David Cole

Thanks for having me.

Well, as you indicated in your opening, they were arrested at gunpoint. They were all detained initially as national security threats. When we challenged that assertion, the government said it wanted to rely on secret evidence that we couldn't see to show that they were security threats.

The judge said, no, I'm not going to look at secret evidence unless you can show it to the defendants, essentially. And the government said, OK, well, then we're not going to show it to the judge either. And they were allowed out. So they were free after about the first month. They were free for the entire 20-year saga of their case.

But it took 20 years to prevail in a case in which the government targeted our clients not for engaging any criminal activity at all, but for essentially advocating for Palestinian self-determination.

Well, because they were free, they were able to work. Some of them got green cards while the case was going on. The principal restriction on them was that they weren't able to leave the country permanently. without giving up their case.

And so a number of them lost parents who were living back in Palestine and were unable to go see their parents in the last years, months, days of their lives without giving up their right to stay in this country. And they just had, for two decades, hanging over their heads the fact that they may want

lose the right to be in this country despite the fact that they engaged in no unlawful activity because of what they said and what they believed in.

Well, it's really deja vu all over again. The government is targeting Palestinians engaged in nothing more than protest activities on campuses. Why? Because the government disagrees with the viewpoints expressed. And so they are seeking to deport people for their speech. And what we established in the LA-8 case was that the First Amendment protects all of us in the United States.

It doesn't limit its protections to citizens. It protects everyone in the United States, whether you're a citizen or an immigrant, whether you're here on a student visa or a permanent resident visa, or even if you're here illegally, you have First Amendment rights. The government can't prosecute you

for burning an American flag or for saying something offensive or for advocating in favor of Palestinian rights or against Israel. And it also can't deport you for doing the same thing.

Well, I think it's really a weaponization of anti-Semitism to target campuses, to target universities. The right disagrees with many of the perspectives that are prevalent on universities, and they have sought to attack universities for that very reason. And this charge of anti-Semitism has given them a pretext to to go after a set of institutions that they don't like because it is liberal.

And I think the Trump administration has escalated that because universities are an important part of civil society that provide a source for checking government abuse, for providing criticism of government, and they don't like that. So they are seeking to neutralize that opposition by targeting students who engage in activism and targeting universities like Columbia

if they don't crack down sufficiently harshly on that activism.

Well, I think, first of all, the notion that a college student's speech on a single campus in the United States somehow poses serious adverse foreign policy consequences is laughable. We're stronger than that. We can tolerate the fact that people, students speak out on campus without our foreign policy going down the tube. So the assertion is... blatantly pretextual.

But in addition, it's a violation of the First Amendment because what is the basis upon which he says Mr. Khalil's activities undermine our foreign policy? Nothing more than his pure speech. And speech is protected for all of us.

Well, I think what we did in the LA-8 case, they were initially charged with a similarly obscure provision. It made you deportable for being a member of a group that advocated world communism. And we challenged the constitutionality of that provision as a violation of the First Amendment.

We said citizens have the right to be members of groups that advocate world communism or to advocate world communism themselves. and can't be prosecuted for it. And so non-citizens also have the same right to engage in that activity because the First Amendment does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens. We won on that ground.

And I suspect that Khalil will make the same arguments that he has the same First Amendment rights as citizens. And if you can't prosecute a citizen for criticizing Israel's attacks on Gaza, you can't deport a foreign national for doing so. That violates the First Amendment.

Well, it will send a tremendous chill across this country, and that is its intention. President Trump on Truth Social essentially said, you know, this is the first step. We're going to go after anyone who engages in what he calls illegal protests, which he seems to define as protests he doesn't like.

And so if you, you know, if you're a student on any campus and a foreign national and you see what the government is trying to do to Khalil and Mr. Khan Suri simply because of their pure speech, You're going to shut up. You're going to not engage in your speech rights. And that's precisely what it is designed to do, to shut down speech that the government doesn't like.

But the First Amendment is here to say that is not the government's prerogative. The government in the United States has to tolerate speech, even speech that it disapproves of, especially speech that it disapproves of.

Thanks so much for having me.