We Must Find Mahmoud Khalil or Lose America
Our Neighbors Are Being Disappeared
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
Yesterday, ICE arrested Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. His lawyer does not know where he is. Nor does his wife, who is pregnant. He is a legal resident of the United States, and a Palestinian who has protested against genocide. Reportedly, ICE told him his student visa had been revoked. This alone would be unacceptable, but worse still, Khalil is not here on a student visa— he has a green card. All of this is relevant— it matters that this is specifically repression of a Palestinian protesting the ongoing killing of his people— and at the same time, none of it is: if a person’s right to counsel and legal status can be entirely ignored, for any reason, then American rule of law is meaningless. This is true whether ICE successfully achieves this illegally, or finds a spurious legal excuse for doing so.
I was an undergrad during one of the foundational “cancel culture” moments. On March 2, 2017, Charles Murray was chased out of a speaking engagement at Middlebury College. He merited the treatment he got. His best-known work, The Bell Curve, is an explicitly eugenicist text responsible in large part for the revival of scientific racist arguments on the right. Forget ethics— the biology and mathematics faculty of any college would have been in their right to run him out of town for the numerous and well-documented inaccuracies in his argument. The rest of his oeuvre is by and large dedicated to justifying racial inequality. And Murray remains happily employed by one of the many right-wing think tanks that can reliably be counted on to fund any noxious idea. He suffered no consequences.
For most of my adult life now— all of which I have spent at a university in some capacity or another!— I have had to witness the odd spectacle of well-paid elite correspondents at major newspapers explain that universities were vicious Orwellian environments in which any deviation from ultraleft thought was punished with Maoist struggle sessions. I have learned, worked, and taught at these institutions, and I can tell you this is false. The first event I have seen that actually fits this narrative is Mahmoud Khalil’s: he has been disappeared for expressing his beliefs.
By the time you are reading this, maybe he will have been returned home safely. Or he may have been deported to Panama, like numerous other deportees, including Iranians and Afghans. Or anywhere else— we don’t know. This “cancel culture” has come not from the courageous and determined protesters at Columbia, but from the federal government, university donors, and administration. It is perhaps the most extreme example of a pattern on display across US universities and employers. Nathan Kalman-Lamb, a Canadian sociologist, was recently barred because of his anti-genocide views from entering the US to give an academic talk on sports. The organization Canary Mission has blacklisted student protesters in an attempt to ruin their careers. I have colleagues who have been publicly called “Hamas sympathizers” for signing decidedly moderate open letters defending students’ right to protest.
Both right-wing “anti-wokeness” and centrist ire at “cancel culture” have proven to be projections: the loudest voices against “cancellation” have embarked on a campaign to destroy their enemies that uses every tactic they imagined the “woke” were. Even American citizens are being punished, by the state: the administration is attempting to revoke Public Service Loan Forgiveness from anyone who has opposed the genocide in Gaza, supported trans healthcare, or protested too disruptively. Khalil’s illegal and immoral arrest is a fundamental violation not merely of particular laws or even constitutional rights, but the very concept of legal rights at all. The MAGA vision of international relations and war— no laws, no rules, no alliances, kill every civilian you need to— is the geopolitical version of this attack on civil liberties, part of a broader underlying vision of an anti-ethical world. The President wants to take us back to a Hobbesian war of all against all in which only the capacity for violence matters. American universities should stand up or cease to be universities, and Americans must stand up, or cease to live in a nation of laws.
Over the next 15 months, Americans— most especially some of the very architects of this repression— will come together to commemorate and celebrate the 250th anniversary of a protest movement that often broke far more laws than anyone at Columbia has been accused of by even the most dishonest anti-Palestinian voices in the country. Khalil’s disappearance in fact is not dissimilar to a number of cases from my own work on American revolutionary history. Sailors with a variety of nationality statuses and political views suffered extrajudicial kidnapping (via impressment, a draft into naval service) in the 1760s. Colonial authorities in Rhode Island arrested mariner John Weber in 1765 (more on him and this in a later series I’ll be doing closer to the 4th of July) because of his protests against these same kidnappings.
Weber was a scapegoat offered up by wealthy elites to placate a repressive state. Given Columbia’s cowardly response to the politically-motivated revocation of $400 million in federal research funding— after it had already persecuted students for the protests the Trump administration used as a pretext— it is not hard to feel like the same is happening here. Americans then responded the way Americans now should: they confronted the authorities and freed their neighbors from detention.
Doing so today is more difficult. America is vast, its police apparatus more powerful, and if one nonviolently assembles a group of like-minded citizens to march on ICE facilities one will be physically detained or attacked. And we don’t actually know where Khalil is. But someone does— workers at this ICE facility, actors elsewhere in government. And others can know— representatives in Congress have a right to demand this information, for example. ICE has always been a lawless organization infringing upon our rights and our democracy by disappearing our neighbors, and this case— while a profound and threatening escalation— only makes that clearer. If you are near an ICE facility, you can and should try to link up with those around you organizing protests there. If you aren’t, you should be calling Congress, and speaking out, insisting that no one around you collaborate with this fascist agenda. Local and regional officials matter too: detention facilities like this are in real places that still have their own state and local governments, and we should demand mayors and governors treat this case as the kidnapping it is.
Others wiser than I will, I hope, have far better proposals for action. This is above all else a call to look for and listen to them. Find a group that suits you— whether that’s DSA or Indivisible— and start organizing and joining local actions to defend freedom and the rule of law, and above all to build a better America, not just to go back to the flawed pre-Trump status quo. If, by the time you read this, Khalil is free, don’t breathe easy. We have more to do.
“America” should not be romanticized, and I imagine some might take issue with my headline here. But the best of our deeply-flawed nation, throughout its entire history, has come from the radical democratic visions of its people. The still unfulfilled promise of democracy and equality— the America represented by Black antislavery activists in the 1760s, Union soldiers a century later, working-class organizers decades after that, and college students facing down the state to oppose genocide— is worth fighting for. That is the America we stand to lose. The present those Americans have made for us is at stake here. So is the future we imagine for our children. Do not let them take it from you.