First They Came for the Student Activists

It's a playbook as old as authoritarianism itself. The first step to suppressing dissent is to instill fear. Make an example of someone. Someone visible. Someone vocal. Someone whose punishment will send a ripple of terror through the ranks of those who dare to think, to organize, to speak. Mahmoud Khalil is that someone.

Over the weekend, plainclothes ICE agents—acting on a Trump administration order—arrested Khalil outside his university-owned apartment. Initially, they claimed his student visa had been revoked, a meaningless assertion since Khalil wasn't on a student visa. When his wife— who is eight months pregnant — retrieved proof of his legal residency, the agents suddenly changed course. Now, his green card was revoked. It was bureaucratic legerdemain, a justification conjured out of thin air.

A Palestinian graduate of Columbia University, Khalil made headlines leading the student protests against Israel. He is a lawful permanent resident who did not commit a crime. Not that it matters - the point was never legality. The point was never justice. The point was never even Mahmoud Khalil himself. The point was the crackdown. The point was sending a message.

And it is a chilling message. It says: if you speak against the government's policies, if you challenge power, if you organize against state violence, you are not safe. Not in your home. Not at your university. Not in a country that purports to value free speech. And if you are an immigrant—even one with legal permanent status—your very existence is conditional, subject to the whims of an administration eager to conflate dissent with terrorism.

The Department of Homeland Security, echoing Trump's slurring rhetoric, claimed that Khalil was "aligned with Hamas," a designation offered without evidence but wielded with purpose. This is how repression works. First, you label your opponents extremists. Then you criminalize them. Then you deport them. Then, maybe, you start arresting citizens too. Maybe the protests grow. Maybe they fade. But the precedent remains.

Tools of authoritarianism are never single-use. Every suppression emboldens the next. Every time American citizens accept that sacrificing freedom is the cost of safety, they move further into a future where safety is an illusion, reserved only for those who never dared to speak.

You don't have to agree with Khalil's politics, rhetoric, demands, or beliefs. But this isn't about one man. This is about the precedent. This is about Trump's war on free speech, his noted and documented "shoot them in the legs" disdain for activists, his executive orders targeting campus protests, and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio openly calling for mass deportations of foreign students who criticize U.S. policy. This is about the escalation, how normalizing one political arrest paves the way for dozens more.

The Anti-Defamation League, in an astonishing betrayal of its supposed mission, cheered this on. ADL leadership praised the "bold" Trump administration for cracking down on campus antisemitism—by which they mean cracking down on student protesters calling for Palestinian freedom. But when the ACLU sounded the alarm, when legal experts pointed out the blatant First Amendment violations, when human rights groups decried this as a targeted political prosecution, the defenders of free speech were notably absent. Silence speaks volumes.

Columbia University has issued its lukewarm statements, claiming it follows the law but refusing to explicitly condemn the detention of one of its own students. This is the cowardice of institutions, the tendency of powerful universities, corporations, and governments to hedge their bets, waiting to see which way the wind blows before deciding whether to care about fundamental freedoms. They hope the students will tire, the media cycle will move on, and the anger will dissipate into resignation.

So far, that hasn't happened. Students have flooded the streets of New York, demanding Khalil's release. His attorneys have filed an emergency petition in federal court, where a judge has temporarily blocked his deportation. His case is a flashpoint, a test of how far this administration will go to crush dissent. And this is only the beginning. More arrests will follow. More universities will be pressured to comply. More protest movements will be labeled security threats rather than what they are: young people resisting systems of violence that they refuse to accept as inevitable.

Today, it's a student. Tomorrow, it could be a union organizer. A journalist. A professor. A citizen. The machinery of subjugation doesn't stop on its own. It expands. Until it is dismantled. Until it meets resistance stronger than its force.

This is the line in the sand. Crackdowns do not end with one case; they metastasize, emboldening those in power to stretch the limits of what the public will tolerate. Every equivocation, every glance away, permits the machinery of state violence to keep turning.

There is no neutral ground. Either people stand against this or watch it grow, knowing full well that it will come for more and more of them next.