How Far Will the Trump Administration Go to Deport Mahmoud Khalil?
It may or may not be true that all happy families are alike, but it’s certainly true that any married couple with a car, happy or unhappy, must at some point decide who will do the driving. For Mahmoud Khalil and his wife, Noor Abdalla, this was not a difficult decision. Khalil, who is thirty-one, spent his youth in a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, where he didn’t have much time for driving lessons; until recently, he was on track to become a high-level diplomat, a career that usually involves not driving but being driven. Abdalla, on the other hand, was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, and she learned to drive before she could see easily over the dashboard. (She is still short enough that this seems to require some effort, though she is now a thirty-year-old dentist who until recently had a daily commute.) In the inveterate American tradition, she treats her car as a second living room. “It’s where I’m most comfortable,” she said this past fall, giving her steering wheel an affectionate pat.
It was a Tuesday in October, just after dawn, and a pink sun was rising over the oil-distillation towers of northern New Jersey. Abdalla was making good time from Brooklyn to the federal courthouse in Philadelphia, where the couple would observe oral arguments in what Khalil dryly called “one of my cases.” He sat in the passenger seat, holding a phone in each hand: his own, from which he texted members of his sprawling pro-bono legal team, and Abdalla’s, which he used to d.j. The music, mostly old Levantine folk songs, was interrupted every now and then by a notification from a navigation app, in English: “Police ahead.”
Khalil moved to Manhattan in 2022, and he adapted quickly to American culture. (In a sense, he even came to inhabit that most American of identities: an influencer.) At Columbia, where he was a master’s student in public and international affairs, he became perhaps the most visible pro-Palestine activist. After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza, there were turbulent protests at many universities, and those at Columbia were often featured on TV news. Khalil, one of the few student protesters who never wore a mask to hide his face, became a symbol of the anti-Zionist movement. President Donald Trump, a few weeks into his second term, was standing next to Elon Musk, shilling Teslas on the White House lawn, when a reporter asked about Khalil. “I think we ought to get him the hell out of the country,” Trump said. Although Khalil was a legal permanent resident, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, wrote a three-paragraph memo declaring him “deportable” owing to his “beliefs, statements, or associations.” Khalil was sent to an ICE detention center in rural Louisiana, where he was held for more than a hundred days, missing the birth of his son.
In Philadelphia, Abdalla parked a few blocks from the Liberty Bell, smoothed her hijab, and swapped her sneakers for high heels. Khalil made a half-hearted attempt to disguise himself, as he often does before going out in public, putting on a baseball cap emblazoned with the word “Lucky.” Every time he approached a door, he stepped aside, bowing slightly and stretching a chivalrous arm in front of him, until everyone else had gone. He passed through security and into the marble lobby of the courthouse, where the words of a renowned jurist named Learned Hand were etched on a glass panel: “If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.”
The hearing was before three federal judges, each appointed by a different President. The casting seemed almost too on the nose. The Trump appointee, a white guy with a thick beard, interrupted early and often, his eyes bulging with incredulity. The Joe Biden appointee, the first Black woman to become a Third Circuit judge, occasionally raised her eyebrows but remained mostly silent. In the middle, figuratively and literally, was a silver-haired judge appointed by George W. Bush. The judges were hearing one of several appeals, spread across various state and federal districts, in a case called Khalil v. Trump, which, in addition to determining Khalil’s fate, could set stark precedents in immigration law, national-security law, and the interpretation of the First Amendment. Lawyers for the government did not dispute that Khalil was in the U.S. legally, that the Administration had targeted him because of his political opinions, or that this might have a chilling effect on other people’s speech. Rather, at various points in the case, they simply seemed to suggest that the President had the authority to detain Khalil despite these constitutional concerns, and that federal courts could not stop him.
After the hearing, Khalil and his lawyers posed for photos in front of the National Constitution Center, where all forty-five words of the First Amendment were engraved on a fifty-ton slab of marble, then walked to a ramen bar for lunch. Before starting the drive home, Khalil and Abdalla spent a couple of hours at a science museum called the Franklin Institute. He stopped at a series of interactive screens, learning the proper form for pitching a baseball, and how high he would be able to jump on Mars. On one screen, part of an exhibition on mental health, a prompt read “How are you feeling today?” The options were “Excited,” “Confident,” and “Sad.” He considered them for a moment, then moved on without registering a choice.
