza protest. They handed out 25 violations of code conduct as a result of those protests. The student who got suspended was suspended for using a bullhorn indoors, which is the first time somebody has ever been suspended for this nationally. So we’re seeing schools cracked down on this kind of dissent and stifle criticism of Israel supportive Gaza alongside this push for the Trump administration. As you say.

Before we get off this topic, I should quickly mention there are a couple lawsuits. One is a couple graduate students and a Cornell professor are actually suing the Trump administration over its push to deport students. One of those students was actually almost deported last year after he was suspended for participating in a pro-Palestine protest. The other lawsuit I think is important here is Khalil and seven other current Columbia students are suing the school and Republican out of Michigan, representative Tim Wahlberg to prevent their private disciplinary records from being handed over to the House Committee on Education and Workforce. And people probably remember this is the committee that has consistently tried to bring university presidents before Congress and really grill them on their alleged inability to crack down on antisemitism. And this’s an important part of this. I think it’s hard to know where one group begins in the other ends, but there is definitely this, you see this collaboration that precisely Eric Lee’s point in your quote, this kind of collaboration with the government pro-Israel lawmakers and these schools. And I think it’s a really important point. We’re really going to learn a lot I think, in the coming weeks and months about how that breaks down and how people are going to be able to battle against it and fight against it.

Marc Steiner:

So lemme ask you this. What have you learned since your article about Mahmoud kil and his legal situation where he is? I know you’ll probably stay on top of this. I just want to get an update from you on what’s happening to him, to Mahmoud.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, as I mentioned, so he’s hypothetically supposed to be heading back to the East Coast. I think today was obviously, as I said, something of a victory for his legal team and for him, I mean, his wife put out a statement today basically saying First step, we need to, this is a good first step, but we need to continue to demand justice from a mood. Because he was unlawfully and unjustly detained and she basically said, we’re not going to stop fighting until he is home. Your listeners have probably seen there’s been protests all across the United States in regards to this. There’s actually been a number of, I’d say pro-Israel voices even who have come out and kind of said, this violates the First Amendment. Whether or not you agree with the Palestine protestors, this should still be opposed. I think it’s a very dire situation for everyone in this country who cares about the First Amendment or anyone who wants to exercise their right to free speech.

And I think his current situation, we’ll see what happens, but as it stands, this is going to continue to progress in court. Now it’s supposed to take place in the East coast and we’ll kind of be able to see how that goes. Yesterday we saw the first statement from him. His lawyers released a statement from him where he basically explained his situation and provided some disturbing details. He wasn’t given a blanket, for instance, the first night he spent on sleeping on the cold ground and just kind of his ordeal and it detailed what he’s thinking, but it also kind of highlighted the fact that he’s committed to liberation of the Palestinian people as many people are, and they’re going to continue to fight. And Columbia has targeted him for his views. And really when you read his statement, which I encouraged people to check out, they can check it out on ccrs website

Marc Steiner:

And we will link to it

Michael Arria:

And we actually ran it on our site as well. When you read this, you really start thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail. This is a political prisoner. This man is being held with no charges, no crime has been identified by the administration. I think quite obviously for the simple reason that he has advocated for Gaza and he has advocated for Palestine, and he has consistently criticized the genocidal assault that has been unleashed on those people by Israel with the support of the United States the entire way through. So that’s kind of the situation we’re in right now. I’d say

Marc Steiner:

You took the words out of my brain as I read it just a little bit ago, thinking about King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail that I think that he’s this eloquent spokesman, stuck in jail wife about to give birth, and we’re going to stay on top of what happened to Mahmoud Khalil and we’ll stay on top of that and keep abreast of what’s happened to him and what you can do to support his release and his freedom and to keep that going. This is a very dangerous moment we’re living in and we have to be really aware, careful, and on top of these issues. So we fight for our democracy and keep this alive. And Michael, want to thank you so much for your work and your writing, and we’re going to link to your article and your other work as well. Thank you so much for joining us today and let’s keep in contact and keep this conversation going and free Mahmoud.

Michael Arria:

Of course. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you. Once again, thank you to Michael Arria for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebden for the program and audio editor, Alina Nehlich and producer Rosette Sewali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Michael Arria for joining us today. And so for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.