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

Maximillian Alvarez:

After being abducted from his New York apartment building by plain clothes agents and then locked away in an ice jail in Louisiana. For over a hundred days, Mahmud Khalil has been freed and reunited with his family. The Syrian born husband, father Palestinian activists and former Columbia University graduate student played a key role in the 2024 Columbia University Palestine solidarity protests mediating between student protestors and the university administration after a federal judge ruled that Khalil’s detention was unconstitutional and that he was neither a flight risk nor a threat to the public. Khalil was finally released on June 20th, but the fight for Khalil’s freedom is not over, and we have by no means seen the last of the Trump administration’s authoritarian attacks on immigrants universities and the movement to stop Israel’s US backed genocide of Palestinians. The country watched in horror as Khalil and other international students and scholars like Ru Meza Ozturk at Tufts and Bader Kuri at Georgetown were openly targeted, traumatized, and persecuted by the Trump administration for their political speech and beliefs. Here’s a clip from the Chilling video of Khalil’s abduction in March taken by Khalil’s wife, no Abdullah that we republished here at the Real News Network.

Amy Greer:

You guys really don’t need to be doing all of that. It’s fine. It’s fine. The opposite. Take Amy. Call Amy, she’ll be fine. Okay. Hi Amy. Yeah, they just handcuffed him and took him. I don’t know what to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Okay, I, what should I do? I don’t know. Now as Mahmud is being dragged away in handcuffs by those plain clothes agents, in that video, he turns to his wife noir and he says, call Amy. And you can actually hear in that video no’s terrified voice saying over the phone to Amy that she just doesn’t know what to do as her husband is being dragged away. Joining us on The Real News Network today is the Amy who was on the other end of that phone call on the fateful day when Mahmud Khalil was abducted from his apartment building on March 8th. Amy Greer is an associate attorney at DRA and Lewis and a member of Mahmud Khalil’s legal team. Amy is a lawyer and archivist by training and an advocate and storyteller by nature as an attorney at DRA and Lewis. She works on a variety of cases including international extradition, Rico, terrorism and drug trafficking. She previously served as an assistant public defender on a remote island in Alaska, defending people charged with misdemeanors and as a research and writing attorney on capital habeas cases with clients who have been sentenced to death. Amy, thank you so much for joining us on the Real News Network today. I really, really appreciate it. And I just wanted to kind of start by asking how is Mahmud Khalil doing? How is his family doing? How are you and the rest of the legal team doing after this long, terrifying saga?

Amy Greer:

Yeah. Well, I think for many of us, including Mahmud and Ur, the reunion and knowing that Mahmood is free was just a huge relief. Seeing him detained, watching that experience of that family being separated from each other was incredibly challenging to watch as attorneys, and I can only begin to imagine what that felt like for Mahmud and nor themselves. So having them be together is so critical, and you’ll see every time you see photos of them in public, they’re holding hands or Mahmud’s arm is around North. So just that physical proximity I think has just been really powerful and important for the two of them, the legal team. The fight continues, but I know for many of us, the relief that course through our own bodies, our own hearts as people who love and have loved ones bearing witness to their reunification was really special, really important. And now it’s galvanizing for the fight to continue.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and good news is in short supply these days, and I can genuinely only imagine what it is like for you and folks in the legal world to be navigating the reality of this new administration. I mean, because the law fair that is unfolding, the fights over the future of this country and the Trump agenda, so many of those fights are happening in the courts, and the law system itself is a key player in how the Trump administration is trying to execute its authoritarian excesses. So it is, I think, gratifying and energizing for so many people. And we’ve heard that from our own audience that amidst all this darkness and these onslaughts from the administration to have a victory, like seeing Mahmud, Khalil walk free from the ice detention facility in Louisiana reminds people that the fight is not over. And we are going to talk in a little bit about where things stand now with Mahmud’s legal standing in the case that he’s fighting for his freedom. But I wanted to ask if we could go back to that fateful day in March when you got that call from No Abdullah. Can you talk us through what it’s even like to get a call like that? Is this a call that you’re used to getting? And what was the process of responding to that call? What were you guys doing in the hours after Khalil was abducted?

