If Donald Trump thought few Americans would care about the deportation of an Arab student protest leader accused of supporting terrorism and antisemitism at an elite university then he was wrong on several counts.
Trump accused the student, Mahmoud Khalil, of being “pro-Hamas” and hailed his detention by immigration officers, in front of his pregnant American wife as she waved her husband‘s permanent residence card, as the “first arrest of many to come”.
But the disappearance of the Palestinian activist who led protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza into the maw of the deportation process has been widely denounced as resembling the actions of an authoritarian police state. Democratic members of Congress accused Trump of “criminalising dissent”. Others have described the administration’s actions as “the greatest threat to free speech since the Red Scare”.
The resulting uproar over the manner and legitimacy of Khalil’s arrest has been accompanied by accusations from Jewish groups and others that Trump is exploiting justified concerns over antisemitism as cover for a much broader assault on universities, dissent and diversity programmes.
Prof Marianne Hirsch, a member of Columbia Jewish Faculty Group, said that “it should be obvious to everyone that what is happening on this campus, or to this campus, is not about protecting Jews”.
“My committed Jewish faculty colleagues and I have warned that the false characterisation of [Columbia University] as a hotbed of antisemitism would be used as an alibi for what’s actually at stake for the Republican establishment and now the Trump administration: strict control of speech, of protest, and of higher education at large,” she said.
A federal judge has temporarily blocked Khalil’s deportation and is considering an appeal to move him from a detention centre in Louisiana back to New York.
But the administration shows no sign of backing down in its determination to round up foreign students at the forefront of pro-Palestinian protests as part of a broader campaign against what it regards as liberal and leftist dissent on campuses across the country. It is also no coincidence that it has a particular ire for Columbia as a crucible of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes so deeply despised by the administration.
Activist and social liberation groups marched to decry the detainment and show support for Mahmoud Khalil on Wednesday. Photograph: Dave Decker/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
The day before Khalil’s detention the Trump administration pulled $400m in federal funding for Columbia, ostensibly because of its failure to curb antisemitism, even though the university cracked down on protests against the war in Gaza and the Biden administration’s support for it, including facilitating the arrest of students and banning groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine.
The US education department has warned 60 other colleges and universities that it is scrutinising their responses to allegations of antisemitism on campus and that they may face “enforcement actions”, widely taken to mean more funding cuts.
That action was followed by another announcement that it would investigate 45 universities for “race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs”.
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Prof Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor at Columbia and a leader of the campus branch of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), described the combined cut to federal aid and Khalil’s arrest as a “pincer attack” by Trump. He said that Columbia may have drawn the administration’s ire as a bastion of liberal elitism but other universities should not delude themselves that they are not also targets.
“There’s an attack on people’s rights with one hand and on their livelihoods with the other,” he said.
“Both of them are equally dangerous in their own way. It’s no secret that the right wants to defund the left and that they see universities as bastions of the left … It won’t stop with Columbia. They want to suppress all dissent.”
The White House piled additional pressure on Columbia by accusing it of failing to cooperate in the arrest of other named individuals the administration accused of “pro-Hamas activity”, and said the university would have to make major changes to disciplinary and antisemitism policies as a condition of restoring its funding. On Thursday, the school announced a slew of disciplinary measures, including expulsions and suspensions, against students who occupied a school building last year.
Columbia’s leadership has warned students who are not US citizens against social media posts sympathetic to the Palestinians, saying that these are “dangerous times” and that “nobody can protect you”.
One of Khalil’s lawyers, Samah Sisay, accused the White House of victimising her client, who has not been accused of any crime, for political ends.
“What we are seeing from the Trump administration, as we’ve been seeing since the inauguration in January, is an attempt to show power and to say that anyone who disagrees with this administration, or who publicly speaks out against this administration, could be targeted,” she said.
The rationale for Khalil’s detention is an obscure immigration provision allowing for the deportation of people deemed to harm US foreign policy. That rationale will almost certainly be used against others denouncing Israel’s war in Gaza in which about 50,000 Palestinians have been killed, a majority of them believed to be women and children, although some studies put the figure significantly higher.
