Mahmoud Khalil’s Actions, Not His Beliefs, Got Him In Trouble

Mahmoud Khalil is to be deported, and that is just. “Trump administration lays out its evidence for deporting activist Mahmoud Khalil,” by Joel Rose and Adrian Florido, NPR, April 10, 2025:

Lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security released their evidence against Khalil, who is a lawful permanent resident, after an immigration judge in Louisiana ordered them to do so at a hearing on Tuesday.

The Trump administration is trying to deport the 30-year-old, who played a prominent role in campus protests last year. Judge Jamee Comans said she will rule on Friday whether Khalil can be deported or whether he must be freed. Whichever side loses is likely to appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Khalil’s case has become a crucial test for how far the Trump administration can go to deport noncitizen protesters. Khalil insists he was expressing support for Palestinians in Gaza, while administration officials accuse him of providing support to Hamas terrorism….

Is calling for Israel’s disappearance (“From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free”) and the expulsion or killing of its Jewish inhabitants merely “expressing support for Palestinians”? He defended the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, describing them, with evident approval, as the “Palestinian resistance.” Is that not a defense of Hamas, a designated terrorist group?

After Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Khalil on March 8 and shipped him to Louisiana, Rubio said he had revoked Khalil’s green card.

Rubio relied on a rarely used statute from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that authorizes the secretary of state to personally order the deportation of people whose presence in the U.S. the secretary believes “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

But after the Cold War ended, lawmakers modified the law to protect “beliefs, statements, or associations” that are “lawful within the United States,” and raised the standard for deportation to cases in which the foreigner’s presence in the U.S. would “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”

Well, isn’t the fight against designated terrorist groups a “compelling United States foreign policy institute”? And didn’t Mahmoud Khalil give his support to one such group, Hamas and urge others to do likewise? And aren’t Khalil’s accusations of “genocide” being committed by the only Jewish state both a lie, and an attempt to undermine support for Israel, whose survival and well-being the American government rightly regards as a “compelling United States foreign policy interest?

In the memo, Rubio concedes that Khalil’s activities would be “otherwise lawful” but says that they nevertheless “undermine U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States.”

But Khalil’s lawyers say Rubio has not shown any evidence to support that conclusion.

“His determination, quote unquote, has absolutely nothing to do with foreign policy,” Van Der Hout [Khalil’s lawyer] said. “What does he talk about? He talks about First Amendment activity in the United States and the effect on people in the United States.”

Van Der Hout’s objection makes no sense. The brainwashing of American students, the deliberate spreading of antisemitic canards, has a direct effect on our foreign policy. We are a democracy, and if the voters’ minds can be poisoned with false charges against Israel, that will inexorably lead to a change in our foreign policy toward the Jewish state and those who would destroy it.

Days after Khalil was arrested and detained, Homeland Security officials charged him with several additional civil violations. They allege he withheld information on his 2024 green-card application, including his work history with a United Nations relief agency and his involvement with a pro-Palestinian activist group at Columbia University.

Was Khalil working for one of those UN groups such as UNRWA that have been penetrated by Hamas operatives? And what was the pro-Palestinian activist group at Columbia that he had been involved with? We’d like to know more about that group, and its activities, but I am sure that Rubio made a thorough investigation before citing Khalil’s involvement in the group as one of the reasons his green card had been revoked.

It is not his “beliefs” that have landed Mahmoud Khalil in trouble. It is his acting on those beliefs. He may dislike Israel all he wants. But he is not entitled to express that dislike by disrupting campus life, shouting down anyone trying to say a word in supporting Israel (thus violating the free speech of others), screaming hatred for, and making false claims against, the Jewish state, calling for that state’s obliteration and the annihilation of its Jewish inhabitants, creating a hostile atmosphere on campus that Jewish students find threatening, shutting down courses given by Israeli professors, encouraging his followers to seize and vandalize campus buildings. These are acts that have consequences.

And this is what Mario Rubio should now lay out, in a second, much longer letter than the two-page memo he has submitted, in all its incriminating detail, Mahmoud Khalil’s involvement with a UN agency in Lebanon that may have terrorist ties, his role as the student leader of the Columbia protesters, joining them in chants calling for Israel’s destruction, encouraging them to harass Jewish students and to try to shut down classes taught by Israeli professors, to invade and vandalize university property, and much more that goes far beyond mere “beliefs.”

That should. be justification enough for taking away his green card, putting him on a plane, and deporting him, along with his wife and child, to a country — Syria? Lebanon? Qatar? — where he will be able to fit right in. He might even be given a sinecure at Al Jazeera.