Amy Greer:

Sure. So actually the first call I got was from Mahmood himself, and that wasn’t on video. Mahmud called me at around eight 30 ish on March 8th, and I was embarrassingly, I just poured a glass of wine and was sitting down to a Ted Lasso episode, which is what I watched. It’s like the equivalent of sucking my thumb. It’s like how I chill out sometimes. I have some episodes that I like to rewatch, and it was a Saturday night, and so I was relaxing and the phone rang and I saw that it was Mahmud, and it’s very unusual. Even though we’d been working together for a few months, it’s pretty unusual that he would call me outside of business hours. So I knew that something must be going on, and I picked up the phone and he told me he was surrounded by ice and that ice agents in plain clothes and that they told him that his student visa had been revoked.

We knew that he was not on a student visa, he was a green card holder or lawful permanent resident. And so the agent asked to speak with me because Mahmud introduced me as his attorney. I had some words with the ice agent asking him if he had a warrant, what the basis for the arrest was, which again, they repeated that the Secretary of State had revoked Mahmud’s student visa. When I informed the agent that Mahmud was actually a lawful permanent resident, he said, well, they revoked that too, which is not a thing actually. There needs to be some due process that happens in order to revoke somebody’s lawful permanent residency. And when I demanded again to have the agent show Mahmood or to send me a warrant, the agent hung up on me. And that’s when Nora’s video picks up because no had gone upstairs to get the green card to show ice that Mahmood was a lawful permanent resident.

And so when she came back down, that’s when the filming began that that has become so famous now. And so nor then called me back. However, I will say there was about a five minute or three to five minute gap between when Mahmood hung up or when the agent hung up on me and when Nora called. And that’s the thing, I am an attorney. I am cool head in a crisis, but even people like me have human feelings. And Mahmud is a student that I had been working with along with numerous other students for protecting their speech rights on campus protests regarding Palestine when it became clear what was happening, that he was being taken by ice. And it seemed to me that that was not going to be stopped. You know what I mean? That showing the green card wasn’t going to stop that process.

I cried. I mean, when that phone hung up, I’ve never felt so helpless because, and we can get into this a little bit, but the reality is that law enforcement takes people, ice takes people, police take people, many in our communities, many that are connected to your network know this, and then lawyers have to undo it, right? We can’t prevent it from happening always. We have to undo it on the other side. And that revelation and that realization really struck me and I burst into tear as if I’m being totally honest. And then I called my colleague who was on the phone with me when no called back, and then we talked nor through, and you can hear no in that video, you can hear her asking, what’s your name? Where are you taking him? And you can hear her speaking to us as we’re asking her, telling her what to ask and how to gather that information.

I mean, it’s one of those situations where you have to suppress all your natural human reactions, which is fear and anxiety, and where are they taking him and deep sadness and all of those things. And so between Lindsay, my colleague and myself, we tried to stay calm for no, who I had not met yet. So she’s also talking to a stranger as this horror is unfolding in front of her. And she was eight months pregnant at the time as well. So there was a lot happening there, both what you can see, which was you can hear the fear in her voice, although she is remarkable. And while you hear the fear, you can also hear her strength. She spoke with such clarity, her voice shook. But like Rashida Taleb said, I’m speaking even as my voice shakes and that has been nor through this entire ordeal is speaking even as her voice shakes. And so that’s what you hear in that video. And I’m sure my voice was shaking as well as I was listening to this beautiful woman trying to fight for her partner, her husband, who’s being taken away right in front of her. So it was a pretty intense experience, and it’s not one that I’ve typically experienced even as a criminal defense attorney. I’m more used to the call from the jail as opposed to the call happening during the taking itself. So that was a first for me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean, my God, I can really only imagine what it’s like, but sadly in this country I find myself imagining it a lot more frequently than I used to worrying about my own family being abducted by immigration, being racially profiled and disappeared from the streets, and then having to begin that process that you just described of figuring out where my loved ones are and how I get them back. Like you said, this is what law enforcement does in this country, and the taking of people from their homes, from their job sites, from their campuses did not begin with the second Donald Trump administration. But I wanted to ask, what about this case and this call and this fight is new. Can you impress upon folks watching why this is such a marked escalation of what law enforcement and immigration enforcement typically do in this country?

