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So here is the new juicy one.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/11/us/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-ice-green-card-hnk/index.html
Couple of thoughts:
Section 3(b)(VII) of 8 U.S. Code § 1182
Chances of him being in support of Hamas are not that low. He is activist - so earning or giving money from someone related to hamas is plausible. He is refugee grown Syria - so being related or in some way associated with any terrorist organization in the region is also plausible.
This is obviously a 1A amendment violation if all he did was legal. On the other hand a lot of the students' protests since oct 7 were of dubious legality. On the third - the US government seems to have quite wide discretion about who to admit before they are citizens. And Elon of course has access to quite a bit of his deleted tweets and dm's so it could land either way.
I do think that probably the government has a good case since they have designated shitload of organizations there as terrorists and they need a public statement of support for one of them for the case to not be completely meritless. Or a single chant from the river to the sea.
Idk I don't think this is a huge a deal as the libs claim since he is a permanent resident, they're not gonna come after citizens with this. But it is substantively against the ideal of 'freedom of speech'. The First Amendment has been, and this is imo as it should be, interpreted to include explicit political calls for violence as protected speech, so long as they eg aren't part of planning a crime and don't single out specific targets. This isn't just a legal trick, 1A allows this because we recognize that real political speech by people with real grievances (including the right wing) will include such things, and suppressing it will just function to suppress political speech! I personally would have a lot less interesting material to read if everyone on the right (or the left) who ever called for various subsets their enemies to be killed were punished for that. So while Mahmoud probably hasn't produced any interesting intellectual output, I'm not a fan of actions like this.
I mean, he has literally committed crimes at a college where using "reactionary language" is enough to get you investigated and expelled. At some point you have to go beyond exposing the double standard to enforcing a fair one, and handing out appropriate punishment.
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IANAL so this one seems really obvious to me. You aren't a citizen, you are here on a greencard. I would not expect to be able to go to Germany and stage a protest against their government, or "occupy" one of their schools and expect to be able to stay.
There's also something obvious here: you aren't a citizen. If you don't like what we're up to over here, then leave on your own.
I'm also getting a bit frustrated at the lengths to which the concept of "speech" has been stretched. It seems like there is a line somewhere between publishing a newspaper and "occupying" a public building where what you're doing stops being speech and starts being something else.
Also, to put some things together.
Khalil was an organizer of a protest at Columbia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Columbia_University_pro-Palestinian_campus_occupations
The protest was organized by a group called CUAD: https://instagram.com/cuapartheiddivest/
CUAD has called for, among other things, the "Eradication of Western Civilzation": https://nypost.com/2024/08/17/us-news/columbia-universitys-anti-israel-group-seeking-total-eradication-of-western-civilization/
America is my home. If you come here and want to protest to destroy or "eradicate" it, I think it's reasonable to deport you. You can keep calling to eradicate my home, but you can do it from your own country, and not by "occupying" any of my universities or public buildings.
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What stops the Trump admin from gitmoing the guy instead with those tasty war on terror carte blanche laws?
If you deport someone they're off the books. If you Gtimo someone you have to pay for feeding tubes for life.
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Because they want to be able to deport people at whim.
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Steve Vladeck has a pretty good writeup at his blog about the case. The short version is that there are a lot of unknowns and not a lot of precedent with respect to the laws that may be relevant here.
I'm not sure I understand the mechanics of the legal disagreement. Is it illegal to per se revoke an authorization to be in the US without an acceptable reason? Or is it that it's clearly in response to his speech?
For example, if Khalil had murdered someone on federal property and then led this campus protest, and the US looked into him and brought murder charges against him, still clearly in response to his speech, would lawyers be lining up their arguments about a 1A violation?
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Because of Secretary of State Marco Rubio's personal involvement, it is likely they are claiming the foreign policy exception, which explicitly applies even to activities legal in the US. This is going to make the issue whether or not that particular exception is unconstitutional, in particular whether it is unconstitutional as applied to permanent residents (who are often more protected than temporary visa holders). I think most likely it will be found unconstitutional as applied to permanent residents.
If so the only logical response would be to dramatically increase the scrutiny applied to granting of permanent resident status. It is unacceptable that we would be required to import people who seek to destroy us.
Us? He's protesting against Israel, not the US. Those are two separate countries, and the Israelis have done objectively more harm to the US and US interests than the Palestinians ever have. How many US navy ships have been bombed by Palestinian fighter jets?
