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| Protesters gather at courthouse to support Mahmoud Khalil (NY Times) |
In the wake of Donald Trump's order to arrest pro-Palestinian protest organizer Mahmoud Khalil, government investigators now are scouring social media for posts showing protesters' support for Hamas, according to a report from The Evening newsletter at The New York Times (NYT). That news arrived as Khalil appeared in court yesterday. Under the headline "Columbia activist’s deportation case goes to court," Matthew Cullen writes:
Outside a Manhattan courthouse, hundreds of protesters gathered to criticize the Trump administration’s plan to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate who helped lead protests there against Israel. Inside, a judge said he would grant Khalil’s lawyers the ability to speak with him privately for the first time since he was arrested and sent to immigration detention in Louisiana.
The case is at the center of President Trump’s effort to expel foreign students who took part in last year’s campus protests over the war in Gaza. After months of threatening deportations, Trump celebrated the arrest of Khalil, a legal permanent resident with a green card, as the first of “many to come.”
Behind the scenes, federal investigators who typically focus on human traffickers and drug smugglers have been searching social media for posts showing protesters’ sympathy toward Hamas. (is that a good use of government resources? Is it an example of Trump producing "fraud and waste"? Maybe we need to ask Elon Musk, the expert on this sort of thing.) The authorities have not accused Khalil of having any contact with the terrorist group or providing material support to it. Instead, Trump’s aides are arguing that he had organized antisemitic activities on campus, which makes him deportable under an obscure legal statute.
“This is not about free speech,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said today. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.” Trump’s critics argue that Khalil’s pending deportation is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
The arrest put a spotlight on Columbia, which has been struggling with the competing demands of free speech and student safety. Last week, the Trump administration revoked $400 million in federal funds for the school.
In related higher education news, Yale suspended a scholar after an A.I.-powered news site accused her of having links to terrorists.
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