The majority opinion, by the two Republican appointees, came down on a Thursday morning in January. It stripped Khalil of his previous legal protections, making him vulnerable to deportation. And it went further, narrowing the right to habeas corpus, which protects people from unlawful detention. “We game-planned for five scenarios—one to five, from best to worst,” one of Khalil’s lawyers told me. “We’re in Scenario 5. ” For decades, both left- and right-leaning judges had taken for granted that constitutional rights like habeas corpus applied to everyone on American soil, citizen or not. But now the Trump Administration was calling such long-standing principles into question, and some judges seemed inclined to follow its lead. (“The writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion, so that is an option we’re actively looking at,” Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s senior advisers, had told reporters.) When I spoke with Khalil, he said, “I did nothing illegal, so of course I will do whatever I can to stay.” And yet, he added, “it isn’t shocking, in my life and in the stories I grew up hearing from my relatives, this concept that, one day, you might be forced to leave.”
For now, Khalil lives in Brooklyn, not far from Prospect Park, in a building with tall vases of flowers and soothing music in the lobby. The first time I visited his apartment, he answered the door barefoot, holding Deen, his six-month-old son, who was sandy-haired and ample- cheeked, still yawning after a nap. All babies are cute, but this was a gratuitously good-looking baby—like a Rubens portrait of the infant Jesus, if the Flemish had been more realistic about a Nazarene’s complexion. Khalil, with a half smile, craned his neck into the hallway and looked behind me, as if to raise the possibility that I was being followed. This was a joke but, also, not entirely a joke.
On top of a low-lying bookshelf were art works that fans had sent him, including a hand-painted piece reading “Free Mahmoud Khalil.” (“We usually keep this one more hidden,” he said, placing it behind a ceramic cup that the artist Nan Goldin had given him.) He sat with Deen on the living-room floor, and Abdalla served grapes—whole for the adults, mashed for the baby. Khalil was writing a memoir, drawing in part on the diaries he’d kept during his time in ICE detention; he handed me a box of the diaries and let me flip through them. “There’s noise around me like a school cafeteria—Spanish, Hindi, broken English,” he’d written in one entry. In another, the phrase “kangaroo court” was scrawled in English and Arabic.
Khalil is unfailingly polite, in a way that can come across as mannered, almost aloof. He has his master’s degree from Columbia, but not a full-time job. “I spend time with my baby, and on calls with my lawyers,” he said—it felt like a setup for a Borscht Belt joke for which he couldn’t quite find the punch line. He also speaks publicly (on Twitch streams, onstage at South by Southwest), exhibiting what a politician might call consistent message discipline. And yet disciplined messengers do not always make for the most entertaining content. One afternoon, Khalil took a car to a small studio in the Flatiron district to tape an episode of “The Adam Friedland Show,” an interview program that combines earnest leftism and absurdist cringe comedy. With Khalil, Friedland struggled to find a comedic angle. Before they started rolling, Khalil walked in with a “posse” of legal advisers, and Friedland deadpanned, “You’ve got more reps than Justin Bieber.” Crickets. “This is gonna be our funniest episode ever.”
When Khalil was a child, his paternal grandmother often told him the story of how, in 1948, she’d been forced out of Tiberias, in contemporary Israel, and had to walk forty miles to Syria. (On the way, she gave birth to Khalil’s father in a tent.) Khalil’s school, run by the U.N., was in the second-biggest Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus. He was bright and curious, but there weren’t many books at home. His father, a welder, left school after sixth grade; his mother, a civil servant, didn’t finish high school. “I had one uncle who was a poet, and he used to make me type up his poems,” Khalil told me. “That, more than school, was how I really learned to read and write.”
