Mahmoud Khalil speaks at Palestine march following release (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
A US immigration judge has ordered the deportation of pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil to Algeria or Syria. In an order dated September 12, Louisiana Judge Jamee Comans leaned into Trump administration allegations that in his permanent residency application, Khalil failed to disclose his work with UNRWA and the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut, along with his ties to a pro-Palestine student group at Columbia University. Comans thus denied Khalil’s application for a waiver of removability, a legal order that waives a particular ground for deportation, permitting an individual to stay in the United States, and ordered his deportation – in what her ruling states as “the interests of this country.”
“It is no surprise that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of free speech. Their latest attempt, through a kangaroo immigration court, exposes their true colors once again,” said Mahmoud Khalil in response to the ruling. “When their first effort to deport me was set to fail, they resorted to fabricating baseless and ridiculous allegations in a bid to silence me for speaking out and standing firmly with Palestine, demanding an end to the ongoing genocide. Such fascist tactics will never deter me from continuing to advocate for my people’s liberation.”
Khalil’s team has already moved to challenge Comans’ order. On September 17, Khalil’s lawyers submitted a letter to the federal court in New Jersey which is overseeing Khalil’s civil rights case, explaining that Khalil will challenge Comans’s order.
“When the immigration prosecutor, judge, and jailor all answer to Donald Trump, and that one man is eager to weaponize the system in a desperate bid to silence Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident whose only supposed sin is that he stands against an ongoing genocide in Palestine, this is the result,” said Ramzi Kassem, co-director of CUNY CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility), one of the organizations part of his legal team, which includes the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Dratel & Lewis, Van Der Hout LLP, and Washington Square Legal Services. “A plain-as-day First Amendment violation that also puts on sharp display the rapidly freefalling credibility of the entire US immigration system.”
“We will win”: Khalil continues activism for Palestine
Since his release in June, Khalil has not once shied away from continuing his advocacy for Palestine. Only days after leaving an ICE detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, Khalil appeared on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Harlem, only blocks away from his alma mater of Columbia University. Khalil answered questions from the press while surrounded by hundreds of his fellow Columbia student activists and supporters from the pro-Palestine movement. When a journalist asked him what his message was to students who might be afraid to speak out based on what happened to him, Khalil firmly said “We will win.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, on June 3, 2025. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP)
“Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” said one free speech advocate.
Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about a bill in the US House of Representatives that they fear could allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip US citizens of their passports based purely on political speech.
The bill, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), will come up for a hearing on Wednesday. According to The Intercept:
Mast’s new bill claims to target a narrow set of people. One section grants the secretary of state the power to revoke or refuse to issue passports for people who have been convicted—or merely charged—of material support for terrorism…
The other section sidesteps the legal process entirely. Rather, the secretary of state would be able to deny passports to people whom they determine “has knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”
Rubio has previously boasted of stripping the visas and green cards from several immigrants based purely on their peaceful expression of pro-Palestine views, describing them as “Hamas supporters.”
These include Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after Rubio voided his green card; and Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student whose visa Rubio revoked after she co-wrote an op-ed calling for her school to divest from Israel.
Mast—a former soldier for the Israel Defense Forces who once stated that babies were “not innocent Palestinian civilians”—has previously called for “kicking terrorist sympathizers out of our country,” speaking about the Trump administration’s attempts to deport Khalil, who was never convicted or even charged with support for a terrorist group.
Critics have argued that the bill has little reason to exist other than to allow the Secretary of State to unilaterally strip passports from people without them actually having been convicted of a crime.
As Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, noted in The Intercept, there is little reason to restrict people convicted of terrorism or material support for terrorism, since—if they were guilty—they’d likely be serving a long prison sentence and incapable of traveling anyway.
“I can’t imagine that if somebody actually provided material support for terrorism, there would be an instance where it wouldn’t be prosecuted—it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Journalist Zaid Jilani noted on X that “judges can already remove a passport over material support for terrorism, but the difference is you get due process. This bill would essentially make Marco Rubio judge, jury, and executioner.”
The bill does contain a clause allowing those stripped of their passports to appeal to Rubio. But, as Hamadanchy notes, the decision is up to the secretary alone, “who has already made this determination.” He said that for determining who is liable to have their visa stripped, “There’s no standard set. There’s nothing.”
As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, noted in The Intercept, the language in Mast’s bill is strikingly similar to that found in the so-called “nonprofit killer” provision that Republicans attempted to pass in July’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act. That provision, which was ultimately struck from the bill, would have allowed the Treasury Secretary to unilaterally strip nonprofit status from anything he deemed to be a “terrorist-supporting organization.”
