Columbia University is now the epicenter of the American culture war. The Trump administration is targeting a former Columbia student — and the university itself — as a test case for its new authoritarian regime.
The story of Columbia isn’t simply about Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student in international affairs there who was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests that burst into view almost immediately after the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. But when federal immigration officials showed up at his apartment building last weekend and whisked him away to a facility in Louisiana to begin deportation proceedings, they brought the malice and incompetence of the Trump administration into stark relief.
The incompetence was obvious from the start. At the time of Khalil’s arrest, federal officers seem to have believed that he was in the United States on a student visa. But that was incorrect. He’s a green-card holder, a lawful permanent resident of the United States.
The malice was plain as well. In spite of his permanent residency, which agents on the scene appear to have learned about soon enough, the government did not permit Khalil to have a privileged conversation with his lawyer until it was ordered to do so by a federal judge. Khalil was taken from his family when his wife, who is an American citizen, was eight months pregnant.
What was the reason for his arrest, potential deportation and isolation from his own attorneys? According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Notice to Appear that was provided to Khalil, “The secretary of state has determined that your presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
While that statement sounds damning, the reality is that Khalil was detained because of his protest activity and not because he’d provided illegal support for terrorists. As an administration official told The Free Press, “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.”
In an interview with NPR, Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, made it clear that the administration was targeting Khalil’s expression. “We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country,” Edgar said, “and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the secretary of state can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.”
But there is no visa to review. Khalil is a permanent resident now. Make no mistake, the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil are a direct attack on free speech.
While I’m appalled by the administration’s actions, I’m not surprised that the case arose out of what someone was doing at Columbia. The university has been in various degrees of political turmoil for decades.
In fact, the first time I had to walk through metal detectors to give a speech was at Columbia 20 years ago. I was president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (now called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and I went to campus to defend the right of Jewish students to speak out against faculty antisemitism in the university’s Middle East and Asian languages and culture department.
I will never forget the menacing atmosphere both on campus and at the event itself. People in the audience shouted at me and shouted at one another. Protesters chanted in the halls.
But that experience was insignificant compared with what happened on campus following the Hamas terror attacks.
Jewish students faced an ordeal at Columbia and on several other elite American campuses. While many pro-Palestinian demonstrators criticized Israel’s military response peacefully and lawfully, the protests often took a dark turn.
Supporters of Hamas celebrated the attacks, and protests against Israel spiraled out of control. Protesters occupied large segments of campus grounds for days on end, and at Columbia a faction of protesters took over Hamilton Hall, a central administrative building.
According to a 234-page complaint filed against Columbia by a coalition of Jewish students and Jewish organizations, “Jewish and Israeli students have been spat at, physically assaulted, threatened and targeted on campus and social media with epithets,” including statements such as “death to Jews,” “Zionist pig” and “baby killer.”
While it’s not possible to determine the truth of every allegation of antisemitic discrimination or harassment against Columbia, the situation was sufficiently serious for the Biden administration to start a Title VI investigation against the university in November 2023, even before the lawless protests of 2024 and 2025.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires federally funded educational institutions to protect students from discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin. Both the Biden and the Trump administrations have interpreted Title VI to prohibit antisemitic discrimination and harassment.
At the same time, however, protecting students from discrimination isn’t Columbia’s only priority. It should also be highly protective of free speech and academic freedom.
Columbia isn’t a public university, so it is not bound by the First Amendment (which only protects against government censorship), but I’m persuaded by the moral force of the Supreme Court’s words in a 1957 case called Sweezy v. New Hampshire: “Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.”
In other words, universities possess a double obligation — to protect students and faculty and staff members from discrimination and harassment, while also protecting free expression on campus. It’s not an easy task. It requires a combination of wisdom and courage.
But 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. The Red Scares of 20th-century anti-communism are being replaced by a new frenzy, whipped up against left-wing supporters of the Palestinian cause.
I’m hardly the first person to make that comparison, in part because there is a particularly obvious parallel — in both instances censorship had political appeal. Communism is a repugnant ideology, and the unpopularity of communists and communist ideas (especially at the height of the Cold War) made them inviting targets for populists and demagogues. The government could censor communists to thunderous applause.
Sympathy for Hamas (much less support for Hamas) is similarly repugnant. And there are a host of people on college campuses who have said truly vile things about Israel, Zionism and Jews. They have called for the destruction of the Jewish state and for violence against Jews. Punishing these voices also draws thunderous applause, especially from parts of President Trump’s base, but not only there.
Even so, just as we rightly look back in shame at the excesses of McCarthyism, we will look back in shame at the excesses of this moment — if we permit anger at campus protests to overwhelm our commitment to due process and free speech.
Let’s start with free speech. It’s hard to state all the ways in which I disagree with Khalil’s anti-Israel activism. The encampments interfered with the rights of other students on campus. There is also evidence that a pro-Palestinian group Khalil belonged to did, in fact, endorse violent attacks against Israel, including by posting an essay calling the Oct. 7 attacks a “moral, military and political victory.”