Amy Greer:

Sure. I mean, I think there’s a few layers on a very sort of visceral, tangible layer. These people are showing up masked, they’re not identifying themselves. And so in the case of Mahmood, and this is also true with Rusa Ozturk, both of them have spoken on the record in court or publicly about they thought they were being abducted and then taken somewhere to potentially be executed. I mean, I know that I am sure that that’s not original to many people in communities around this country, indigenous communities, communities of color. And also I do think that there is a little masked men in plain clothes arriving on college campuses or their surrounding housing may be new. I think it’s new, it’s my understanding that it’s new where, this sounds like a strange example, but a very amazing advocate around the heroin and oxycodone crisis that it was talked about as a crisis, a public health crisis a number of years ago spoke about how it’s been a crisis for many, many years, but when it started impacting middle class white folks, then it became a public health crisis, not a criminal issue that needed to be prosecuted through the courts, but something that needed to be mediated through mental health care, addiction services and other public health framing.

I think what’s happening here is college students, graduate students, people who have no criminal records or no even association or affiliation with anything that we would necessarily conceptualize as criminalized. And again, I’m not saying that any of those labelings are okay, are being taken by masked people who refuse to identify themselves and basically disappeared for 24, 36, 48 hours where nobody knows where they are and even their families aren’t entirely sure who is taking them. And where Rua was on the phone with her mother in Turkey when she was taken and the phone was cut off, the phone call was cut off, and nobody heard from Rua again for quite some time. And similar in Mahmud’s case, we didn’t hear from him from Saturday night until Monday morning. And so these things I think are escalations because of who the people are that are being taken and the attention given to college and graduate students as unlikely people to be abducted in this way.

Again, not agreeing with any of the framing of people having been taken previously, that they deserve any less of an innocent explanation of who they are and where they’re from and what they’re about. But that’s not the narrative that’s coming out. In this particular case, it’s students speaking against a genocide taken by masked men and then detained. I think that’s the other piece is immigration detention has been an issue for a very long time. There is no question particularly around the border, but I think internal, internal to the United States, the access to parole and having to do regular check-ins, but being able to live out in the community has been general practice for a long time according to many of my immigration lawyer colleagues. So this is also new, is the actual detention of people as opposed to processing them and then allowing them to be free in the community while their case is processed in the administrative immigration side.

So that’s also a new aspect to all of this. The last thing I’ll point out is the statute that’s being used and weaponized against the students like Mahmud and Rusa and others, is an old statute where these students for speaking out against a genocide have been determined by the Secretary of State. Their presence in the United States is adverse to American foreign policy and American foreign interests. And I think that’s a statute from the 1950s that was actually weaponized against people who were accused of being associated with communism and in particular Jewish Americans who are accused of being associated with communism. And it’s being weaponized now again for people speaking against genocide. So these are some of the layers of things that are at play here that make it different, but I think what it is is it’s just they’re going for people in the United States that they assumed many people with power, with money, with privilege would not speak against, they would not speak against their taking. But what they’ve discovered is actually people have been really horrified by these abductions in a way that we should be for everybody else who’s abducted but haven’t been.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put. It’s not national news in years prior when immigrants from Latin America who raise issues on a farm that they’re working on about unsafe working conditions, and then they get abducted and disappeared by ice. No one bats an eye, but when graduate students are targeted, and then it gets a little more real for a lot more people. And of course, our aim and the necessity here for everyone watching is to care equally about both and to care about the rights of all humans. That’s why we call them human rights. And to tug on that thread a little more, talking about the sort of intricacies and the vagaries of immigration detention, can you tell us a little bit about what it was like trying to free Mahmud from this ice detention center in Louisiana for over a hundred days?

