Over the weekend, agents of the government entered a legal resident’s home without a warrant and arrested him, and then flew him a thousand miles away without notifying his family or lawyers about his whereabouts for a day. If you read about it in any other country, you would know what to call it.
This happened to Palestinian activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil in New York on Saturday night. The ostensible crime was, per a Homeland Security spokesperson, leading “activities aligned to Hamas” — or, described another way, protesting a genocide while a masters degree student at Columbia University, an obviously First Amendment-protected activity at the very core of theoretical American values. Khalil’s wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, was present during the arrest, and was threatened with detention herself.
The arresting agents apparently told him his student visa had been revoked — only he doesn’t have one, and is, again, living here legally with a green card. According to Khalil’s lawyer Amy Greer, his wife tried to visit him the following day at a detention center in New Jersey but was told he was not being held there. For at least a while, no one outside of the government knew where he was — and it later became clear that he had been flown all the way to Louisiana to be detained.
This is, obviously, blatantly illegal, horrendously immoral, and straight-up fascist. This is what dictatorships do — arrest people without legal backing for thought and speech crimes against the government. As many have already pointed out, the choice to start such depravity with a Palestinian activist seems deeply and cynically calculated, given the attitudes of much of the government itself as well as various elite institutions on the subject; at one point on Monday Morning, a small-type link to a story on Khalil’s arrest was 39 stories down on the New York Times homepage. As of this writing a couple of hours later, it does not appear to be on the homepage at all.
Call it a trial balloon. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it outright when he shared the Khalil story: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” But why stop there? As Jamelle Bouie said on Bluesky, “if they can disappear permanent residents they can disappear citizens.”
There have been plenty of examples of creeping fascism since Trump took office, but this seems like the most breathtakingly obvious one yet. “Silencing dissent is unlawful, unjust, and authoritarian through and through,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D—MA). “A President who detains a protestor and revokes their legal status can only be called one thing: A dictator.”
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