When speaking up for Palestine becomes a crime

 

The fight to free Mahmoud Khalil is not merely about preserving First Amendment rights, it is about whether we will allow our government to criminalize resistance to its complicity in human rights abuses and genocide.

As a Palestinian, I learned very young that our very existence was a form of protest. Every family gathering that turned into a political discussion and every celebration existed in defiance of forces that would rather see us disappear. This is why the detention of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil strikes at the core of my being—I recognize in his abduction the same suffocating tactics used to silence Palestinians for generations, now deployed on American soil against those who dare speak our name.

Khalil’s detention by ICE agents on March 8, marks a watershed moment in American democracy. As his pregnant wife watched helplessly, government agents took away a legal permanent resident whose only “crime” was serving as a negotiator in campus protests calling for university divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s Genocide on Gaza.

Let us be clear: Mahmoud Khalil is a political prisoner—detained not for any recognizable crime, but for criticizing Israel. There is no law against calling for the end of genocide, nor should there be in a constitutional democracy. Yet the Trump administration has effectively created such a crime, linking legitimate criticism of a colonial state to “antisemitism,” by abducting and detaining a green card holder solely for his political expression.

After Khalil’s detention, the official White House Instagram account published an image of him with the words “Shalom Mahmoud” plastered across it—a chilling taunt that reveals the administration’s contempt for due process and basic human dignity. His temporary disappearance into the ICE detention system—his lawyers couldn’t locate him for over 24 hours—mirrors the tactics of authoritarian regimes worldwide.

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is that it didn’t begin with Trump. It was precisely the Biden-Harris administration’s demonization of student protesters as antisemitic that laid the groundwork for Trump’s assault on Columbia and other universities. In January 2025, a far-right pro-Israel group submitted a list of students with visas to the Trump administration, urging their deportation for pro-Palestine advocacy. Within days, the administration issued an executive order threatening visa revocation for protesters. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the agenda explicit, writing: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”  (more...)

When speaking up for Palestine becomes a crime