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Notes -
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.
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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