Abducting Mahmoud Khalil: America's Free Fall Into Fascism

Trump declares he will relentlessly hunt and abduct more students—whether Columbia collaborates or not—sending a chilling message violating the rule of law.

They came for Mahmoud Khalil in the quiet hours, when the city still belonged to the sleepless and the haunted.

Mahmoud Khalil is not, according to the White House, accused of breaking the law. He is accused of speaking the wrong words, of holding the wrong beliefs.

And the government’s entire case for deporting Mahmoud Khalil hinges on whether Marco Rubio “personally” feels that a student protest negotiator at Columbia “compromises” U.S. foreign policy—as if imperialism needed more fragile gatekeepers.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian refugee raised in Syria, had just entered the lobby of his university-owned apartment building on Columbia’s campus when agents approached him and his 8-months-pregnant wife. They told him he was under arrest because the State Department had revoked his student visa. But he isn’t in the U.S. on a student visa.

The plainclothes officers did not present a physical warrant. Khalil’s attorney, reached by phone in the desperate scramble that followed, informed the agents that his client was alawful permanent resident, a holder of a green card. The words that came next were spoken with the same quiet authority as before, as though truth were a thing that could be altered at will. His green card too had been revoked, they said.

But that’s not how the law works.

There was no trial, no judicially authorized warrant. Just men in plainclothes, armed with the weight of a government that decided his existence was inconvenient, his protesting of genocide, a crime.

On Thursday, Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyer told the court she wasn’t allowed a single word with her client since his detention. No charges, and no due process.

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Erosion of Law and Revisionist Narratives

On Monday, in a post on Donald Trump's Truth Social platform, the US president described Khalil as a "Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student" and announced that his arrest was "the first arrest of many to come.

No trial. No crime. No due process. Just a list. Just a government demanding that universities turn over students who protest against genocide.

Mahmoud Khalil— a student, a husband and a man who had previously worked for the British government on its “flagship soft power policy” for years—was disappeared.

"He went through a vetting process to get the job and was cleared to work on sensitive issues for the British government," Andrew Waller, a former British diplomat told Middle East Eye.

"It's outright defamation what Trump has done. Mahmoud is an extremely kind and conscientious person and he was loved by his colleagues at the Syria Office," he added.

Mahmoud had previously worked as a program manager at the Syria Office in the British embassy in Beirut from 2018 to 2022.

Online records reviewed by MEE show that Khalil worked as a local manager for the Syria Chevening Program, a prestigious UK government international scholarship scheme, as well as for the Conflict, Stability, and Security Fund.

“It's really interesting. Less than two weeks ago JD Vance is lecturing Keir Starmer about free speech, and then the US goes and kidnaps Mahmoud Khalil for organising student protests,” Waller told MEE.

He was charged with nothing. He had committed no crime. But in Trump’s America, it is enough to dissent to be disappeared. The U.S. government, in tandem with Israeli proxies, abducted him without charge, without trial, without hesitation. The machinery of empire, well-oiled and familiar, seemingly swallowed him whole.

They moved him swiftly. Within 24 hours, Mahmoud was in Louisiana, locked in immigration detention, over a thousand miles from the city that erupted in protest, from the wife clutching at shadows, from the lawyer demanding answers that would never come.

A Test Of System’s Limits

This is a system’s test to see what they can get away with. It’s not ending here.

They are not arresting Mahmoud Khalil for a crime. They are not even pretending that he committed one. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” the White House Press Secretary said openly without hesitation.

“Columbia University has been given the names of other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity, and they are refusing to help DHS identify those individuals on campus. And as the president said very strongly in his statement yesterday, he is not going to tolerate that,” the White House Press Secretary said.

“The president is not going to tolerate that,” she said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who got told to “get the f*ck out of here” the last time he was on Columbia’s campus in spring 2024 said, “I went and faced down the angry mob at Columbia at the height of that stuff ... it was dangerous … This guy was apparently a mastermind of that very stuff, the gnashing of teeth … people screaming at me.”

The students at Columbia were building on a tradition of student-led anti-war protests at university: a coalition of students, who were led often times by Jewish students on campus, held rallies and staged “teach-ins” were smeared as “terrorists”.

