Is Mahmoud Khalil the new Emma Goldman?
A WWI-era attorney general exploited Goldman’s notoriety to target thousands of legal immigrants. Trump seems to be doing the same with Khalil.
Screenshot Photo by Getty Images
Larry Cohler-Esses March 14, 2025
A notoriously radical émigré with a violent past is arrested with huge fanfare for inciting protesters to break the law. Convicted and jailed for two years for violating the Espionage Act, she is then deported on completing her sentence despite the fact she’s been a naturalized U.S. citizen for 32 years.
Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist leader, was expelled and shipped off with 249 others in one boat en masse to Russia in 1919. And they, in turn, were just a portion of the thousands of mostly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Catholics from Italy who were swept up under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, a then-young Justice Department official put in charge of a newly established office dubbed the Bureau of Investigation.
American Jews have come far since the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920, led by President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. Back then, 6,000 people, including many Jews viewed as alien radicals, were arrested across 36 cities in a drive that officials vowed would purge America of foreigners said to be threatening its very lifeblood. Thanks only to opposition from Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of Labor, Louis Post, who had authority over deportations, just 556 were eventually expelled.
In many ways, these raids are a better template for understanding the Trump administration’s drive against immigrants today than the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Trump’s rule is often being compared to that later time, an era that destroyed the reputations and careers of numerous Americans, and made them more fearful to frankly voice their views. But there were no mass deportations. It is the Palmer Raids that explicitly sought to tie thousands of legal immigrants to radicalism and criminality as a prelude to expelling them by the boat (or plane) load.
Last Saturday’s high-profile arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is Trump’s bid to replay Palmer — the opening shot of a campaign not just against undocumented immigrants now, but legal immigrants, as well. Khalil, a 30-year-old Palestinian graduate student from Algeria, helped lead Columbia University’s student encampment protests against Israel last year.
Khalil’s nabbing comes accompanied by loud — but so far, unsupported — government denunciations of him as a pro-Hamas terrorist. As was the case with Emma Goldman, he is a permanent legal resident. And like Goldman, he is being touted now as the embodiment of wider fears about even legal foreign immigrants.
“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump himself promised Wednesday on his social media platform, Truth Social.
More than 100 years ago, Goldman personified the fears many Americans harbored about the widespread enthusiasm Jewish Eastern European immigrants showed for the Bolshevik Revolution, which had only recently seized power in Russia, ruthlessly overthrowing an oppressive and antisemitic tsar. Never mind that Goldman herself was a communist anarchist who staunchly opposed state power of any kind. For millions, she was the face of foreign radicalism.
Khalil similarly personifies widespread fear of Arabs and Muslims, and Palestinians in particular, for many Americans today, including many Jews, who see them as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, supporters of everything from 9-11 to the atrocities Hamas committed against Israelis and others on Oct. 7, 2023.
Except, of course, Goldman was more violent — and much more radical. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Lithuania, then within the Russian Empire, Goldman fled poverty by immigrating to America in 1885, only to find herself working 10 hours a day in a grueling Rochester, NY sweatshop for $2.50 week — less than $70 in today’s currency — in an era bereft of food stamps, Medicaid or other support programs. Moving to New York City, she burst into the hothouse of émigré political life in 1887 as a charismatic disciple of anarchist leader Johann Most, an advocate of “propaganda of the deed” — the use of violence to instigate change.
Goldman did not remain a mere advocate. Together with Alexander Berkman, a fellow anarchist who became her lover, she plotted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, the manager of a steel plant in Homestead, Penn. owned by Andrew Carnegie. In 1892, Frick’s use of Pinkerton guards to break a strike there led to a 12-hour gunfight between the guards and armed steel workers in which seven guards and nine strikers were killed. Goldman and Berkman crafted a plan for Berkman to murder Frick in retaliation while Goldman would explain his motives to the public — the propaganda part of “propaganda of the deed.”
Berkman shot the steel executive three times and stabbed him in the leg, but Frick survived. Berkman went to prison. But police were unable to find enough evidence to convict Goldman as his accessory.
One year later, they got her. During the financial Panic of 1893, with unemployment at more than 20%, undercover agents charged Goldman with inciting a crowd of more than 3,000 during a rally in Union Square by ordering them to “take everything…by force!” Goldman denied ever saying this. And others offered different versions. But a New York jury believed the police witness at a trial in which the district attorney delved deeply into Goldman’s political beliefs and atheism, and the judge described her as “a dangerous woman.” Goldman served one year in prison.
