Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk were the canaries in the coal mine. Now, we may all suffocate.

By: Mira Costello

Editor-in-Chief

You’ve probably never been arrested. Still, you have an idea of what it would look like: people with guns and badges put you in handcuffs. They tell you you’ve been charged with a crime. They take you to jail. You get one call. Maybe you’re guilty – maybe you’re not. Either way, you’ll get the chance to make your case.

Now imagine you’re getting home from dinner, making your way upstairs to your apartment. People in t-shirts approach you. They tell you your student visa was revoked – this confuses you, because you don’t have a student visa; you’re a legal permanent resident with a green card, married to a U.S. citizen. They say that actually, your green card was revoked. They don’t tell you why. They force you to come with them. Your lawyer and your spouse have no idea where you are for almost two days.

Of course, this story isn’t about you –  it’s about Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University who was kidnapped from his student housing complex by plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers March 8 and taken to an ICE facility in Jena, Louisiana. He’s still there, facing deportation.

What was his crime? At first, he had no charges. Weeks later, the government said he misrepresented himself on his visa application by “failing to disclose” work with international aid organizations.

He’s far from the only one. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student on an F-1 visa, was abducted March 27 from the sidewalk by masked, plainclothes DHS officers, forced into a van and flown to Louisiana. She was missing for 24 hours. In security footage, a bystander asks who the officers are. “We’re the police,” they say. “Yeah, you don’t look like it,” the bystander says. 

Like Khalil, she has no charges. She did, however, co-author an editorial regarding demands for Tufts to divest from Israel.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he has the authority to deport anyone who poses “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Apparently, Khalil, Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, Yunseo Chung, Rasha Alawieh and multiple other academics pose such a threat.

Those who are students of history, who are paying attention and seeing the bigger picture, know the truth: Khalil was targeted because he helped organize Columbia’s pro-Palestine protests. The Trump Administration didn’t like the way he exercised his freedom of speech, so they’re calling him a terrorist sympathizer and trying to make him go away.

I’m not a lawyer, but I am a journalist, so I read Title 8 of the U.S. Code on aliens and nationality. What I know now is that it’s illegal to deport someone for their beliefs or expression if those same beliefs and expressions would be allowed of a U.S. citizen. And I know that Khalil’s activism had nothing to do with “terrorism.” 

I didn’t have to dig too deep to discern the motive for targeting Khalil and others. They’re saying the quiet part out loud: if you do something the government doesn’t like, you won’t be in this country much longer. 

Rubio said over 300 visas have been revoked from “lunatics” – almost all scholars and students – and that the DHS is searching for more every day. He’s made it clear that he does not believe the First Amendment applies to people who weren’t born in the United States.

“If they’re taking activities that are counter to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa. They’re here to go to class. They’re not here to lead activist movements that are disruptive and undermine our universities. I think it’s lunacy to continue to allow that,” he said. 

As a reminder, Khalil was not on a student visa. He had a green card. 

Tom Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar”, doesn’t appear to believe that dissent is free speech at all.

“When you are on campuses – I hear ‘speech’, ‘freedom of speech’, ‘freedom of speech’ – can you stand at a movie theater and yell ‘fire’? Can you slander? Free speech has limitations,” he said.

None of this is surprising after statements from the president himself, like his March 4 post on Truth Social that said, “All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests.”

In another post, he said, “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”

What is an “illegal protest”?

What – if you really think about it – is a “terrorist sympathizer”? What if I told you that as long as the speech is First-Amendment protected, it’s completely legal to express support for the views of a designated terror organization?

What is the logical conclusion of this rhetoric?

You may think you are safe because you are not an immigrant. Because you are not Black or brown. Because you have never been to a protest or written an op-ed. But you are wrong.

Authoritarianism is a death by a thousand cuts, just like the famous poem tells us. First, they came for undocumented immigrants. Then, they came for legal residents. Next, will they come for naturalized citizens? Dual citizens? Even indigenous people? How long will it take for the net to grow so wide that it ensnares you? At what point will you start to care? 

More importantly, do you want to live in whatever country will remain when all dissent is silenced?
This is not someone else’s fight. This is your fight – you, personally, even if you “don’t like politics” or “aren’t very educated on the issue.” You have to speak. Speak when you are scared, confused, uncertain, angry, sad, proud, emboldened, passionate. If you shut up in advance, they’ve already won.