He turned sixteen in 2011, the year of the Arab Spring. Of all the despots in the region, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was perhaps the most ruthless in crushing dissent. One day, Khalil’s aunt was working at a nonprofit; the next, the office was raided and his aunt was sent to prison without explanation. Khalil and a few of his bravest friends engaged in small acts of resistance—spray-painting a pro-democracy slogan on a wall, saving a protest song on a burner phone—but they all understood the danger. “If the police catch you, you will be tortured or killed,” Khalil said. “We all had our contingency plans: ‘If they take me, run to my house and bury my computer in the yard.’ ”
A week after Khalil’s eighteenth birthday, he heard that two of his friends, Ali and Bashar, had been arrested. “I thought, If they came for them, they will be coming for me next,” he told me. He fled to Lebanon with twenty-five Syrian pounds—less than fifty cents—and ended up staying in Beirut for a decade. He taught himself French and English; he got a job with an aid organization, and then with the British Embassy. In 2016, he met a Syrian American college student—Abdalla—who was spending the summer volunteering in Beirut. After she returned to Michigan, he got a Canadian visa, and they met in Windsor, Ontario, on the banks of the Detroit River, where they sat in a Tim Hortons for hours. Abdalla, who was about to graduate from the University of Michigan-Flint, had been selected to be her class’s commencement speaker, and they edited a draft of her speech together. “We are all so privileged to be living in a country such as this one,” it read. “I’m safe to converse with my professors and have passionate talks . . . and I’m safe to dream big.” Khalil became a Columbia student in 2023. Soon afterward, they drove to a courthouse in the Bronx, where they were married. A year later, Khalil got his green card.
The Assad regime fell in 2024, but the bodies of Khalil’s two friends were never recovered; their families assumed that they had been tortured, killed, and buried in a mass grave. Life in Syria was untenably brutal, Khalil told me, “but at least we knew the risks. Nobody was gaslighting us, saying, ‘This is a democracy.’ Then you come here, and it’s all so confusing.” Trump did not have boundless dictatorial powers, yet it was not at all clear whether the institutions that were supposed to check his authoritarian instincts, such as Congress and the courts, were equal to the task. Still, Khalil continued, “there’s this discourse of ‘This is the greatest democracy on earth, where everyone’s rights are guaranteed.’ ”
I was with Khalil during a series of life-altering moments, as he reacted to both propitious and disastrous news, but I never saw his poker face slip. This stolidity had its advantages. And yet, he noted, “I struggle to show my emotions, even to access my emotions,” which made it difficult to write a memoir. (The book, “No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention,” comes out next month.) Recently, at a furniture store in Williamsburg, Abdalla and Khalil spotted a table that seemed perfect for their kitchen, but they were hesitant to buy it: by the time it got delivered, Khalil might be gone. “For Noor, this uncertainty is just too much,” he said. “But my whole life has been uncertain.”
Before dawn on April 17, 2024, dozens of student activists pitched tents, purchased in bulk on Amazon, on a lawn in the middle of Columbia’s campus. They strung up Palestinian flags and hand-painted signs (“WHILE YOU READ, GAZA BLEEDS”). “We’re calling it an occupation,” one of them told me that morning, using the word with intentional irony—but other organizers called it an encampment, and that was the name that stuck. Khalil led a teach-in on the lawn, sitting cross-legged and facilitating a discussion about “apartheid” in Palestine. For years, it seemed to him, Palestine had been treated as a “side issue,” but now the world was paying attention.
The university called in the N.Y.P.D., and officers arrested more than a hundred protesters. Students set up another encampment, on an adjacent lawn. Later, a few students took over Hamilton Hall, barricading themselves inside. This time, the N.Y.P.D. sent a tactical unit, which cleared the building using surveillance drones and a military-style armored vehicle.
Khalil wasn’t part of the group that entered Hamilton Hall. “I wasn’t even on board with that as a tactic,” he told me. In the encampments, he acted as an organizer and as a go-between, communicating his fellow-protesters’ demands to university administrators and relaying the administrators’ responses. “I know how to speak bureaucrat,” he said. A university administrator told me that Khalil, in contrast with some of the other student activists, was known as a levelheaded mediator.
