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🌊 Can Mahmoud Khalil Be Deported?
And what we know Mahmoud Khalil said and did
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By Max Frost
On Sunday evening, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrived at a Columbia University campus apartment in Manhattan. Inside was Mahmoud Khalil, with his eight-months pregnant wife.
They told Khalil that they had orders to revoke his visa and took him outside. His wife says she told the agents that he didn’t have a visa – he was a green card holder, a “permanent legal resident.”
The agent allegedly replied, “He has a green card?”
Nevertheless, they detained Khalil and sent him to an immigrant detention facility in Louisiana. A day later, the Department of Homeland Security said the arrest was “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.” Khalil had led “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organisation,” it said.
President Trump added that Khalil was among students who have “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again,” he said.
So is Khalil a “terrorist sympathizer”? What did he say and do? And can green card holders be deported?
That’s the subject of today’s deep dive.
Khalil was born to Palestinian parents in Syria. After studying computer science at the American University in Lebanon, he worked with a Syrian-American non-profit and then at the British embassy in Beirut. In 2022, he moved to the US to pursue a master’s degree at Columbia’s public policy school.
In the US, Khalil married an American woman, apparently enabling him to get a green card. He also became involved with campus politics, becoming a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a group that demanded Columbia cut financial ties with Israel.
If it weren’t for October 7, the story would likely end there. But instead, Israel and Hamas went to war, and Khalil became the face of the country’s most controversial anti-Israel protests.
Last spring, CUAD members at Columbia began camping out on the main quad, defying orders to leave and sparking the university’s mass protest movement. Protesters were documented harassing and heckling Jewish students, prompting allegations of anti-Semitism. At one point, a CUAD member was documented saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live…Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
When Columbia tried to get CUAD off the quad, Khalil became the group’s “lead negotiator.”
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Editor’s Note
Once again, very curious to hear your thoughts. Is this a slippery slope toward restricting freedoms? Or should Mahmoud be deported? Do CUAD’s statements about Hamas qualify as supporting terrorism? Let us know by replying to this email.
And here are our last five stories:
Reader Replies
That article about the potential recession received a huge amount of feedback. Thank you all for sending it. Some responses we received:
Megan from Chicago wrote:
Hi there! I’m a liberal leaning small business owner in Chicago and I have to say I’m surprising myself with how on board I am with all of this. I 100% agree with the maga’s assessment of Biden’s economy. Every time I heard the economy stats I felt gaslit because on the ground here as a small business it’s very clear that people have less expendable income than they had before and during the height of the pandemic. We are a cafe/bagel shop and thrived in 2020/21 but have struggled a lot in the years since and many of our friends in the industry say the same thing. I feel cautiously optimistic about the changes the trump administration is making economically and honestly the idea of a recession isn’t that scary to me because I feel like we have been living through one for a few years now and have been making it through.
Bruce from Chestertown, NY wrote:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing in June 1979 was 22% of nonfarm employment. In June of 2019, it was 9% of nonfarm employment. A loss of almost 7 million jobs. Some went out of the country and other jobs were lost to automation. What kind of effort is it going to take to bring back those jobs. New manufacturing in the US would be heavily automated. The number of plants needed to be built to significantly increase the percent of nonfarm employment would be far greater than what we have lost. I just don’t see manufacturing coming back to the US occurs without a decline in our standard of living through higher prices.
It would have been helpful in your piece to get input from economists on how this all might work out. Is comparative advantage in international trade no longer a viable theory? If not, why have the textile mills (lousy working conditions, 6-day work weeks) in New England been replaced by high paying tech jobs? Do the people in Lowell, MA and Manchester, NH want to go back to working in mills?
Finally, the amount of debt in the US is a very real problem that has not been addressed by either Republicans or Democrats for many years. I am not convinced a voluntary recession is how to go about it.
Judd from Tennessee wrote:
I own and operate a Rv and boat dealership. Rvs and boats are want items, not need items. We have been feeling a weak economy brought on by high product cost and high interest rates for over a year now. I believe the mainstream media intentionally hid the true status of the economy during the end of the Biden administration in an effort to continue to boost their party for the election. I firmly believe the mainstream media now is turning loose the news that the economy is not great, in an effort to degrade the Trump presidency in its early days. Although I am a conservative and Trump supporter, I have my concerns regarding his tariff policy. Could it be that the short-term pain will not outweigh the long term gains. If we were operating currently in a strong position, a bit of a turndown may be sustainable. However, many businesses are already operating from a weak perspective and may not survive these short term pains.
Wonderful replies today. Thank you all for writing in. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say about today’s edition! Send us your thoughts here.
See you tomorrow.
–Max and Max