Amy Greer:

Right. Well, and I think this is where I get a little nerdy for people because I think it’s really critical, and this is where our lack of civics education in the United States is really coming back to bite us in so many ways. But I think what’s really critical to point out here is immigration court, as it’s called immigration judges, as they’re called, are actually administrative employees of the Attorney General of the United States. They are not. When you think of a judge, most people I would think of the people that they see in Maryland State Court or even the Supreme, the US Supreme Court, that people who have been vetted by the Senate or even voted into office in certain parts of the country by their constituents, they are typically lawyers. They are people who have some experience and then rise and get promoted into judicial roles.

And most of them think the people we’re thinking of are Article three, meaning in the Constitution, article three judges that were conceptualized at the framing of the Constitution, but immigration court and immigration judges, that’s actually a misnomer. They’re administrative employees. And this is an administrative process. And what that means is, for example, the immigration judge in this case said this exactly on the record, the rules of evidence, the rules of civil procedure and certain other protections and due process protections that would exist in a constitutional Article III court do not exist in the immigration process. And so really, immigration court per se, and that process is an administrative process. So for example, people have watched the procedural shows where they talk about hearsay. And in a regular court, for example, if something can’t be substantiated or corroborated in some way, it’s considered hearsay and it may not be allowed into the court in immigration proceedings, it can.

So in mahmud’s case, the government could use a New York Post article with anonymous sources as evidence against Mahmud, right? So we don’t know who the speakers were, we don’t know who the sources were. We have no way to verify that. But because the rules aren’t the same in immigration proceedings, things like that are allowed in. And so I think I say all of that just to say that people undergoing these immigration proceedings do not have, if you hear the term due process in regard to immigration, it doesn’t mean the same thing that it does in a criminal court, for example, where we already know that that’s a struggle. We already know that that’s a struggle over on that side. But believe it or not, the protections are significantly greater. So people like Mahmud and that the thousands of men that he was incarcerated with in Gina, Louisiana are going through these administrative processes.

What happens a lot of the time, and this has been so important to Mahmud highlight whenever he speaks out, is also a lot of people don’t have access to attorneys through this process, don’t even know how to reach an attorney and don’t know what their rights are. They don’t know if they can speak or not speak what they’re allowed to say or not say. And so they’re flying blind through an administrative process with very few and rights. And that’s been the case with Mahmood as well. But the difference for him is that he had access to me initially to hunt down where he was, to figure out how to find him to call attorneys in the Department of Homeland Security in the Department of Justice to find him. But so many other people don’t have that. And so people are being disappeared. The inmate locator as it’s called, or the detention locator that ICE has isn’t being updated and people don’t know where their loved ones are.

And then they also don’t have access to phone calls necessarily to be able to even find or locate an attorney. And they imper in front of these employees of the Attorney General who have clear directives from the Trump administration that people are not welcome here. This is a great sort of white supremacist project that’s being undertaken to make America white again, and therefore these processes are being truncated. Some people aren’t even seen by a judge at all or an immigration administrator at all. In Mahmood’s case, we have been able to litigate a case, but it’s been on an extremely expedited schedule. We had very little time to prepare. And so even though he’s had really good legal support, the case has been jammed through as fast as possible. And one thing that I think is really critical is the immigration administrator determined that she does not actually have the authority under the Constitution to question the Secretary of State.