Stern said Mast’s bill would allow for “thought policing at the hands of one individual.”
“Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” he said, “even if what they say doesn’t include a word about a terrorist organization or terrorism.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
dizzy: There are similarities to what’s happening in UK with showing support for Palestine Action currently being a terrorist offence. Disagreeing with the dominant Neo-Liberal/Capitalist ideology is becoming terrorism.
The Trump administration is a serious threat to democracy. They’re also laughably incompetent. But the result is no laughing matter.
…
Clown-show fascism describes a regime marked simultaneously by hubristic and defiant assaults on the democratic and constitutional order on the one hand and, on the other, a nearly laughable incompetence in just about every other area of the regime’s activity. The first characteristic certainly applies to the Trump administration, and it’s chilling and frightening and not at all funny. Just ask Mahmoud Khalil.
Yet at the same time, in other areas, the incompetence has been staggering. Trump’s constant about-faces and walk backs on tariffs have been an international embarrassment. Elon Musk’s DOGE has fired federal workers willy-nilly only to turn around and rehire many after the Musketeers realized they weren’t deep-state bloodsuckers and the work they did was kind of essential, after all—you know, like the people who tend the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
It can be hilarious to watch. But it carries two consequences that are no laughing matter.
First and more obviously, we have the prospect of the impact of Trump’s tariffs policy on real people. Will they cause inflation and a recession, as most experts now believe? As fate would have it, Trump will go to bed the night of his 100th day in office—Tuesday—and wake up the very next morning to the release of the first-quarter GDP number. Economists expect anemic results. The Atlanta Fed even predicts negative growth, around -2.5 percent. During Trump’s first week in office, its forecast nudged a gaudy 4 percent, but the president’s actions have liberated that figure ever downward.
Second and more insidiously: Even the gross incompetencies take us into treacherous territory because they contribute to making this all about one man, the man who must be in front of the cameras every day. He doesn’t have policies so much as he has urges, which he must announce to the world on a constant basis in a desperate plea that we keep him front of mind at all times. Some of those urges are cruel; some of them are a joke. What unites them is that they make the story entirely about him.
That is not how it’s supposed to work in democracies. Which we still are, for now, as we reach this 100-day mark. Only 1,361 to go.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Hundreds attend an event to support calls for the release of Mahmoud Khalil (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
Hundreds attend event in support of detained Palestine activist and raise funds for Middle East Children’s Alliance
On Saturday, March 22, hundreds packed the concert hall of the New York Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan for an event organized by the People’s Forum calling for the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil from ICE detention.
Weeks after his sudden arrest by plainclothes immigration authorities outside of his apartment building, Khalil still languishes in the notoriously violent ICE detention facility in Jena, Louisiana. Khalil, his family and friends, his legal team, and the growing movement for his release are currently battling the Trump administration in order to bring the activist home before the birth of his first child next month.
Activists and organizers of the event vowed to keep the struggle going for Palestine and Khalil’s release. “We will let the Trump administration know in no uncertain terms, that as they carry out their war on our right to speak, to assemble, they will have to deal with us,” said Layan Sima Fuleihan, Education Director at the People’s Forum, speaking at the event, titled “Free Mahmoud, Free Palestine”.
“We stand with Mahmoud and all the student activists daring to resist. We will stop business as usual, and we will never stop until Palestine is free,” said Manolo De Los Santos, People’s Forum Executive Director, at the event.
Last week, the Trump administration added new accusations against Khalil, in a move that appears to be intended to sidestep the anti-free speech accusations that have emerged from his case. Trump’s Justice Department lawyers claim that Khalil failed to disclose his work for UNRWA, and also some work he did for the UK government after 2022.
Hundreds packed into the concert hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
Legal battle continues
On Saturday, Shezza Abboushi Dallal, an attorney at the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) Project and part of Khalil’s legal team, provided some updates to his case. According to Dallal, Khalil’s legal team is fighting tooth and nail to have Khalil moved from Louisiana to ICE detention in New Jersey, and to have him released from detention on bail, to return home to his wife Noor Abdalla, who is due to give birth in less than a month. Khalil’s legal team is also fighting his immigration case in an administrative court in Louisiana.
“The legal fight continues on all fronts,” Dallal addressed the crowd of hundreds. “And it will continue until Mahmoud is brought back here, home, with his wife, and soon his newborn child, and until his constitutional rights are vindicated.”
Dallal continued: “We know this is a test case for how far the government can take punishing organizers. And this administration says as much. They tell us plainly, that Mahmoud’s case is, ‘the blueprint.’”
“What’s at stake in this case is the very ability to dissent,” she said. According to Dallal, if Khalil’s case is the blueprint, “your collective refusal to accept it is too.”
