Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is a shanda for democracy (and, yes, for Jews)
Why is President Donald Trump so insistent on not following the law?
Demonstrators outside of a New York court protest the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and recent Columbia graduate who played a role in pro-Palestinian protests at the university, on March 12. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman March 12, 2025
I don’t know if Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia grad and pro-Palestinian protest leader, is a threat to the security of the United States, and neither do you.
I do know that Khalil — a green card holder who ICE agents arrested last weekend at his university-owned apartment and carted off to a detention facility in Louisiana — has a constitutional right to due process. And so do you.
Which demands that we ask: Why does President Donald Trump, in taking on the very real problem of campus antisemitism, intimidation and harassment, have to undermine the rule of law — while purporting to maintain it?
Whatever Khalil did or didn’t do was almost certainly less dangerous than the Trump administration’s refusal to follow due process. In case after case, the administration is choosing to disregard the law, move fast, break things, keep the opposition on its heels and demonstrate “toughness,” all at the expense of the Constitution — and the basic efficacy of our government. Elon Musk came in and made drastic cuts to government agencies, only to have courts or agency heads reverse them. Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship, which a federal judge then called “blatantly unconstitutional.” He froze federal grants across a wide range of departments, a decree that a judge again ordered him to pause.
That’s why when news broke that Khalil, who is 30 and was born in Syria to a Palestinian family, had been swept up and whisked away by law enforcement agents, my first reaction was: Here they go again. I suspected a judge would stay deportation proceedings — and Judge Jesse Furman, who is Jewish, has. (Khalil’s first hearing was Wednesday; the next motions in his case are expected Friday.)
In certain ways, Khalil’s arrest is unprecedented. In other ways, under Trump’s administration, it’s another instance of routine: Those in power take outlandish actions only to be checked by another branch of government, and as the bureaucracy slowly muddles toward a resolution, individuals suffer.
It doesn’t have to be like this. It shouldn’t. The 1952 McCarran Walter Act, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked to detain Khalil, does not give the government far-reaching powers to revoke the rights of permanent residents at will. Instead, the law states the authorities must reasonably determine that the person’s presence in the U.S. poses serious adverse consequences to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.
That leaves room for judicial review, not a midnight knock on the door and one-way ticket to a holding center where neither your lawyer nor your family can reach you. (Furman, in today’s hearing, ordered that Khalil be allowed privileged phone calls with his legal team.)
Whatever Khalil did or didn’t do, meanwhile, is left for partisans and hacks to fight over. In what he thought was a damning column, a New York Post writer accused Khalil of giving an interview to Quds News Network, “completely in Arabic.”
Really, is that the bar?
“I’m much more hawkish than a lot of people,” Professor Jonathan Zasloff, a professor of law at UCLA, said in a telephone interview. “But when the United States argues, ‘We have to do this because of national security,’ and won’t tell you exactly what the problem is, usually, it’s invented.”
This isn’t about whether it’s right or wrong to defend Khalil; it’s about defending the Constitution, which guarantees due process. And this latest attempt to do an end run around that guarantee is so on brand for this administration I have to believe it wasn’t done out of general incompetence, but purposefully — and again, I’m left wondering why.
The author Neal Gabler has a compelling answer. There has long been an undercurrent in American life that rejects order, law and the liberal values on which they are based. Some Americans prefer disorder, Gabler writes, quoting the historian Henry Steele Commager in his classic The American Mind: “Rules represented tradition, and discipline authority,” Commager wrote. That sort of American “knew that his country had become great by flouting both.”
Trump doesn’t act or speak for all the United States — and unlike Gabler, I am more optimistic that the country will soon spurn him and the party that enables him — but he does act on behalf of this kind of American.
“The arbitrariness is the point,” Zasloff said of Khalil’s detention, “because they’re playing to an audience that wants anarchy and arbitrariness and doesn’t really want rules.”
The cruelty was embodied in the way the administration chose to announce Khalil’s detention. On the social media site X, it posted a photo of Khalil and the words, “Shalom Mahmoud.”
That’s a special kind of cruel: co-opting the Hebrew word for “peace” to announce what could very well be an unjust act of state power, which Jews themselves have so often been the victims of.
There are thoughtful, effective ways to address campus antisemitism — and yes, universities and former President Joe Biden’s administration should have prioritized enacting them sooner and more effectively.
But trampling First Amendment rights and legal norms just to stick it to the libs? Shalom Constitution.
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