But my feelings about the substance of these comments are irrelevant to their constitutionality. Indeed, the entire point of the free speech clause of the First Amendment is to protect speech that other citizens seek to suppress. Popular speech doesn’t need legal protection.
In addition, it has long been established that the First Amendment doesn’t just protect the rights of American citizens. The Supreme Court held in a 1945 case called Bridges v. Wixon that “Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.”
That doesn’t end the inquiry, however. It turns out that federal statutes muddy the waters and provide authority for federal officials to deport even legal permanent residents if those residents are determined to be a threat to national security or support designated terrorist organizations. These statutes are so rarely invoked that there isn’t sufficient case law to determine exactly how the courts will apply them to Khalil.
It’s important to take a brief technical detour to explain. For now, the administration is relying on 8 U.S.C. Section 1227, which states, “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the secretary of state has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
A different statute, 8 U.S.C. Section 1182, says that any alien who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization” can be blocked from entering the country. Violation of that same statute can be grounds for deportation as well.
But invoking those statutes raises additional questions. First, they’re absurdly broad. The idea that a graduate student’s campus protest could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” is almost absurd on its face, and even if Khalil did endorse terrorist attacks on Israel, that is still constitutionally protected speech. The First Amendment permits advocacy of violence, including illegal violence, so long as the speaker isn’t inciting imminent lawless action.
This standard protects the campus protesters who chanted “Globalize the Intifada,” and it protects people who call for the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza. In both circumstances, protesters are endorsing illegal, violent actions. Yet in both circumstances, the Constitution protects their speech.
The attack on due process is just as serious as the attack on free speech. This month, the Trump administration announced that it was canceling roughly $400 million in federal contracts and grants to Columbia. The administration’s statement said the cancellations were “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students” and said “additional cancellations are expected to follow.”
At first glance, the action seems lawful. After all, Title VI does require schools to protect students from harassment, and there is ample evidence that Jewish students faced an ordeal on campus.
But there’s a problem — federal statutes and regulations permit termination of federal financial assistance only when “compliance cannot be secured by voluntary means” and when “there has been an express finding on the record, after opportunity for hearing, of a failure to comply.”
There was no hearing. The administration simply acted. As a rule, our nation does not take the approach of the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: “sentence first, verdict afterwards.” At least, we are not supposed to.
To make matters worse, on Thursday the Trump administration sent Columbia a letter demanding that the administration make changes in its governance, its admissions processes and its academic programs “as a precondition for formal negotiations” with the administration. Yet the administration doesn’t have the legal or constitutional authority to impose those demands. Columbia is still a private university that possesses its own constitutional rights.
The administration says it’s just getting started. On March 10, the Department of Education notified 60 universities that they might face enforcement actions for failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. And the president himself wrote that detaining Khalil was “the first arrest of many to come.”
The chilling effect on free speech here is profound. Even if Khalil’s rights are ultimately vindicated — and even if Columbia can successfully resist the administration’s efforts to cancel grants and contracts and control what gets taught and by whom — very few people or institutions will be willing to confront the administration, if confrontation carries such a substantial cost.
As Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, told a gathering of students, many of them from foreign countries, “Nobody can protect you.”
The university has reportedly begun scrutinizing speech that would clearly be constitutionally protected at a public university. On March 6 The Associated Press reported that Columbia was investigating a student named Maryam Alwan for discriminatory harassment. One of her alleged offenses? Writing an essay that called for divestment from Israel.
The sad irony of our unconstitutional moment is that the perspectives of foreign students can be particularly valuable when foreign affairs dominate American discourse. Why wouldn’t we want to hear from Israelis and Palestinians, who often have firsthand knowledge of the conditions on the ground? Don’t we want them to be able to speak out and speak freely when they do?
It’s a dreadful thing to declare to immigrants or foreign students, “Welcome to the land of the free: Now watch what you say.”
I mentioned Sweezy v. New Hampshire earlier. That case arose out of a 1951 law passed in New Hampshire that was designed to suppress so-called subversive activities. As the Supreme Court put it: “A loyalty program was instituted to eliminate ‘subversive persons’ among government personnel. All present employees, as well as candidates for elective office in the future, were required to make sworn statements that they were not ‘subversive persons.’”
The identity of the “subversive persons” has changed — from communists to pro-Palestinian protesters — but the impulse to censor is still the same. Yet, as the Supreme Court put it in Sweezy, “Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness in our society.”
We thought we cured that illness when we made it through the Red Scares and the Cold War with the First Amendment intact. But that illness is returning. Columbia has become Patient Zero in an outbreak of censorship and repression. And unless it’s stopped there, expect more universities to yield to Trump’s control. Expect political repression to spread far beyond the borders of the university. Expect more dissenters to hear a knock on the door and the question, “Are you …?”
Once again, American liberty hangs in the balance. Our Constitution has survived previous waves of government repression. There is no guarantee it will survive another.
