“This is the first arrest of many to come,” President Trump boasted on Truth Social about the arrest of the Columbia graduate student (and green card holder and pro-Palestinian campus leader) Mahmoud Khalil. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again!” Even more ominously, perhaps: “We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to Comply!”
It is easy to fear where this all might lead, even if you choose to take Trump seriously rather than literally. The State Department is apparently using artificial intelligence to review the social media posts of foreign students, looking for visas it might revoke. On Monday, Ann Coulter suggested that compiling a list of students to deport because of their stances was an obvious violation of the First Amendment. The scholar Samuel Moyn, who spent much of the first Trump term criticizing those hyperventilating about the president, called it “a big and flagrant step towards fascism.” My colleague Michelle Goldberg called it the biggest threat to free speech since the Red Scare.
“The state cannot make it up as it goes along,” John Ganz wrote — as it seems to have done in this case, arresting Khalil without seeming to know he holds a green card, according to his lawyer, or which constitutional protections that afforded him. “If it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law; we live under a police state.”
But the arrest is not only a portent but also a kind of culmination, with a history stretching farther back than Trump’s second inauguration. Those protests have been going on in some form for almost a year and a half, and many of the country’s liberal institutions and organizations regarded them as dubious and perhaps criminal.
When the Trump administration announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants previously promised to Columbia, explicitly to punish the school for its handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, it was both outrageous and unsurprising: the country’s elite schools have been under fire for their handling of such protests; several university presidents have been forced to resign in response. The new administration has reportedly prepared a list of nine additional schools to target.
But the strike against Columbia was especially grotesque, to me, since during last year’s campus protests across the nation, the university delivered the most conspicuously punitive and visible public crackdown. Almost immediately after the attacks of Oct. 7, the university suspended its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, and when the encampment developed the following spring, Columbia invited the New York Police Department on campus to break up the encampment and arrest students.
This school year, the crackdown continued, even after the embattled Columbia president, Minouche Shafik, resigned in August. A new Office of Institutional Equity disciplinary committee has begun investigations into the activism of dozens of students, according to reporting by The Associated Press, including one who reported that her main offense was writing an opinion essay calling on the university to divest from Israel. One professor claimed she was pushed into retirement, and several Barnard students have been expelled for their activism.
Even if you believe that these protests and essays and the quad encampment egregiously interfered with the life of the campus — I don’t — what more could you have realistically asked a university to do to punish them? The problem, it seems, was not the university’s response so much as the fact that there were students inclined to protest at all.