In early March, immigration and customs application arrested Mahmoud Khalil – a student graduated from the University of Columbia, the campus organizer and a legal permanent resident – and arrested him for more than three months, while the Trump administration worked to strip him of his status and deport him. (Khalil has since graduated.) For many, Khalil’s arrest has marked a terrifying inflection point. Here is a legal permanent resident launched in detention for what Secretary of State Marco Rubio clearly admitted to being political reasons. Khalil was transparent and defining a political prisoner. His detention was an early marker that even the legal and political conventions which had held throughout Donald Trump’s first mandate were on the Cup block for an administration led by people like Stephen Miller, whose main point to remember from this first round at the helm was that they were too referred to laws and standards.
Khalil had known that he had incurred the risks of his advocacy on the campus, in particular given the so-called exception of Palestine in liberal support for political discourse, but he thought that he could, all the most, undergo harassment or university discipline. Neither he nor, frankly, longtime long -standing political and political observers like me expected his actions not only attracted the attention of the direct intervention of the federal government. “My understanding of the United States was that they had a solid constitution, a solid law rule,” said Khalil from his apartment, right next to the giant’s institution who recently folded the knee to Trump in the form of a regulation which gives the administration a hand in admissions and the program of studies. “I have never hidden my face; I did not care if I would be doxed … But at no time did I feel that the government would go so low to target freedom of expression. “
In June, a federal judge ordered Khalil’s release and he was finally able to return to his wife and child, who was born when he was detained. Most people, in a situation where the government had already imprisoned them for their speech and has desperately desperately doing so, could choose to keep a low profile. This is not the case for Khalil. “In a period like this, staying silent is complicity,” he said. “Staying silent is not only neutral, because it has a cost, and the cost is that the atrocities would continue, the complicity – whether from the US government or the University of Columbia – would also continue.”
Rather than staying behind, Khalil made a vourbillon trip in July to the American Capitol, where he turned heads and met nearly 20 legislators, largely to urge the adoption of the Blot Act, which would reduce the military expeditions to Israel, and an additional action to address the humanitarian crisis of Gaza, which was then extended to the threat of the imminent mass. A few days earlier, he had brought in federal legal action to receive $ 20 million in damages against the administration that still embodied to hold it.
Khalil is aware of the contrast between his decline and the capitulation of much more powerful people and institutions, including not only his university, but the congress and the courts: “It is like a stain on their history, on their morals, on everything, what they represent.” The Trump administration, he said, intimidates people so that they do not retaliate; These institutions do the same.
All this left Khalil in a somewhat bizarre situation: he is both a lawyer And cause. People went out to protest against his direct name, and it is a recognizable figure worldwide, a reputation that seems to leave him a little disconcerted and a little uncomfortable. However, the fact that he has not chosen his role does not change his conviction that he must take up the challenge. “It is a huge responsibility,” he said, “to see you as a” symbol “of the movement, of this attack on freedom of expression.”
The case of Khalil also had the effect of connecting the actions of Israel to Gaza more concretely to a creeping authoritarianism at home, a link which, according to him, is real and useful to establish. “It is all the same. All this has just … ignore the public, ignore human rights,” he said. “So having this work of cross movement, solidarity, helps absolutely.” According to Khalil, some of the people who wrote to him letters of support during his detention in Louisiana said they were aware of the conflict, but that his arrest had brought him home. The Federal Immigration Application Application, now gave a voucher in white budget by Trump’s Maga budget, is Trump’s attempt to create Khalil’s words, “his own militia which would act in an extrajudicial manner, because the immigration system is so loose, and it is under the total control of the executive branch.”
A question to which Khalil cannot answer is what is exactly the next one, because there will be a after – after the deletion procedure and the trial and the hearing rooms. Before his arrest and detention, he had a plaid work aligned, putting his new graduate diploma at work, but now everything is in the air. “I take it day by day,” he told me. “The murder always occurs. It is not that I can take a break from that because the genocide does not take a break. ” Anyway, Khalil is at least certain that it will have something to do with defending his people, using his unexpected platform to ensure that there is also a term for them. »»