And his determination that Mahmud is his presence in the United States is adverse to American foreign policy. And as a result, his case could have fallen into no man’s land, so to speak, where nobody really had authority to question the Secretary of State. But that’s where the federal habeas case comes in, the Article III constitutional court, which we can get into if you want. So that immigration case is proceeding rapidly in an administrative process. It will eventually potentially rise to the Fifth Circuit, which is an Article three appellate court, but by then the record that that court will be reviewing will be complete, and what they’re allowed to review is actually quite limited. So the process is really very remarkable on many levels, and I think it’s important for Americans or people residing in the United States, however they choose to identify, are aware that this is truly an administrative process without bumper guards or some of those procedural rights that people associate with terms court and judge,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I really appreciate you breaking that down for us. Get nerdy sis, because we need your nerdiness to educate us. And I want to end on talking about where things stand now, but I guess by way of getting there, like you said, civics education in this country has failed us and to the point where so many of us don’t even fully know or appreciate what something like due process is. But I have this terrifying feeling that we’re going to know what due process is because we’re going to remember what it was. And I wanted to ask if just really quickly, you could talk to our audience about just clarify what is due process and why should you care about it.

Amy Greer:

Sure, yeah. And yeah, there’s a couple of layers to that, but I, I’ll keep it short. I mean, the idea of due processes is chronicled in the United States Constitution, and the idea is that you cannot have your rights infringed upon your property taken, et cetera, without being heard by a neutral arbiter and having some procedural opportunity to be heard, to present evidence in a criminal situation. If somebody’s testifying against you, you have the right to cross examine that person. These are the types of things that are due process and that are associated with that. The parameters of due process have largely been carved out by case law through the United States Supreme Court. And what’ll be interesting for your listeners, because I know that a lot of people, the genesis of the Real News Network and other things that you’re covering, labor, et cetera, is that there were all these push for rights in the early part of late part of the 19th century, early part of the 20th century that became codified into law and then also codified through the United States Supreme Court.

And due process was part of that do process, procedural and substantive. These ideas of what kinds of processes have to happen for your rights to be taken away, your liberty to be taken away, and also what the standards are that the government has to meet in order to do those kinds of things. All of that has been litigated for many, many years. And what we’ve seen since the Earl Warren Court of the 1950s and sixties is an erosion of those things over time, to your point, which is what we’re seeing now are actually the fruits of that erosion that has already been taking place. And so what I want to make a plug for people is lawyers in law school, people in law school and citizens in general. I think laws are talked about as if there’s something that are static that come down from above are carved into stone, and that’s that.

But what I want to really leave us with is laws are made by humans to protect wealth and power and as a reaction to fear and anger. And so we, as the people in this country, we can be part of crafting those laws or blocking laws that are very harmful to our communities and encouraging that our systems adhere to our values and not to values of protecting wealth and power and racial privilege as well. And so what we’re seeing here are the fruits of 50 plus years of erosion of rights, 50 plus years of white supremacist structures, really taking root in the law in new shape shifting ways because obviously it’s always been the law. That’s how the law was made in the United States, starting with the doctrine of discovery, et cetera. But we are moving into that space where we are really seeing the harms and the pervasive harms that these laws have in that now everybody’s vulnerable.

It doesn’t matter who you are now, you’re vulnerable unless you’re like Elon Musk or somebody like that. And so this erosion, because many of us have remained silent as these erosions have taken place because it’s not been us who’ve been directly impacted many people who look like me. This is the case now. We’re seeing that people like us can actually be impacted as naturalized citizenship is being challenged. I wouldn’t be surprised if even native born citizenship gets challenged in some ways depending on what your speech is. And so we’re really learning that these erosions will come for all of us eventually, and so we should speak up sooner. But what we’re seeing now, unfortunately, I think is the fruits of many years of the hard right labor to erode due process, to erode free speech rights, to erode citizenship rights, to erode the amendments that were passed after during reconstruction after the Civil War, to the extent that we’re moving into and are experiencing authoritarianism.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I guess on that heavy, but I important note, I wanted to remind people, like I said in the intro, this fight is not over for Mahmud Khalil and for all of us and our rights as such. And I wanted to ask if in the final minutes that I’ve got you, if you could just let us know where things stand right now with Mahmud Khalil’s case. I know there are multiple cases, some that you can talk about and others you can’t. But I guess for folks watching just where do things stand now and what can they do to be part of that change that you talked about, to ensure that the law is not weaponized against us, but in fact is serving us and our needs, the people’s