The student protesters called themselves anti-Zionist; their opponents accused them of antisemitism. When other Columbia students staged a counter- protest outside the encampment, holding Israeli flags, people threatened them with violence. Some visibly Jewish students, walking out of the campus gates, were heckled with shouts of “Go back to Poland!” (In both cases, it’s not clear whether the perpetrators were students or outsiders.) In our conversations, Khalil distanced himself from these incidents. “There were some antisemitic things that happened, some unacceptable things,” he said. At one point, someone from outside the encampment “came over and started shouting, ‘Fuck the Jews,’ and the person with the megaphone said, ‘You don’t represent us, go away.’ ”
“Doxing trucks” circled the campus, photographing protesters and then publicly displaying their names. Two students had offers from white-shoe law firms rescinded; another student, who had been advertised as one of “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites,” sued the company that owned the doxing truck for defamation. Some protesters’ photos were posted on Canary Mission, a website that purports to “document people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.” A militant Zionist group called Betar, which is widely considered a hate group, compiled dossiers of student protesters (or “jihadis,” as Betar referred to them). Khalil and his friends treated such exposure as a badge of honor. “Our joke was ‘Canary Mission is our dating app,’ ” he said. “You weren’t really a part of the movement unless you had a Canary Mission profile.”
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, was working on a report called “Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.” The report—published on October 7, 2024—said that “the so-called pro-Palestinian movement” was actually “part of a highly organized, global Hamas Support Network (HSN) and therefore effectively a terrorist support network.” Referencing Canary Mission, the report enumerated several goals, including getting anti-Israel protesters “deported from the U.S.” At the time, this seemed like bluster.
Then Trump was reëlected. “Under Biden, we were pushing a giant boulder up a steep hill,” Ross Glick, who was then the director of Betar’s U.S. chapter, told me. Now, suddenly, “we had friends in the White House”—and also in “the Justice Department, F.B.I., D.H.S.” Under previous Administrations, Betar had been treated as a fringe group; now it apparently enjoyed access to the offices of some of the most powerful figures in the executive branch, including Rubio and Miller. Glick and his colleagues lobbied officials to pursue the objectives of Project Esther, although “it didn’t take much convincing,” Glick said. “Do you know the expression ‘preaching to the choir’?” Betar even furnished lists of names, suggesting “enemies of the US” whom the government should deport.
The New York Attorney General investigated Betar and found that it had targeted Muslim and Jewish New Yorkers with threats and harassment; as part of a settlement, the organization agreed to cease its operations in the state. By then, Glick was no longer working at Betar. (Years earlier, he had pleaded guilty to harassing an ex-girlfriend.) In response to inquiries from The New Yorker, a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security wrote, “Any suggestion that the United States would take action against a terrorist sympathizer simply because it was told to is not only ridiculous but FALSE.” A White House spokesperson wrote, “Allegations that officials from Betar had a direct line to the White House through Stephen Miller are FALSE. He has not even heard of this group.” But I reviewed previously undisclosed e-mails in which Lew Olowski, who has served as a senior adviser to Rubio, treated one of Betar’s lists as a spur to government action, asking, “What’s the timeline for . . . revoking the visas of Hamas activists?” Less than two weeks later, Olowski prodded again, adding that he owed “an update on our progress.” In response, another State Department staffer noted that the list appeared to have been “provided to Secretary Rubio’s office” and “sent to . . . Stephen Miller.” (Olowski did not respond to a request for comment; a State Department spokesperson said, “We stand by our decisions to revoke visas from individuals who seek to undermine America and hate what it stands for.”)
Khalil was on at least one of Betar’s lists, incorrectly identified as a “student visa holder.” On March 5, 2025, he went to another protest at Columbia, and footage of his unmasked face ricocheted around social media. “🚨 SUSPECTED FOREIGN NATIONAL ALERT🚨,” Canary Mission posted. Shai Davidai, an Israeli professor who was then at Columbia, tagged Rubio, writing, “Distributing terrorist propaganda should be a deportable offense, no?”
Two days later, Khalil and Abdalla were in Morningside Heights, walking home from a dinner breaking the day’s Ramadan fast. When they opened the door to their apartment building, two large men wearing plain clothes followed them inside. Two more men—federal agents, apparently, though they would identify themselves only as “police”—were waiting in the lobby. They claimed that Khalil’s student visa had been revoked. “I don’t have a student visa,” he replied. “I’m on a green card.” This confused the agents for a moment, but then one of them made a phone call, and they proceeded to arrest Khalil anyway. (“They wouldn’t say who they were talking to, but it was clearly someone high up,” Abdalla told me.) They handcuffed Khalil and frog-marched him across the street to an unmarked S.U.V. Abdalla, who was eight months pregnant, followed them outside, tearful and short of breath, and asked why Khalil was being taken. The men drove off without answering. For more than twenty-four hours, no one could tell her where her husband was.
