In January of 1987, Michel Shehadeh, a Palestinian man who'd lawfully immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, was taking care of his toddler son at home when federal agents arrived at his door and arrested him at gunpoint. Shehadeh soon learned he was one of eight immigrants arrested on charges relating to their pro-Palestinian activism. Then, in March of 2025, federal agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate student, and Georgetown professor Badar Khan Suri. Both are in the U.S. legally, being threatened with deportation. And both are targets of the Trump administration's crackdown on what they describe as anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas speech on college campuses. We hear from David Cole, who represented the Los Angeles Eight for insight into this moment, and what we can learn from their plight.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [email protected] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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It's been very overwhelming. It's like when I wake up in the morning, it's a lot of, like, just go, go, go, call after call after call. It really, I don't think it, like, hits me until, like, Sorry, I'm a mess this morning.
That's Nora Abdallah speaking with NPR. Her husband, Columbia graduate student and legal U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the evening of March 8th.
He's like, are you Mahmoud Khalil? Mahmoud said yes. And he says, I'm with the police. You have to come with us. I think at that point, like, honestly, like, my heart sank.
Khalil was taken to a detention facility in Louisiana and has been there since. He has not been charged with a crime. The government has instead accused him of being a Hamas sympathizer, a claim his wife vehemently denies.
I just want to be clear that the smears against Mahmoud are exactly that. They're smears. He has and always will stand up for what's right. And the way that he was taken from his family was...
was not right. Since his arrest, the government has also alleged in a court document that he failed to disclose some of his employment history in his application for a green card. And Mahmoud Khalil is not the only Columbia student for whom federal agents have come knocking.
I did not answer the door. My roommate did, and I'm grateful to her for that. She asked them to identify themselves repeatedly, and they refused. They first said they were police. Secondly, They said they were a supervisor, and eventually she was able to get them to admit that they were from immigration.
Ranjani Sreenivasan is a 37-year-old architect who was set to finish a doctoral program at Columbia in May when she was notified that her visa had been revoked. She told NPR's Here and Now that the Department of Homeland Security is accusing her of advocating for violence and terrorism. She'd attended a handful of protests against killings of civilians in the war between Israel and Hamas.
Rather than risk arrest, she fled to Canada.
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