In an interview with CNN in the spring of 2024, during the campus protests against Israel’s apocalyptic assault on the Gaza Strip, Mahmoud Khalil explained his involvement in the student movement at Columbia University:
As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other; our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone … We are the lucky ones that made it here to speak for our people who are under oppression in Palestine and across the refugee camps and the Palestinian cities.
On the night of Saturday, 8 March 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Khalil at his student apartment in Manhattan. They also threatened to detain his wife, who is eight months pregnant (and a US citizen). Unbeknownst to his wife and his lawyers, he was taken to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, 1300 miles away.
The White House published a statement from President Trump, under the slogan ‘Shalom, Mahmoud’, announcing that ICE had ‘proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student’ and vowing to ‘find, apprehend and deport these terrorist sympathisers from our country – never to return again’.
Khalil, a permanent resident of the US, has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the authorities purported to revoke his green card on the grounds that he ‘led activities aligned to Hamas’ (whatever that might mean), such that his ‘presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences’. In substance, it appears that the Trump administration disagrees with Khalil’s opposition to the Israeli occupation and his participation in the Columbia University Apartheid Divest campaign.
Khalil’s arrest came the same week that Columbia welcomed to its campus the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who once boasted ‘I’ve already killed a lot of Arabs in my life, and there is no problem with that,’ and recently joked about using exploding pagers against protesters at Harvard. Less than three months earlier, the Biden administration welcomed the former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant to the White House, despite the outstanding warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Khalil’s arrest has provoked a flurry of protest, and his future remains uncertain: his detention and proposed deportation are now being challenged in the courts. Proposals to carry out mass deportations of ‘foreign pro-Hamas students’ have raised eyebrows even among right-wing luminaries such as Ann Coulter, who tweeted: ‘There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?’
It would be a mistake to see the attempt to deport Khalil for his political views in relation to Palestine as an authoritarian aberration on the part of the Trump administration. In reality, it marks the latest episode in a long-running saga of state repression of political speech in support of Palestinian rights on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the UK, the home secretary has the power to revoke a lawful resident’s visa on the grounds that their presence in the UK is ‘not conducive to the public good’, whether or not they have committed any crime. That power has already been exercised in cases involving the expression of political opinions about the situation in Palestine and Israel. Dana Abu Qamar’s visa was revoked in December 2023, at the personal instigation of Robert Jenrick, on the basis of her public statements in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October attacks and subsequent Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip (which killed 15 members of her family). A tribunal later found (in a case in which I was involved) that the decision was an unlawful interference with her right to freedom of expression. More recently, a Turkish academic working at a British university had his visa revoked because police found a ‘Hamas media document’ on his phone. He too is appealing against that decision.
The position in Germany is even starker: Jewish peace activists have been arrested on charges of ‘inciting racial hatred’ for holding placards which say: ‘As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza’; the Interior Ministry has banned the slogan ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’; and immigration authorities have banned the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis from entering Germany (or even speaking at a public event in Germany via video link) because of his political activity in support of Palestinian rights.
These events reveal the convergence of two phenomena. The first is the ‘Palestine exception’, a label given by constitutional scholars and civil rights groups to the erosion of civil liberties in the particular context of advocacy for Palestinian rights. It is striking that the loudest ostensible proponents of free speech on campus are the proudest cheerleaders for state repression of pro-Palestine activism on those same campuses, but there is no inconsistency if one regards the question of Palestine (and its proponents) as an exceptional category to which the ordinary freedoms do not apply.
The second phenomenon is the use of immigration powers as an instrument of state repression. These powers are often vastly broader in scope than their criminal counterparts, and can generally be exercised by the executive without the mediation of any independent police or prosecuting authorities. They are also by their nature targeted at the margins of society: non-citizens whose legal status is precarious and revocable, without rights of political representation.
The exercise of immigration powers can therefore serve as a form of political theatre, an intervention in debates about who belongs to the nation and who does not, as for example in Sajid Javid’s decision to revoke Shamima Begum’s citizenship, or the creation of suspect populations through ‘hostile environment’ policies, resulting in the systematic wrongful detention and deportation of the Windrush scandal.
It is not surprising, then, that the erosion of civil liberties in the UK’s ‘war on terror’ years reached its peak in the indefinite detention without trial of foreign terror suspects. That policy was ultimately held to be unlawful in the 2004 ‘Belmarshcase’ because it was premised on an arbitrary distinction between foreign and British suspects. As Lord Bingham put it:
the choice of an immigration measure to address a security problem had the inevitable result of failing adequately to address that problem (by allowing non-UK suspected terrorists to leave the country with impunity and leaving British suspected terrorists at large) while imposing the severe penalty of indefinite detention on persons who … may harbour no hostile intentions towards the United Kingdom.
One hopes that the courts on either side of the Atlantic will be similarly alive to such distinctions today.
But what begins as a state of exception often augurs a new normality. Coercive powers ceded to the state are rarely handed back, and powers exercised against those at the margins of society invariably permeate more widely. Those who shrug at the deportation of supporters of Palestinian self-determination today may wake up to a knock on their own door in the twilight hours of the not too distant future.
