Future Deportee of Conscience?
CrowdSource 3.17.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: Mahmoud Khalil and freedom of speech.
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The Khalil Case
The White House wants to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a lead negotiator in last spring’s pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, a permanent US resident with a pregnant American wife. He is currently detained in a Louisiana ICE facility.
As of this writing, Khalil has not been charged with a crime.
What’s going on?
An Assault on Free Speech. But a weak one, argues New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang: “I have found much to fear in Trump’s first fifty days, but I do not see the detention of Mahmoud Khalil as a show of strength from an authoritarian regime. Rather, it strikes me as the desperate flailing of an Administration in search of a new crisis and an unpopular enemy.”
A New Red Scare. Writes former university free speech legal activist David French: “the Trump administration possesses neither wisdom nor courage, and it is now in the process of using claims of antisemitism on campus as a justification for grave violations of due process and free speech.”
A Coordinated Attack on Free Speech. Another scholar recently accused of having ties with terrorist organizations, Helyeh Doutaghi of Yale University says: “This is not about me. It’s not about Mahmoud Khalil. It really isn't about any of the individuals or the specificity of the cases and the individuals involved. It really is a very much coordinated attack on free speech …”
AI Surveillance and the Suppression of Political Views.
sees the return of McCarthyism and brazen contempt for free speech in the Administration’s conduct.People are Once Again Pretending that Israel is the Underdog. Freddie DeBoer writes: “People are responding to the Mahmoud Khalil horror show because it has actually happened. If an Israeli international student was arrested expressly because of their political support of Israel, the controversy would engulf our entire country and result in prosecutions and the resignation of some Cabinet members, at minimum.”
The American Empire is Protecting Itself by Suppressing Inconvenient Views. So argues
“As always, ‘freedom of speech’ is confused with ‘freedom of speech that doesn’t hurt my feelings.’ What a beautiful symbiosis, huh? Why the glum look chum? Those meanies got you down? Don’t worry: the mommy state will give them what for!”The Trump Administration is Fighting Anti-Semitism. So argues William McGurn: “The arrest represents a huge change in the status quo and marks the Trump administration’s determination to address the inability — or unwillingness — of elite universities to maintain the basics of civilized behavior. More immediately, the arrest is a result of President Trump’s Jan. 29 executive order combating antisemitism.”
Possibly, an Attack on American Values. So argues
:
Nobody Knows, Because the Law isn’t Clear. So says
’ legal reporter Jen Rubenfeld.The Law is Clear: It Allows the President to Deport Foreign Radicals. And it should deport more of them. So argues
’s : “The point should be to preserve the American way of life by declining to extend the privilege of residency to those whose allegiances and beliefs are incompatible with our own. The latter category includes foreign Hamas supporters but is not limited to them. If the administration broadens its focus to other sorts of foreign radicals … we suspect they’ll find a target-rich environment.”A Pretext for Persecution. Writes
: “Mahmoud is one of the most upstanding people I have ever met. Alongside other Jewish student activists, I only ever felt Mahmoud’s respect, solidarity, and strength.”
Commentary aside,
has written a useful explainer covering the basic questions about the basis for Khalil’s arrest and where his case will be tried. And here is the section of the US Legal Code concerning “Deportable Aliens.”“A Vast Public Utility”
In a 1965 interview titled, “The University Has Become a Factory,” the late activist Mario Savio suggested that the reason why the American university has to control the anti-war views of its students has to do with the role it plays in the military-industrial complex.
The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today’s vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises.
From the Crowd
Responding to our latest podcast episode, “Why do "Sensitive Young Men" Love Trump?”, prolific WoC commenter
writes:
I enjoyed Mana’s article. It’s great to hear her on the podcast.
In a lot of ways, I don’t think the Trump era right is that different from previous forms of American conservatism. The idea that Democrats hate success, prosperity, and ambition is something many generations of Republicans have said when calling for lower taxes and less regulation. Apart from tariffs, Trump’s approach to the economy is pretty Reaganite. Indeed, both economically and culturally, both presidents invoked a glorious past in contrast to the decadence of their own time.
If the Iraq war had been the grand success the Bush administration said it would, I think many conservatives today would see Bush as a great man achieving a great thing by taking America to war, regardless of whether the official rationale was false. Trump bullying other countries with tariffs and threats of invasion isn’t entirely different from Bush bullying them with actual invasions. One big difference, to be sure, is that Bush made a idealistic case for war as well as a national-interest one.
And even then, a lot people around Bush had contempt for the UN and diplomatic niceties much like Trump does. In The Assassins’ Gate, George Packer writes about neocons, under the influence of Leo Strauss (even if that's easy to exaggerate), viewing liberal democracy as weak. They paired their vision of remaking the Middle East with contempt for Bill Clinton.
See you next week!
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For those who want to read yet more on the technicalities of the Green Card, see "How to Lose a Green Card: Green card holders like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil are entitled to due process before having their permanent residency taken away." by Matthew Boaz in Lawfare March 12, 2025 (https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/how-to-lose-a-green-card )
I agree with Eli Lake: if Khalil was only expressing a natural abhorrence of Israel's murderous and criminally disproportionate assault on the population of Gaza, then his attempted deportation is a travesty.