You Shouldn’t Feel Comfortable Deporting Mahmoud Kahlil, Even If It’s Right
I have a controversial opinion: I don't want America to be turned into Syria. If you want to turn America into the Middle East, please stay there. No, thank you.
This hot take of mine has become more relevant in the difficult case of Mahmoud Khalil. It’s a story of free speech, American values, and the necessity of defending them all, mixed up with one question looming above it all:
How do we protect our way of life without losing ourselves in the fight?
Mahmoud Khalil is a legal US resident with a green card who protested against Israel's war in Gaza at Columbia University. Immigration agents arrested Khalil this spring and sent him to a detention center in Louisiana, sparking demonstrations nationwide. He faces deportation.
Before diving into the details of what the Trump Administration is trying to do and why, I want to get you up to speed on who Mr. Khalil is, what he participated in, and why he would face this level of scrutiny and potential deportation as a green card holder.
Pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with the NYPD at Barnard College, culminating in officers in riot gear forcing the mob off campus. Cops had to deal with a bomb threat at the Milstein Center, where demonstrators took over the building for several hours, demanding the reinstatement of students recently disciplined.
Inside the Milstein Center, protesters took over the library and student center, again treating the event almost like a party.
This was at Barnard College, an all-female school affiliated with Columbia University. One thing I find so bizarre is that young women, of all people, have come to the side of Palestinians—a group of people culturally at odds with basic Western notions of women's rights.
It's weird to see young American college women dressing up like Intifada fighters. It’s not a great strategy for winning American public support. It all contains echoes of Jane Fonda in North Vietnam.
As a parent, if my daughter went off to college and soon after was seen cosplaying as a terrorist, I would immediately pull her out of the school or stop paying for it—end of story.
Mahmoud Khalil was not just part of the mob: he was a leading participant, negotiator, and frontman for the group "Columbia United Apartheid Divest" (CUAD). Since the October 7th attacks on Israel in 2023, Khalil helped to organize the protests, plan the building takeovers, and strategize how to disrupt school operations.
Windows smashed… buildings stormed… janitors assaulted… chaos…
Khalil was at the center of this.
To make matters worse for Khalil, he’s associated with some student organizers like Khymani James, who proclaimed that "Zionists don't deserve to live."
James later apologized, of course, but then claimed he was “taken out of context.” Do you believe him?
Khalil and James helped to pen a student manifesto last year that said:
“We are committed to creating a multigenerational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anti-capitalism, decolonization, and combating anti-blackness, queerphobia, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism."
They reject prisons, police, militarism, immigration enforcement, etc, etc.
Oh, and let’s not forget the proclamation on Instagram saying, "We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization."
Eradication… interesting word choice. Is there a peaceful or democratic method of eradicating a civilization?
I don't want Western civilization eradicated. I like it here. I like the founding principles of the United States. You probably do too.
But still, I can at least understand Khalil's anger. If you grew up in the Middle East and watched for decades as Western powers bombed your community and meddled in your society, you would feel resentment. America's history in the Middle East is ugly, from funding the Mujahideen to toppling Iran’s democratically elected government in the 1950s. We’ve botched all of this, horribly.
So while I can empathize with that sense of righteous anger, it doesn't lead me to justify importing radical, totalitarian ideologies into my own home. Nor does it absolve the young, very privileged American students rallying behind these movements, who are supporting mine and their own “eradication.”
The Trump Administration's response was predictable. Trump's Truth Social post said:
"Following my previous signed executive orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a radical foreign pro-Hamas student on Columbia's campus. This is the first arrest of many."
The administration, including Marco Rubio, argues that visitors on visas and even green card holders don't have an absolute right to stay if they engage in certain activities. Ok, fair enough.
When you apply for a visa or green card, you answer questions like:
Have you engaged in activities opposing the US government by force?
Do you intend to endanger the safety of the US?
Have you been affiliated with any totalitarian party?
Khalil’s group’s endorsement of "armed resistance" and its retraction of apologies for pro-Hamas comments makes this a bit more than complicated.
Liberal journalist Glenn Greenwald has articulately warned of a dangerous precedent that could be set here. Legal residents do have free speech rights. If political dissent becomes grounds for deportation, millions could self-censor out of fear. This is not an unreasonable theory. A culture of fear would grow in America that spreads to legal residents and even natural-born citizens.
Still, I kind of want visitors to the country to feel uneasy about advocating openly for the eradication of the place I call home…
Green card holders have rights, but they also have responsibilities. Does that mean we should deport Khalil? I don't really know.
If you’re reading this, you know me. On principle, I believe in free speech and tend to be absolute about it. But Khalil’s views are disturbingly common in American academia, and that's the deeper form of rot that threatens our civilization’s ability to defend its own existence. Nobody gets freedom of speech in America if it collapses from within, with our own elites facilitating the fall.
Polls show patriotism among young Americans collapsing. In 2013, 85% of 18-to-29-year-olds were proud to be American. Today, it's 18%. This collapse mirrors the decline of trust in institutions, religion, and community involvement.
If young Americans don’t love their country, how can the country survive? This raises two final questions I’ll pose for you.
Does a government have the right to control who enters and remains in the country?
Should immigrants who despise Western values be allowed to stay?
Federalism means Americans can choose which state to live in. Global federalism, or the existence of different countries with different values, should be celebrated too. I hate to be that guy, but you don’t have to live in America.
If you want to live under Sharia law or other regimes hostile to Western freedoms, plenty of countries exist for that. I don't want America to become one of them.
Our challenge is defending free speech without becoming complicit in our own destruction. It’s an incredibly hard balancing act, and it makes me a bit queasy. But when I think of the greatest men and women in American history—the ones who built this place and have prevented its dissolution—they faced monumental quandaries when it came to their convictions.
This isn’t supposed to be easy.
TL/DR: Fuck that guy, and all who behave that way. Imagine yourself doing that in any other country in the world. What would you expect to happen to you? Deportation is at the mild end of the spectrum. Especially where that asshole came from.
Here's a controversial opinion for you: I am far more bothered by the recent deportation of the gay makeup artist for no apparent reason other than "suspicious" tattoos. In no way is this kid a criminal, and yet they sent him to the gang prison in El Salvador. He is from Venezuela, so it makes no sense. And he was still in the legal asylum application process, and a productive individual. But for some reason, the kerfuffle over the piece of shit "family man" from El Salvador, who looks more guilty as time goes on, gets ten times more political coverage than the gay kid.
I am old enough to have seen this idiotic dynamic play out so many times, usually with celebrity inmates who were supposedly wrongfully convicted. The likely Innocents get little love from politicians, celebrities, and the media, while the likely guilty become famous. I don't know why people are so dumb. Too many on the left want to spend millions studying root causes of crime, rather than punishing actual predators; and too many on the right can't see the problem with three-strikes policies in which a strike ranges from murder to petty theft. Virtue signaling is an unhealthy addiction that is hazardous to the health of democracies.
John, as you might imagine, the first of these revocation of student visas/green cards cases is designed to send a message to others. It is right message — don’t abuse the generosity of Americans to allow foreign students to study at American schools.