It was her leadership role advocating resistance to the military draft during World War I that finally got Goldman deported. In June 1917, police seized “a wagon load of anarchist records and propaganda” when they raided the offices of Goldman’s journal, Mother Earth on 125th Street, The New York Times reported. Charged with conspiracy to “induce persons not to register” based on this evidence, Goldman was convicted under the recently enacted Espionage Act and sentenced to two years in prison, to be followed by deportation. Her protests that she was a U.S. citizen were rejected when the Department of Labor determined that her naturalization was no longer valid.
Compared to all this, Khalil’s background, at least as it’s known so far, just can’t compete. To date: No wagon loads of propaganda. No history of involvement in murderous conspiracies, or even violence. No identification of any statements he has made inciting others to violence. Will he be able to play the role the government seems to want him to play as a symbolic boogeyman for its wider aims?
Asked what evidence the government had to support its claims that he backs Hamas, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Khalil had disrupted college campus classes, harassed Jewish-American students, and “distributed pro-Hamas propaganda — flyers with the logo of Hamas.” Set aside, for a moment, whether this last charge, even if true, is speech protected by the First Amendment. Set aside, too, whether such speech is something to which legal residents who are non-citizens are entitled. What about those flyers? Pressed for details about them, Leavitt simply demurred.
“I thought about bringing them into this briefing room to share with all of you,” she said. “But I didn’t think it was worth the dignity of this room to bring that pro-Hamas propaganda.”
In an NPR interview Thursday, Troy Edgar deputy secretary of Homeland Security, was unable to specify any criminal act committed by Khalil, despite being repeatedly asked to do so. And on March 9, rather than accuse Khalil of supporting Hamas, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin instead accused Khalil of “activities aligned to Hamas.” [Emphasis added.]
A lawyer for Khalil, Samah Sisay, says that there is no evidence his client provided support of any kind to a terrorist organization.
We shall see. Khalil is so far known to have acted as a negotiator on behalf of the anti-Israel students in their talks with Columbia administration officials. Allegations that there is video footage showing him harassing Jewish students at protests have not been confirmed by the government. And in the absence, so far, of being able to identify any criminal act he has committed, Justice Department officials are instead relying on a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationalities Act. The provision gives the secretary of state the power to expel foreigners whom he has “reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Unlike Goldman, Khalil is not a U.S. citizen. But neither is he here merely on a temporary student visa. Married now to a U.S. citizen who is pregnant with their first child, Khalil holds a green card, which entitles holders to permanent residency.
To this, Secretary of State Marco Rubio replied on March 10, “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with….No one has a right to a green card, by the way.”
Just a day before he was arrested, Khalil emailed Columbia’s president, pleading for protection amid threats of targeted deportation. “He was worried about detention by ICE and doxxing, and actions by private actors,” Ramzi Kassem, a member of Khalil’s legal team, told the Columbia Spectator, the campus daily.
Khalil’s fear of “private actors” may have a sound basis. In a trove of emails leaked to the campus paper, members of a Whatsapp group called Columbia Alumni for Israel, talked at length about how they might identify leaders of the anti-Israel campus movement through the use of technology.
Members of the chat group called for the expulsion, arrest and deportation of pro-Palestinian protesters, according to the messages obtained by the Spectator. “We need the powers that be to squash them like roaches,” wrote Victor Muslin, a technology executive and a leader of the group. “Ignoring roaches in one’s house is possible but who wants to live that way?”
The exchanges reflect the reality that Jews are no longer the poor and hapless objects of a mainstream America in fear of their radicalism. It may even be that today’s hapless, if they’re seen as radical, have reason to be afraid of some Jews. After Oct. 7, 2023 and the undeniable harassment and intimidation of some Jews on college campuses, Jews have grounds for fears of their own. But it’s also a Jewish judge, Jesse Furman, whose injunction against Khalil’s deportation is the only thing now keeping him from being shipped off like Emma Goldman.
This raises the question: Will Jews support the Trump administration’s use of Mahmoud Khalil to launch a new and wider anti-immigrant campaign — one against legal residents whose views or backgrounds Trump abhors? Or will Jews remember that they, too, “were once strangers in the land of Egypt?”
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