Trump seeks to deport those who offend him
In the 1920s, many Americans had little use for Italian immigrants and less use for anarchists. When two men who checked off both boxes — Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – were charged with murder and robbery at a shoe company in Braintree, Massachusetts, they were swiftly convicted.
Seven years and many appeals later, they were executed.
Before their deaths, however, the men became global causes célebres. Writers, artists and academics claimed they were found guilty on thin evidence and were really victims of political sentiment and anti-immigrant feelings. Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter, later a Supreme Court Justice, argued for their innocence in a book, “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen.”
Are we seeing a similar railroading now in the deportation cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Dr. Rasha Alawieh? Are they being given the bum’s rush because of political sentiments and anti-immigrant feelings?
Certainly, the stakes are not as high in the case of the former Columbia University pro-Palestinian demonstrator, Khalil, and the Lebanese physician, Alawieh, a devotee of a dead Hezbollah leader. Deportation is a far cry from execution and murder isn’t on the table here.
But are there troubling parallels? Are we seeing a miscarriage of justice that threatens such cherished principles as free speech and free thought? Unlike Sacco and Vanzetti, there has been no trial for either Khalil or Alawieh, but nonetheless they are high-profile targets of enforcement arms that seem to run on presumptions of guilt and little or no need for proof of wrongdoing.
So far, the two are not accused of much more than speaking their minds or just having noxious views. Neither has been charged with any crime. Neither has been alleged to have given “material support” to terrorists, one standard for a criminal charge (this was a key finding in cases I wrote about in a book about Somali-American terrorists, “Divided Loyalties.”)
But both have views offensive to President Trump and his administration and, inarguably, to many other Americans. For what it’s worth, count me among those who find Khalil’s stance on Israel repugnant, and I hold no brief for Hezbollah leaders or any who support them. But, as Americans, we all have the right to take umbrage at differing views, even as we defend the rights of others to hold them.
Consider the attitude of an ardent Zionist, Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth, as he told Politico:
“I was really shocked that someone in the United States would be arrested for having participated in a lawful demonstration,” Roth said. “I assumed there were some other justifications, I thought there would be some crime that had been committed for which the individual was being held accountable. But as I learned more about it, I saw that this was part of this broader attempt to intimidate people from protesting in ways that the White House doesn’t like.”
The Wesleyan president went still further, lambasting the McCarthyesque atmosphere the Trump Administration is creating.
“People are really afraid to be targeted by the government, whose powers are extraordinary, and when they’re willing to arrest or detain someone without charge and threaten to deport him without charges, that’s very frightening,” he said.
To get specific, Khalil was a graduate student a Columbia last spring and rose to prominence as a spokesman and negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student coalition protesting the Gaza War. As The New York Times reported, he was videotaped shouting “Free Palestine” in a campus demonstration.
While Khalil became the face and voice of the protestors, and he often criticized Israel, it’s not clear that he ever said anything supporting Hamas. He was involved with a protest in the Barnard library at which fliers promoted the terrorist group, but so far there is no proof he had anything to do with the leaflets.
“It remains unclear what exactly Mr. Khalil is believed to have done,” the Times reported. “He is accused by the White House and others of organizing protests, such as the one in the Barnard library, where participants distributed fliers promoting Hamas. A flier that was shown in online postings from the library said it had been produced by the ‘Hamas Media Office.’ It was titled ‘Our Narrative’ and listed Hamas’s code name for the Oct. 7 attacks, with an image of fighters standing on a tank.”
But a friend of Khalil told the paper “he did not touch those fliers.”
Khalil is legally a permanent resident but not a citizen of the United States. Based on that status, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has cited a law that lets the government deport a noncitizen if his presence is deemed adversarial to American foreign policy interests. That is an “extraordinary attestation” consistent with an “emergency-happy administration” whose “broad aim is clearly to curtail or nullify constitutional protections under cover of unreviewable authority,” writes former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman.
And it’s very likely that Khalil’s case will test whether Trump and Rubio will have the right to toss out anyone whose views on just about anything offend them, according to Georgetown University law professor Stephen I. Vladeck.
Vladeck, editor and author of the Supreme Court newsletter “One First,” points to a Trump social media post in which the president says “This is the first arrest of many to come.” To Trump, Vladeck said, “Khalil’s is not a special case.”
Trump in his post also said: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
To the law professor, that suggests a big muzzle that Trump plans to affix on noncitizens and license for him to deport at will.