Khalil was booked in lower Manhattan and led to a crowded, brightly lit room, where he was told to sleep on the floor. In the early morning, he was taken to a detention center in New Jersey for a few hours; from there, he was driven to John F. Kennedy International Airport. “They walked me inside with shackles on, surrounded by guards, like I was Pablo Escobar,” he told me. “I had no idea where we were going. I saw ‘LA’ and thought it was Los Angeles.” The agent sitting next to him on the plane also seemed confused. “I saw over his shoulder that he was Googling me, trying to figure out why this was a big deal.” They landed in Dallas, and, while they waited for a connecting flight to Louisiana, the sun went down, ending the daily fast. The guards took Khalil to a Wendy’s in the airport and bought him a cheeseburger.
If it’s true, as Learned Hand said, that unrationed justice is a prerequisite for democracy, then the U.S. has never been a full democracy. American Presidents have a long history of acting unlawfully, and American courts have a long history of letting them get away with it, especially when they can muster a rationale that has something to do with national security. In 1942, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a hundred thousand people “of Japanese extraction,” most of them American citizens, were forced into military internment camps. At the time, despite the fog of war, many commentators could see the grim irony: it’s hard to claim the moral high ground in a war against Fascism while rounding up racial minorities at home and locking them in camps.
Nevertheless, things got more perfect, or less glaringly imperfect. Politicians stoked the anti-Communist fervor of the nineteen-fifties, but, by the end of the decade, the courts had reined in the executive branch somewhat, declaring many of the overreaches of the previous twenty years illegal. Presidents kept trying to bend or break the rules, and they often got away with it. The George W. Bush Administration used warrantless wiretaps to spy on a wide swath of Americans; the Barack Obama Administration pursued whistle-blowers with surprising zeal. When these Presidents were checked by the other branches, though, they at least appeared to be chastened.
But Trump, especially in his second term, knows only how to double down. First, he decides who his enemies are, and how they are to be afflicted; later, his underlings come up with post-hoc justifications that might hold up in court. Perhaps the Administration’s most concerted effort to suppress disobedient speech has been its ongoing pressure campaign against universities, which it has carried out through lawsuits, investigations, and other tactics—some lawful, some unlawful, and some that inhabit a legal gray area. In a settlement with the federal government, Columbia agreed to pay more than two hundred million dollars and to insure that “all students, international and domestic, are committed to the longstanding traditions of American universities.”
In 2024, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. candidate on a student visa, co-wrote an eight-paragraph op-ed in the Tufts Daily. In a subdued tone, it accused Israel of “clear violations of international law.” In February, 2025, Canary Mission created a profile for Öztürk; it accused her of “anti-Israel activism,” citing only the op-ed. The following month, D.H.S. ordered her arrest. Öztürk was walking through a quiet residential neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts, at around five in the evening, when masked plainclothes agents snatched her off the sidewalk and stuffed her into a van. “Is this a kidnapping?” one of her neighbors asked. Betar posted footage on X, gloating, “She was on our list.” Later, in court, an ICE agent testified that higher-ups had ordered him to fast-track Öztürk’s arrest and added, “I can’t recall a time that it’s come top down like this.”
The government revoked Öztürk’s visa and tried to deport her, asserting that her actions indicated “support for a designated terrorist organization,” but an immigration judge ruled that the government had failed to meet its burden of proof. Trump’s D.O.J. then fired that immigration judge—a clear act of interference in a nominally independent court—and appealed. (Last month, a group of U.N. experts denounced “the mass arbitrary removal of immigration judges and continued politicisation of immigration courts in the United States.”) Öztürk, meanwhile, got her Ph.D., in child development, and moved back to Turkey.
According to the testimony of an ICE official named Peter Hatch, of roughly five thousand pro-Palestine students that Canary Mission and Betar reported to the government, ICE apparently investigated some two hundred as potential targets for arrest or deportation. A smaller fraction of these resulted in the cases against Khalil and Öztürk, and a handful of other pro-Palestine protesters. The government doesn’t have to win these cases for them to have an effect. The Heritage report suggested that making an example of pro-Palestine protesters could instill “fear” in other “potential demonstrators,” deterring future anti-Israel activism. In a paper published last November, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association argued that some of this had already happened: “Antisemitism investigations are producing a new system of government surveillance and monitoring of campus speech.”
