Where Jewish students are targeted with threats of antisemitic violence or willful intimidation, any students engaged responsible should face swift sanction from the college in question. Too few students have been expelled for such activity. Where colleges fail to protect civil rights, the suspension of federal grants is a reasonable recourse. Still, it is concerning and un-American for the federal government to deport students or otherwise seek to intimidate American students into silence simply because they offer pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli sentiments.
Both things are happening simultaneously at Columbia University in New York City.
The Trump administration suspended $400 million in financial aid to Columbia last week after declaring that the Ivy League school had failed to protect Jewish students from intimidation and violence. The available evidence would suggest that this finding is legitimate.
But it’s one thing to strip financial aid in response to an institution’s failure to protect civil rights. It’s a very different thing to arrest students simply because they have said things that the government of the day and its supporters dislike. And that’s what’s just happened with Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil, a Green Card holder, was arrested by ICE agents acting on a deportation order on Sunday evening.
The operative question here is not whether Khalil’s arrest is lawful: the federal government has extensive latitude to expel even Visa or Green Card holding non-citizens if it deems their presence as contrary to the national interest. Instead, the question is whether Khalil and others like him deserve to be arrested and expelled for the reason that Khalil was arrested and will be expelled.
The Department of Homeland Security defends the arrest by asserting that Khalil was engaged in “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” But the evidence for this contention is weak. One X user lists Khalil’s supposed offenses. But these seem to consist mainly of his organizing protests against Israeli military action, and his calls for the divestment of the Israeli defense firms. While one video shows Khalil speaking in defense of the “resistance in Gaza,” that speech does not constitute an act of material support for terrorism under U.S. law.
When it comes to a criminal finding of material support for terrorism, as I’ve noted previously, “in the operative case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, [Supreme Court] Chief Justice John Roberts noted that a finding of unlawful material support for a terrorist group must include the provision of specific services falling under “only a narrow category of speech to, under the direction of, or in coordination with foreign groups that the speaker knows to be terrorist organizations.” While the court found that provision had occurred in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, Roberts added that the court in “no way suggest that a regulation of independent speech would pass constitutional muster, even if the Government were to show that such speech benefits foreign terrorist organizations.”
Khalil’s arrest is concerning in and of itself in that it represents coercive government action motivated only by the content of his non-criminal speech. The silent or otherwise favorable conservative reaction to this arrest also evinces a distinct hypocrisy. After all, many conservatives who have rightly and long complained about censorship and self-censorship from the woke mob now offer satisfaction for government censorship of speech with which they disagree. This is not a sensible course to take. Aside from moral concerns pertaining to the First Amendment, do conservatives seriously expect that a future Democratic administration will not one day flip the script?
This arrest is plainly contradictory to the interest of vigorous public debate on a matter of public interest. It will surely deter American students who do not support Hamas but do oppose Israeli foreign policy from speaking their minds. That is incompatible with the founders’ intent in their construction of the First Amendment. It undermines the fundamental American principle that speech should be tolerated as far as possible. This is what sets the United States apart from the rest of the world. Indeed, the Trump administration is doing here exactly what Vice President JD Vance recently condemned European governments for doing!
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Pro-Hamas sentiments are often built on a deluded sense of what that organization actually stands for (annihilation of Jews and the purging of Israel in its entirety). But it is a foundational American principle that speech should be tolerated as far as is tolerable.
So just as Columbia and other colleges must expect to lose federal grants if they fail to protect the civil rights of their students, conservatives should want the speech rights of all students respected as long as their speech does not constitute criminal conduct.