Palestinians walk amid the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli attacks on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on Friday. Photograph: APAImages/Rex/Shutterstock
Last year, the rightwing Heritage Foundation drew up a deportation action plan as part of its Project Esther, named after the biblical character who was pivotal in saving the Jewish people from extermination during the Persian empire, that alleged hundred of professors have supported Hamas directly or indirectly. The initiative was backed by some pro-Israel groups, including the Zionist Organization of America.
Other pro-Israel activists have also identified students to the Trump administration for detention and deportation. These include Betar US, modelled on a century-old Zionist paramilitary youth organisation, which says it has given “thousands” of names to the administration.
Several Jewish groups and leaders have spoken up against the push for deportations, including T’ruah, a rights network led by rabbis.
“To frontload [immigrants] as the primary threat to Jewish security is not only morally irresponsible, but dangerous for the Jewish people and for American society,” the group said in a letter signed by hundreds of rabbis.
Sisay said the arrest and other actions against the universities were a response to mass protests over the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s assault on Gaza, including the supply of weapons.
“This is not just creating a chilling effect for students on university campuses but for anyone engaged in activism, where you may be going against the administration not just on Palestine but other issues like environmental justice. That’s the wider message being sent here.”
Thaddeus acknowledged that Columbia was vulnerable to political attack as an elite institution with billions of dollars in its trust fund while taking $400m in taxpayer subsidies as well as billions of dollars in research grants.
“Of course we are vulnerable. We have a gigantic endowment but we would burn through that endowment in no time flat if federal funds and tuition funds were taken away,” he said.
Columbia and other universities have been left more open to Trump’s political attacks by mainstream Democratic politicians, such as Senator Chuck Schumer, who sided with pro-Israel activists in painting protests as inherently antisemitic.
The universities have also been a focus of Trump’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes. The administration has rapidly followed a blueprint offered by Christopher Rufo, a rightwing activist who served as a trustee of New College of Florida where he was instrumental in Governor Ron DeSantis’s abolition of its DEI department.
Rufo advised Trump to move swiftly and decisively to do the same across US academia and to ignore the inevitable outrage, a strategy the administration would appear to be following.
More than 240 colleges in 36 states have scrapped at least part of their DEI initiatives, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some have dropped requirements to complete diversity courses in order to graduate. Others have taken down websites, given DEI new names and massaged course content to make it less unpalatable to Trump’s minions.
Protesters rally in support of detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil outside Columbia University on Friday. Photograph: Jason DeCrow/AP
Trump also threatened to withhold funding from colleges that do not promote “patriotic” education.
Some universities are pushing back. Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, said the university would not act on every order from the Trump administration but wait until their legal status is clear. The AAUP joined other groups in filing a lawsuit against the DEI ban as unconstitutional.
Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, said he appealed to Columbia for protection a week before his arrest amid “an intense and targeted doxing campaign”.
“Anti-Palestinian organisations were spreading false claims about my husband that were simply not based in reality. They were making threats against Mahmoud and he was so concerned about his safety that he emailed Columbia University on March 7,” she said.
She said “he begged the university for legal support” but it did not respond.
Columbia’s president, Katrina Armstrong, responded to Khalil’s arrest by telling faculty and students that she understood “the distress that many of you are feeling” about the presence of immigration officials around the campus but that the university would “follow the law”.
Armstrong said Columbia was facing a “challenging moment” but that it would continue to fight for “freedom of expression, open inquiry, a wide range of perspectives, and respectful debate”.
She added that the university was “engaged with several federal agencies and are doing all we can to be responsive to their legitimate concerns and to take corrective action, under the law, to restore funding”.
Critics accused Armstrong of implicitly justifying the Trump administration’s actions by using the phrase “legitimate concerns”.
Thaddeus described the university response to Trump’s attacks as “tepid” and “bland”.
“It’s disappointing. There’s obviously a great deal of pressure on them. It’s time to stand up and defend the values of American education, intellectual life, freedom of expression, and not least, the freedom of students and faculty not to be arrested by immigration police,” he said.