Some of Trump’s attempts to flout constitutional limits are consistent with recent American history, but others are not. To find a precedent for them, you’d have to go back to 1832, when Chief Justice John Marshall wrote an opinion that displeased President Andrew Jackson. In response, Jackson said, or is said to have said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” In other words, the executive and the judiciary are supposed to be coequal branches, but the executive is the one with the guns. This is generally understood as a parable about the fragility of liberal democracy—the thin line between the rule of law and the law of the jungle. But in 2022, on a far-right podcast, a senatorial candidate from Ohio quoted Jackson’s quip approvingly, citing it as a model for “what Trump should do.” That senatorial candidate, J. D. Vance, is now the Vice-President.
Such backsliding has shocked even the human-rights lawyers who already had reason to be disillusioned. Baher Azmy, the legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, spent years defending detainees at Guantánamo Bay. “We lost a lot,” he recalled, of those cases. But when there was clear evidence that the government had violated someone’s fundamental rights, “you could still put that in front of judges, including the most hardened conservatives, and you could get a fair hearing.” Now, Azmy fears, the bad old days of Guantánamo are starting to seem like the good old days. He is one of the main lawyers on Khalil’s team. “The case against Mahmoud is nothing but an authoritarian diktat,” Azmy said. “ ‘We don’t like what you have to say, so we are going to use the full weight of the federal government to make you leave.’ ” Referring to Egypt, where he was born, Azmy continued, “I used to say how lucky I was that I didn’t have to be a lawyer there, that I got to live and work in a country where the rule of law meant something. And now it feels like, ‘Look, Ma, I’m a lawyer in Egypt after all.’ ”
In February, Khalil was wearing his best suit, carrying a flat white in a to-go cup, and walking briskly through the underground tunnels in the U.S. Capitol. He was in Washington for three days, meeting privately with more than a dozen lawmakers, and, as usual, he was running late. He was flanked by one of his lawyers and by advocates from the Center for Constitutional Rights and another progressive organization, Jewish Voice for Peace. The group spotted Randy Fine, a Republican congressman from Florida, and gave him a wide berth. Fine has repeatedly called for Khalil to be deported; he has also voiced the opinion that “the Palestinian cause is evil” and that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Why avoid a confrontation with Fine, I asked, when they could film it and go viral? “I’ve had enough viral moments for a lifetime,” Khalil said.
The group reached the office of Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minneapolis who has a reputation as a political pugilist. At the moment, though, she mostly looked tired. Recently, D.H.S. agents in Minneapolis had shot and killed a protester, Renee Good, and then another, Alex Pretti. “They took a five-year-old in my district,” Omar said, in a low, shaky voice. “They’re just heartless.”
The higher Khalil got on the rungs of congressional seniority, the more circumspect the lawmakers sounded. The No. 2 House Democrat, Katherine Clark, has a palatial office in the heart of the Capitol, with crystal chandeliers and mirrors in gilded frames. “We love our progressive members with our whole heart and soul,” Clark said, diplomatically. “But I wonder if you’ve reached out to our more pro-Israel members—someone who may say, ‘You know, we might disagree on this particular issue, but this is about a higher principle.’ ”
“I’d be happy to come down and meet with anyone,” Khalil said. “So far, we haven’t seen much interest.”
