Trump Cheers Chilling Arrest of Palestinian Activist Mahmoud Khalil
Donald Trump is celebrating the detention of Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, despite his being a green card holder.
The president boasted about Khalil’s arrest on his Truth Social account Monday afternoon, calling him “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University,” and warned, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”
“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Trump posted. “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.”
Last week, Trump threatened to pull funding from schools that allow “illegal protests” and added that “agitators” would be “imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.” Following this, the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University for what it called “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
The president is making good on his threats and gloating about it, and the fact that Khalil is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian origin suggests that the administration’s first targets may be ethnically motivated. Plus, it overlaps with Trump’s goal of mass deportations of immigrants, only in this case, the president is including legal immigrants in this attack on the First Amendment. Will Democrats stand up and demand free speech protections, or will they oppose pro-Palestinian protesters?