Amy Greer:

Needs? Sure. Yeah. So for Mahmud’s case, what’s happening now is in the federal District court of New Jersey, we have a habeas petition, habeas just means of the body. So we’re basically challenging his detention and deportation as a retaliatory move by the administration for Mahmud’s speech against genocide, and that they’re trying to remove him from this country as a retaliation that that’s the retaliation. And so the fight continues there where we will continue to litigate that habeas claim and to try to, the judge has so far found that Marco Rubio’s determination that it is likely unconstitutional the use of this statute as applied to Mahmud, and that it is likely retaliatory or likely it’s vague that people can’t really know what standard is being applied here and therefore it’s chilling speech because nobody really knows what the standard is. So that fight continues and will continue litigating for the first Amendment rights and against the retaliatory actions of the administration there.

And the immigration proceedings, the court on April 11th did find that Mahmud was removable from the United States, and an order of removal has been issued. However, because people panic at that, the federal district court has said that he cannot be removed from this country unless, and until that judge says that it’s okay. And so there is a court order in place to the extent that the administration adheres to that is a whole other thing, but there is a court order in place. So basically these two lanes are being litigated now, and we are trying to basically say that this government, this administration, should not be able to detain or remove Mahmud from this country for his protected speech rights. And that’s the fight that continues. What people can do is, it’s challenging because I think the public support for Mahmood and saying that we as a nation are not afraid of him, that no matter how they frame him or try narrate him as somebody to be feared, I think we can choose to not fear each other.

We can choose not to fear Mahmud, and we can choose to speak as one voice that the weapon, the murdering of women and children and men and women, Palestinian people in Gaza is not something that we support, that that is a mainstream position, not a dissident one. And while it may be adverse to this administration’s foreign policy, it is adverse to our moral compass as a nation and making that very clear that we do not stand for genocide as a nation. And even if we are on the border about whether Israel has the right to defend itself or not, or wherever people stand there, I think it’s important for them to also say that we refuse to see our immigration laws weaponized to shut down an important debate of great public concern, that we refuse to do that. So people, wherever they are on their spectrum, I think all of us should be against what’s happening here.

And the last plug that I’ll just make is on a local level, I think that a lot of us pay attention to the federal structures, and that’s certainly important, but where we can really start to make a difference is in our city halls and in our city councils and in our state legislatures, because over the last 15 to 20 years, we have seen really damaging laws against boycott, divestment, and sanction, adopting very restrictive definitions of antisemitism that encompass any criticism of Israel at all, or any engagement in questioning us, involvement in providing financial and financial support and weapons to Israel. And these are being weaponized now in these other, in immigration, et cetera. And so from a local perspective, we can say no to laws like that. We can ask our cities to be sanctuary cities. We can ask our cities to not allow, there are police forces to be used to aid and abbet ICE and NDHS abductions.

I mean, there’s a lot of ways, and Baltimore, of course, is being really proactive on that front. So I know this work is already happening in Baltimore and in Maryland and have had the honor and privilege of working with and talking with a lot of people doing that work. So keep doing that. I mean, I think that really matters. I do think that these kinds of policy shifts trickle up and then our national delegation, here’s what’s happening on the local level and brings that up to the national level. So I think we just have to stay engaged even when it’s overwhelming and we have to step away for a few minutes to do something that’s beautiful, that’s joyful, that laughter refilling our tanks is necessary, but we cannot afford to turn away right now. And people like Mahmud, people from our own communities who are being disappeared, they need us to show up now and in these varying ways. And I think we are, and we need to continue to do that.