Attendees at the event shared a willingness to fight for Khalil and the right to dissent. One attendee, Sasha, who like Khalil is a green card holder, told Peoples Dispatch that she attended to support the activist because she doesn’t believe that “expressing our right to free speech should be a punishable act, especially if it’s something in support of Palestine, a country that’s being oppressed.”
Shezza Abboushi Dallal, an attorney at the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) Project and part of Khalil’s legal team, provides updates Photo: Wyatt Souers)
Jewish activists stand against accusations of anti-semitism
“My entire life, I have been frustrated by the actions that Israel has taken in Gaza,” Montana, another attendee, told Peoples Dispatch. “I continue to be frustrated by them, and also angry. And this unconscionable arrest that was made a few weeks ago is further proof that our country is not doing what they are supposed to be doing and has always not done what they are supposed to be doing,” she continued. “I’m a Jew, and I proudly support Gaza, and do not support Israel.”
The movement for Palestine, and especially the wave of Gaza Solidarity Encampments that began at Columbia University and spread worldwide, have been accused of anti-semitism by right-wing and Zionist groups. This is also the pretext that the Trump administration is using to crack down on student activism at Columbia University.
On March 13, the Trump administration issued what has been called a “ransom note” against the institution, demanding the University take action against student protest and challenging the academic freedom of certain departments if the institution wanted to retain USD 400 million in federal funding that Trump was threatening to revoke.
Grant Miner president of United Auto Workers Local 2710, addressed crowd (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
Columbia expelled, fired, suspended, or revoked the degrees of 22 students over allegations of pro-Palestine protest activity on the same day that the Trump administration issued its threatening letter. And on the precise deadline issued by the Trump administration, March 20, the university capitulated to Trump’s demands, ending faculty control of the Middle East, South Asian, and African studies department and the Center for Palestinian Studies, declaring anti-Zionist policies of student clubs to be anti-semitism, and empowering campus police to arrest students.
One of those 22 sanctioned students is Grant Miner, who is the president of United Auto Workers Local 2710, which represents graduate student workers at Columbia. Miner himself is Jewish and is a Jewish studies scholar, making Trump’s accusations of anti-semitism against student leaders ring hollow. Miner also spoke at the event on Saturday.
“Many of the students who participated [in protest] were Jewish,” Miner told the crowd. “However, I would also like to dispel the myth that we, as Jewish people, hold special or necessary insight into this issue,” Miner continued. “More and more people realize everyday that what is happening in Palestine is wrong and students who protested stand on the correct side of the most important moral issue of our time.”
Artists speak out
Speakers also included filmmaker and artist Alana Hadid, who is Palestinian and the sister of supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid, celebrated actor Susan Sarandon, as well as poet and rapper Macklemore, who wrote the song “Hind’s Hall” inspired by Columbia student protesters who extended the Gaza Solidarity Encampment to Hamilton Hall, renaming it after the five-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab who was targeted and killed by Israeli forces in January of 2024.
Macklemore spoke about his own fears of speaking out in support of the Palestinian cause, including fears centering around being labeled as anti-semitic. But ultimately, he reached the conclusion that “it is our moral obligation to adamantly protest the atrocities we are witnessing and funding or we are complicit.”
“I want to live in a world where standing up against genocide isn’t brave, it’s human,” said Macklemore.
Hadid, whose family members were victims of the Nakba, said that “what is happening [in Palestine] is not complicated.” Last week, Israel broke the ceasefire agreement and resumed the genocide in Gaza.
“This is a genocide, this is ethnic cleansing, this is the crime of the century yet we are the ones being silenced, we are the ones losing our jobs, we are the ones losing our homes, because we dare to speak the truth,” Hadid said. “But we refuse to be silent.”
Palestinian filmmaker and artist Alana Hadid speaks at event (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Pro-Palestinian protesters rally in support of Mahmoud Khalil outside of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, where a hearing is underway regarding Khalil’s arrest, in New York City on March 12, 2025. (Photo: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)
If the White House can punish anybody who engages in speech it dislikes, nobody will be free to criticize the government—and corporate criminals will be free to run amok.
Earlier this March, agents from the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, arrested Mahmoud Khalil at his Columbia University-owned apartment building in New York City. Khalil, a lawful permanent resident of the United States, was then promptly disappeared by federal agents, who refused to tell Khalil’s wife (a U.S. citizen) why he was being detained or where he was being held. He has since been found by his attorneys and partner in a private Louisiana detention facility notorious for abuse. His deportation was successfully, though only temporarily, halted by a federal judge.