Even granting that in this specific case the subject in question is not broadly anti-American, the principle being proposed - that permanent residents cannot have their status revoked for any free speech activity, even including explicit subversion and undermining of our own policy - is so broad as to make vetting earlier in the process much more important.
In this case he's actually pro-American - American interests are hurt by your entanglement with Israel and the various blackmail/influence operations they run (ever hear about why the Monica Lewinsky affair happened?), but sure.
Yes, this is actually a good thing. Free speech is good and if your policy can't stand up to criticism then it deserves to be criticised. Mahmoud does not have magical powers which mean that his protests against the genocide of his people make American policy less effective - what you're actually saying here is that American policy is so weak, fragile and ineffective that it cannot withstand even the mildest of criticism. You're claiming that the entire US foreign policy establishment is effectively an emperor with no clothes, and that's so much worse than the possibility that someone who is only a mere permanent resident can criticise government policy that I can't understand your position here.
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None, which is a problem. Some of the USs closest allies are those who we've attacked and invaded and have done the same to us.
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Ironically the same factor that might get it reversed as a 1A violation is probably the overall goal of the administration taking this action in the first place.
There's a 'chilling effect' on speech when the government visits consequences on people, even indirectly, for engaging in 'speech' alone. Or so the argument goes. I buy that idea, for what its worth. A law that is broad enough to punish protected speech usually runs afoul of 1A, even if said law is only used to to punish 'unprotected' speech. Hence 'narrowly tailored' requirements and so on.
But that's probably the main goal of this action anyway. A warning shot across the bow, there's a new sheriff in town, the kid gloves are off, etc. etc. Even if any given instance of speech is protected, this admin is willing to take actions against activities that the previous admin would have turned a blind eye towards.
Maybe we can recall when lefties were crying about free speech violations because Ron Desantis socked Disney in the nose when their Exec came out against the "Don't Say Gay" bill. Same effect. Commit to a very public attack on one (1) party engaging in the unwanted activity, and likely the others will back off for the sake of self-preservation.
Helps a lot that the guy they're attacking is not a U.S. citizen so he's already on particularly thin ice, even if he gets away with this particular action, it'll be much easier to keep an eye on him and find some reason to deny citizenship and revoke his green card and kick him out if he doesn't keep to the straight and narrow.
At the very least, it bolsters the argument that there are a lot of migrants, even legal ones, who are bad actors taking advantage of the country's general tolerance and largesse, and we really wouldn't want them here in the first place.
And of course the backdrop of all this is that speech is one thing, and protests are another thing, and a lot of the protests that have been taking place have been blatantly illegal, trespassing in areas they're not allowed to be, or intimidating other students who have an equal entitlement to use a given space, or of course vandalizing both public and private property. At some point you start not caring about the distinctions between the ones merely using speech, merely protesting, and the rest of the Antifa blob committing arson, battery, and theft, since they're all inherently supporting each others' actions and take zero steps to police their own.
I mean, given that the government of Palestine or at least the Gaza portion is Hamas, which is a designated terrorist organization, I think the free speech aspect might be harder to prove. If he’s giving money, producing videos, or other things that support Hamas fairly directly, then he’s probably in violation of the law.
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Public statements of support for organizations (including bad ones) are protected by the First Amendment. I can't see how this would survive a constitutional challenge unless he did something more substantial than "express support" for Hamas.
Well, not absolutely protected in all possible cases.
Someone who publicly expresses support for a foreign adversary can, for example, be denied employment with certain government agencies or denied a security clearance, or discharged from the military, or possibly imprisoned to the extent there's reason to think they've committed espionage or similar acts.
Similarly, it seems likely that Congress can prohibit Federal Funds from being spent on types of speech that are protected but that Congress doesn't want to subsidize. I.e. you can't compel the government to give you funding to spread your speech, nor can you force them to give you funding that they've withdrawn because of some specific speech you engaged in, provided they are doing so within the bounds of a given program they've established.
Seems likely, for instance, that if you started up an otherwise accredited college called "The Death to America School for Anti-United States Activities" that offered courses on "Undermining the Federal Government" and "Foreign Espionage 101" as part of a degree program in "Domestic Subversion Studies" that you couldn't complain if the government denied federal grants to your school or refused access to Federally-backed loans to you due to the particular type of speech you were engaged in.
There's probably a fight to be had over whether somebody here on a visa or as a permanent resident can have their status revoked for what is implicitly an 'Anti-American' position.
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