When the group had downtime between meetings, they relaxed in the office of Representative Rashida Tlaib, from Detroit, whose walls were decorated with a greatest-hits lineup of good-trouble posters (Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Nelson Mandela wearing a kaffiyeh), plus a more recent addition: “Free Mahmoud Khalil.” If other leftist representatives acted like Khalil’s friends, then Tlaib, the only Palestinian member of Congress, treated him like a favorite nephew. “Our elders will tell us, ‘Be quiet, don’t get in trouble,’ ” Tlaib said, in her sonorous Michigan accent. “To this day, my mother says this to me. I’m, like, ‘Mom, it’s too late! I’m in Congress!’ ”
Tlaib asked for updates on Khalil’s case. After he was arrested, D.H.S. issued a statement declaring, in language reminiscent of the Project Esther report, that he had “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Various Administration spokespeople repeated this accusation, but, in its many court filings against Khalil, the government never alleged that he had incited violence, materially supported terrorism, or committed any other crime. (While Khalil was in ICE detention, the government provided an additional justification for his removal, claiming that he had omitted relevant information from his green-card application.) Khalil’s fellow- activists had chanted “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Khalil, in one of his more controversial statements, said that “Palestinians have tried multiple forms of resistance,” including “armed resistance, which is legitimate under international law.” These views are contentious; some take them to be inherently threatening. But almost no one doubts that they are protected by the First Amendment. (In his memo, Rubio confirmed that the “beliefs” and “statements” for which Khalil had been arrested “are otherwise lawful.”) Even if Khalil had openly espoused antisemitic beliefs or walked around campus draped in a Hamas flag, his behavior, though it would have been abhorrent and potential grounds for expulsion from Columbia, wouldn’t have been illegal.
In our interviews, I asked Khalil to clarify what he thinks of Hamas. He resents the question—he doesn’t see why he should be grilled on this any more than someone who protests the war in Iran should be made to answer for the crimes of the Khamenei regime—but, when pressed, he said that Hamas’s leaders, like all leaders, should be held accountable for any war crimes they’ve committed, against both Israelis and Palestinians. He had no kind words for Fatah, or for the Palestinian Authority, or for any other Palestinian political party. “Political factions usually work for their own survival, not for the good of the people,” he said. Anyone who has ever spoken to a Palestinian would find most of Khalil’s political opinions unremarkable. “I want to live long enough to see a safe and free homeland for my people, and I want to be allowed to visit my grandmother’s village once before I die,” he said.
When Rubio determined that Khalil could be deported, he was relying on an obscure and broadly worded provision of immigration law that enables the Secretary of State to single out any noncitizen whose presence in the country could have “adverse foreign policy consequences.” (In 1996, a federal judge found the provision unconstitutional—coincidentally, the judge was Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s late sister—but her decision is not considered binding.) The provision has been invoked only rarely—for example, in 1995, after Mario Ruiz Massieu, a Mexican public official suspected of money laundering, was apprehended in the U.S. But Rubio’s memo stretched the law beyond recognition. He maintained that Khalil had participated in protests that fostered “a hostile environment for Jewish students”; his continued presence in the country, therefore, would compromise “core American interests,” specifically the objective of combatting antisemitism.
According to some commentators, none of this should be controversial. “Every country has the power to control who enters,” Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, told me. “In this country, that includes ideological screenings—you can’t be a Nazi, you can’t be a Communist, you can’t be toxic to the body politic.” If Khalil is ejected for ideological reasons, Shapiro continued, then “that’s an immigration issue, not a free-speech issue. Congress could change immigration law, but this government is following it as it’s written.” Ross Glick, the former Betar official, told me, “You’re not allowed to yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, but you can stand in the middle of a campus shouting, ‘Globalize the intifada,’ which is a call for violence against Jews? No. Fuck you. Get out of this country.”
But many experts argue the opposite: that it’s a textbook violation of the First Amendment for the government to punish anyone, citizen or not, as payback for political speech. “This is an Administration that seems to believe the President can do anything,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at N.Y.U. and a progressive legal commentator, said. But even assuming that a vaguely worded statute gives the State Department the power to revoke visas at its discretion, she continued, “they still can’t do it in ways that contravene constitutional protections, like freedom of speech or freedom from discrimination. And those are protections that do apply to green-card holders”—or, at least, they have until now. When Biden was President, conservatives lambasted him for his purported eagerness to turn campuses into “safe spaces” by stifling free expression. How would they have reacted if he’d singled out a student whose political views he disliked—an anti-trans activist, say, who happened to be in the U.S. on a green card—and then used every lever of governmental power to get that student deported?