To those who participated in the protests or stood against US-backed Israeli mass murder of besieged Palestinians, Speaker Johnson said: “Aspiring young terrorists who want to prey upon your Jewish classmates, you're going home .. this is just getting started.”

Make America Lawless Again?

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Mahmoud’s deportation, ordering a hearing on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. in the Southern District of New York. His wife, speaking through tears, said, “Mahmoud is my rock. He constantly puts his needs last when it comes to helping others. I need your help to bring Mahmoud home, so he is here beside me, holding my hand in the delivery room as we welcome our first child into this world.”

Meanwhile, thousands march in the streets. Over a million people sign a petition. Columbia and Barnard faculty, rabbis, and immigrant rights advocates held a press conference condemning his detention.

The Criminalization Of Protesting Genocide

And yet, the precedent has been set: Trump’s White House, built on the foundation laid by Biden’s crackdown on student activism, has made clear that protesting genocide is enough to have you detained. It was the Biden administration’s demonization of student activists as “antisemitic” that paved the way for Mahmoud’s abduction.

“This is the precise moment we should be studying Palestine,” says Palestinian scholar Noura Erakat, “to understand ourselves and our place in the world as an imperial power.”

Mahmoud is Trump’s first political prisoner. They say he is antisemitic, though they present no evidence. They claim he supports terrorism, though the accusations are stitched together from social media posts he did not write. There is no law banning opposition to genocide. And yet, they have disappeared him anyway.

This is Illegal

Trump cannot detain, deport, or disappear a legal U.S. resident simply because he dislikes their views. The Constitution protects free speech for everyone—citizen or not. The Supreme Court has ruled, again and again, that key constitutional rights apply to all people legally on U.S. soil. If that were not true, the government could arrest non-citizens and imprison them for life without trial. That is not how law works. And yet, here we are.

Escalation

Mahmoud is not the first, and he will not be the last. Biden encouraged this crackdown. Trump escalated it. Universities are complicit. Columbia students wrote letters to Mahmoud—Columbia told them their gathering was “unauthorized.” Emails show Mahmoud reached out to the administration one day before he was taken, saying he couldn’t sleep, that he feared ICE “might come to my home.” He named two individuals who had harassed and stalked anti-genocide students: David Lederer and Shai Davidai. Columbia chose to do nothing.

The Media’s Role In Manufacturing Consent

The media, too, plays its role. It echoes unverified claims of “antisemitism” while ignoring the pro-Israel agitators who launched fireworks at student protesters, assaulted them, and openly called for violence and rape. None of them were arrested. None of them were disappeared.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, just days after Mahmoud’s abduction, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett jokes about giving explosive devices to student protesters. The audience laughs. The headline never comes.

Celebrating Oppression

ICE agent Elvin Hernandez, the man who abducted Mahmoud, wasn’t just doing his job—he is being celebrated for it. Hernandez was a special guest at Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address. The official White House account posted a photo of him afterwards, a public pat on the back for his work in silencing dissent.

They aren’t hiding it. They want you to see. They want you to understand: protesting genocide is now a crime. And those who enforce that crime? They get a standing ovation in the halls of power.

Bipartisan Crackdown On Freedom

It was Biden who encouraged the crackdown on student activism. It was Biden who helped criminalize solidarity. And it is Biden who is now silent as Trump pushes it further, as the war on dissent turns into arrests, as the machine devours the very people who once believed themselves protected by law.

It’s not a coincidence that Mahmoud Khalil was kidnapped by ICE right after Trump took $400 million away from Columbia University for not punishing protestors hard enough.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is suing the Trump administration, filing an emergency motion to return Mahmoud to New York. Legal Director Baher Azmy calls it “modern-day McCarthyist repression,” warning that if the courts do not intervene, “this chilling form of repression will only expand.”

So if you think this will stop with Mahmoud, you are mistaken. As Peter Beinart posted on X, “What the Trump administration is now doing to Palestinian students, it will eventually do to pro-Palestinian Jewish students.”

And the ADL will cheer. Because, ultimately, it defends neither American freedom nor American Jews. It defends Israel. And as the protagonist from the award-winning documentary Israelism, reminds us, what is happening in the US is a reminder of what happened in Germany in the middle of the 20th century.

This is the most unconstitutional executive order in history. This is the criminalization of thought. This is lawless tyranny. And the question is not whether you will be next.

The question is when.