An initial hearing in Khalil’s case was subsequently heard—without him present—in New York City. There, the Department of Justice defended the kidnapping, and backed the White House’s claimed rationale: the Trump administration doesn’t approve of Khalil’s speech, and therefore it has the right to forgo due process, revoke his green card without judicial order, and deport him.
Khalil is a prominent pro-Palestinian leader at Columbia University. He was one of students’ lead negotiators during the anti-genocide encampments that formed on its campus in 2024. It is this right to speech, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and affirmed over and over and over again, that President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are endeavoring to unilaterally, and with no constraints, gut.
Trump and his allies seemingly hope to manufacture a future in which any public critic of the administration or its friends can be defined, and prosecuted, as a “terrorist” for whom basic civil liberties can be summarily suspended.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough. [dizzy: Original article modified by the inclusion of this image and caption.]
To this end, the federal government has made no case that Khalil has committed a crime. Instead, the Trump administration has continuously boasted that Khalil is being targeted with the full force of the state for engaging in speech it doesn’t like; speech that is unambiguously guaranteed by the First Amendment, and that the White House now seeks to classify as “terrorism.”
Should Trump and Rubio succeed, as The Intercept aptly summarized, it will symbolize the death of free speech for American citizens and green-card holders alike.
Of course, it isn’t just Khalil—though if the government succeeds in his case it will be a chilling bellwether for the state of speech and protest in the Trump years and beyond. Even just in the weeks since kidnapping Khalil, it’s been reported that DHS officers have arrested another student protester at Columbia, stripped a different Columbia student of their visa status, denied a French scientist entry to the United States reportedly because of their expressed political disagreement with the administration, disappeared dozens of New Mexico residents, and more.
Of course, this playbook isn’t new, and Republicans have long sought to gut protected speech, and protected protest in particular. Indeed, dozens of Stop Cop City protesters and organizers are still navigating an abusive investigation and prosecution regime in Georgia that functionallyseeks to render public displays of political dissent as violent conspiracy and “domestic terrorism,” including speech activities as mundane as handing out pamphlets.
As baseless and unconstitutional as those prosecutions were and still are, it’s this principle that is being pushed to new and even-more horrifying depths, as Trump and his allies seemingly hope to manufacture a future in which any public critic of the administration or its friends can be defined, and prosecuted, as a “terrorist” for whom basic civil liberties can be summarily suspended.
Indeed, Donald Trump, while turning the White House into a car dealership earlier this month, told reporters that people protesting Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the U.S. federal government at Tesla storefronts, or protesting “any company,” should be labeled domestic terrorists, and that was something he “will do.”
Should the political persecution of Khalil succeed, it will foster a new era of the militarized American police state that greenlights the arbitrary and capricious abduction of organizers, dissidents, and critics of the Trump administration and the corporations it serves.
It should not need to be said, but to say it anyway: If foundational constitutional rights can be unilaterally suspended by the government, with no trial or even formal documentation of so-called wrongdoing, then those rights do not actually exist for anyone.
Who stands to benefit from such a bleak future? Advocates for authoritarianism for one, and corporations for another.
While the executive branch targets protesters’ rights to speech on White House orders, Trump’s own corporate allies and donors are pursuing adjacent tactics to divest normal people of the right to criticize the corporate hegemons ruining our lives.
Greenpeace, for example, just lost the trial brought against it by Energy Transfer, which seeks to functionally sue the group out of existence in the U.S. for criticizing the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). That notorious project, controlled by Energy Transfer, is well-known for its environmental racism and for deploying extreme force against environmental advocates, Indigenous communities, and others who opposed it.
Greenpeace is set to appeal the verdict, but if Energy Transfer should ultimately succeed, it would not just spell the end of Greenpeace’s U.S. operations, but will also usher in a new era in which corporate money can not just silence, but wholly eradicate, organizations that are critical of corporate polluters, labor abusers, price-gougers, and more. Such a future would place a price tag on First Amendment protections, with only the most well-resourced entities in the country seemingly eligible to enjoy it, and everyone else left vulnerable to their whims and machinations.
The political kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil is an egregious attempt to undo 233 years of American constitutional law, and—regardless of what Trump or others claim—threatens to end the right to free speech, and democracy, as we know it. Should the political persecution of Khalil succeed, it will foster a new era of the militarized American police state that greenlights the arbitrary and capricious abduction of organizers, dissidents, and critics of the Trump administration and the corporations it serves. That, to be clear, would wholly cement the United States’ descent into full-fledged fascism.
Crucially, though, even if they fail to make Khalil the defining, and chilling, example of a new epoch of American political prisoners, Donald Trump and his allies in and outside of government have made it clear: They want to eliminate the First Amendment, and will do whatever it takes to do so.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