When Khalil or his lawyers were asked about his potential removal from the country, they tended to respond, at least on the record, with an optimistic hedge: there was no constitutional reason for him to be deported. Even so, I said, it could happen. The government could put him on a plane to Algeria, where he holds citizenship through his mother’s family; it could force him to go to Syria or Lebanon, where his life might be in danger; it could even send him to a “third country,” such as Rwanda or South Sudan, as it has done to other detainees. I was reluctant to press the point during my first few visits with Khalil and Abdalla, but eventually I asked them outright: If the government did send him away, what was the plan? Would Abdalla and Deen go with him, or would he go alone?
For a moment, fear seemed to flash across Abdalla’s face. For all their worrying, apparently, they hadn’t yet talked through specific scenarios. But Khalil’s smile didn’t waver. “It’s too early to talk about these things,” he said.
“They wouldn’t deport me, right?” Abdalla said, turning to Khalil. “Could they?”
“Habibi, no,” Khalil said, rubbing her back. “You’re American.”
The day the Third Circuit opinion came down, making Khalil vulnerable to deportation again, I went to see him and Abdalla at their apartment. “Tonight’s supposed to be our date night,” Abdalla told me. But now, Khalil said, his lawyers were “e-mailing D.H.S. to get clarification—to make sure it’s still O.K. for me to leave the house.” At the end of the day, the lawyers still hadn’t heard back, so they advised Khalil and Abdalla to cancel their date and stay inside.
Once again, Khalil was making contingency plans. “I’ve got a special phone, with a bunch of numbers preloaded,” he told me. If he was out somewhere, and ICE agents ambushed him, “I can press one button, in my pocket, and Noor and all the lawyers will be notified.” He had been in the habit of taking Deen out for a daily walk, just the two of them. He stopped doing that, haunted by the image of an officer handcuffing him and taking him away, leaving his baby alone in a stroller in the middle of Prospect Park.
In April, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued its final decision, rejecting all Khalil’s arguments and approving his deportation. “Normally, a case like this would take years,” Homero López, a former immigration appeals judge, told me. “They had this ready to go within days, which, to me, suggests engagement from the White House.” Khalil’s lawyers moved to reopen the case, citing this and other irregularities, but their motion was denied. They are currently planning to appeal to the Supreme Court. Khalil and his lawyers worry that if the Court agrees to hear his case it could issue an opinion that further curtails the speech rights of immigrants, or of all Americans. But if it doesn’t take the case Khalil may be out of options, at which point he would have to leave the country.
This spring, Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, gave a lecture describing a sudden “phase shift in the way the law operates in the United States”—from “standard liberal legality” to something harsher and dangerously capricious. He discussed several active cases, including Khalil’s, arguing that they indicated the emergence of an American “dual state.” Huq was borrowing the term from Ernst Fraenkel, a German Jew who practiced law in Berlin until he fled, in 1938; he ended up in Chicago, where he completed a book called “The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship.” According to Fraenkel, authoritarian regimes dispense justice on two parallel tracks: “normative” legal protections for loyal subjects of the state, and “unchecked arbitrariness” for its enemies. (Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited the book in one of her recent opinions—a dissent, naturally.) By making the comparison, Huq told me, he wasn’t saying that every enemy of the American state would be sent to a concentration camp. “There are echoes, but they’re partial echoes,” he said.
Last month, I visited Khalil at home one more time. Deen, now more than a year old, sat in Abdalla’s lap as she read him a picture book called “Who’s Hiding on the Farm?” Khalil was still in a state of bureaucratic superposition: the Board of Immigration Appeals had issued a final order of removal, yet, technically, until all his legal challenges were resolved, the government was not supposed to remove him. But what if it did? The government wasn’t supposed to invade Venezuela and kidnap its President, Nicolás Maduro. But it had, and now Maduro was in Brooklyn, not four miles from Khalil’s apartment, in a jail known for its maggot-infested food. As a condition of Khalil’s bail, the government already knew where he lived. What if ICE agents were to stake out his address and apprehend him on sight? What was stopping them? Norms? Pieces of paper? “We’re a superpower,” Stephen Miller said in January, “and under President Trump we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.” If officials decided it was in their interest, they could act now and ask for forgiveness later. “My lawyers keep giving me these refreshers, these ‘know your rights’ trainings,” Khalil told me. “I ask—they hate it when I say this, but I can’t help myself—‘What if I know my rights, and the government knows my rights, but they just don’t care?’ ” ♦