Khalil has not been charged with any crime and is the holder of a green card making him a legal resident, but the filing states that, based on the text of the law first passed in 1952 and amended numerous times since, “the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” By the text of the law, any person meeting that criteria “is deportable.”
In other words: literally any non-citizen can be shipped off to another country if one particular Trump toadie decides he wants them gone. If this argument is allowed to stand, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will have the power to deport any of the 12.8 million lawful permanent residents in the US, at any time (not to mention the millions more with less permanent immigration status), for any perceived or imagined offense. Once again: such is the work of a dictatorship.
“This provision, if not reigned in, will be exploited to pursue the deportation of anyone who disagrees with the administration’s foreign policy agenda,” said Brad Parker, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, to the Washington Post. “This is not about security, this is about absolute executive power and repression.”
At a hearing in New York on Wednesday, it was revealed that Khalil has not yet been allowed to have private conversations with his lawyers. The government has claimed that it moved Khalil the more than 1,000 miles to a detention center in Louisiana before a habeas corpus petition was filed; his lawyers now argue that the distance is preventing them from mounting a defense. “We literally have not been able to confer with our client once since he was taken off the streets of New York City,” said attorney Ramzi Kassem, according to CNN. A federal judge has temporarily blocked his deportation, pending hearings.
Rubio has praised the arrest and theoretical deportation for, again, daring to protest a genocide in public — activity that the Secretary of State and his boss equate to “supporting Hamas.” Trump has promised many more such disappearances, apparently resting on the Cold War-era provision; they started with Gaza and Palestine because Democratic leadership is, predictably, too compromised on that topic and cowardly to mount a full-throated defense of outright fascism. (And it should be repeated over and over: Rubio was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 99-0.) If it stands, though, there is literally no topic that would be off limits. Trump and his thugs can target anyone, for any reason, and Rubio will gladly sign away whatever soul he has left on each new dotted line.
This all comes on the heels of the McCarthyite questionnaire sent mistakenly to CDC grant recipients demanding to know about any work with parties “espousing anti-American beliefs,” among various other administration moves ripped straight from the headlines of the 1950s. It has never been clearly articulated exactly, in MAGA lore, when exactly America was great in the past; we’re getting some good hints now.
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