“And that, to me, is the scariest part—for it suggests that the government intends to use these rarely invoked removal authorities in enough cases to seek to deter non-citizens of any immigration status from speaking out about sensitive political issues, even in contexts in which the First Amendment does, or at least should, clearly protect their right to do so,” Vladeck writes.
He concludes: “If anything is anti-American, it’s threatening non-citizens who are in this country legally and have committed no crimes with the specter of being arrested, detained, and removed for doing nothing more than speaking up on behalf of unpopular causes—even, if not especially, unpopular causes with which many of us may well disagree.”
Khalil’s case will be especially notable, too, because the administration appears to have venue shopped it. Khalil was hustled off to Louisiana from New York City, where he had been living in a Columbia University apartment building. Trump appears to count on getting a more sympathetic hearing from judges in Louisiana, especially on appeal.
“The Fifth Circuit is the court I’d least want to be in if I were Khalil,” Vladeck told The New York Times. “It is a court where immigrants in general have a historically poor track record, and it’s a court in which judges are going to be most sympathetic to the government’s ability to point at someone and say, ‘You supported Hamas.’”
Recall, moreover, that Trump seems to have a particular animus toward Columbia. His administration is imposing $400 million in federal funding cuts on the university, much of which is imperiling medical research. He’s blaming what his minions in a Department of Education release call “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
Never mind that the Anti-Defamation League has praised many of the university’s efforts to battle antisemitism, even while contending it has a ways to go. Or that critics such as Times of Israel blogger Ethan Brown argue that the administration action “targets the wrong institution, disrupts critical research in climate science, technology, and medicine, and does nothing to protect Jewish students.” He argues: “We deserve real protection from harassment on campus, not a political stunt that exploits our community to attack our values.”
As a rabbi of my acquaintance put it in a personal note regarding both Khalil and the funding cut: “I’m really angry that all of this is supposedly being done for the sake of Jews. Deporting a green card-holder for organizing campus protests — no matter how much I disagreed with the protests and their antisemitic rhetoric — won’t make Jews any safer, it will just erode free speech rights for everyone … Columbia has one of the highest proportions of Jewish students AND Jewish professors — all of whom are losing a massive amount of research funding supposedly to protect Jews.”
As for Alawieh, her offense appears to be a matter of holding unsavory views. On a two-week trip home to see her parents in Lebanon in February, she attended a funeral for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, killed last fall in an Israeli air attack. She also was accused of having photos of him and “fighters and martyrs” on her phone that she deleted to avoid running afoul of border protection agents in returning to Boston.
“According to Dr. Alawieh, she follows [Nasrallah] for his religious and spiritual teachings and not his politics,” court documents in her case stated.
Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist in the U.S. under a visa that let her to work as an assistant professor at Brown University, was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel at Logan Airport on March 13 and then deported the following day.
When relatives went to court on March 14 to keep her in the U.S., a federal judge set a hearing for March 17 and ordered that she stay in Massachusetts. By then, however, she was on a plane bound for Paris, the initial stop on the way to Lebanon. The judge cancelled the Monday hearing, though he has scheduled others in coming weeks.
“A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.
Alawieh, who had been in the U.S. since 2018 on an H-1B visa, was not known to be politically active. A demonstration supporting her drew some 200 people to the Rhode Island State House on March 17, including several doctors wearing their scrubs. Signs there read “Hands off our colleagues. Hands off our patients. Abolish ICE.”
Among those on hand were Dr. Paul Morrissey, surgical director of organ transplant division at Brown University Health. He told The Boston Globe that Alawieh works on getting people in Rhode Island on the list for a kidney transplants, a crucial job at a time of acute need for the organs.
“It’s an unfortunate set of circumstances,” Morrissey said. “It’s putting a strain on our office. Her work has been exceptional.”
Dr. George Bayliss, who directs the organ transplant division at Rhode Island Hospital, also condemned the deportation. Alawieh had been part of the transplant service at the hospital.
“This is outrageous,” Bayliss told the Globe. “This is a person who is legally entitled to be in the U.S., who is stopped from re-entering the country for reasons no one knows. It’s depriving her patients of a good physician.”
He added: “She’s really a very humble and able person … She takes care of her patients. She is talented and thoughtful and a great addition to our division.”
Sacco and Vanzetti had plenty of people speaking up for them in their day. In the end, it made no difference. Will that be the case for Khalil and Alawieh? And will they just be the first of many to come?