Last weekend, former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by federal immigration authorities. The move was an escalation in the Trump administration's crackdown on dissent, and it has people wondering: isn't this against the constitution?Brittany is joined by Chenjerai Kumanyika, a journalism professor at NYU, and Rick Perlstein, a historian of conservatism. Together, they talk about America's love/hate relationship with the First Amendment, and what ICE's arrest of a lawful permanent resident could mean for America's culture of protest.Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus content. Join NPR+ today.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What happened to Mahmoud Khalil and why is it significant?
Happy to have you both. All right, so let's set the stage for this conversation. Last weekend, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by federal immigration authorities. Khalil was one of the student leaders in Columbia University's campus protests against the war in Gaza. He's now a graduate of the university.
What's important to note about his arrest is that Khalil is in fact a green card holder, meaning he is a lawful permanent resident of the United States. So why are federal immigration authorities going out of their way to detain a legal resident of the United States who hasn't committed any crimes yet?
Well, President Trump said Khalil's arrest is the first of many to come as part of a policy to punish protesters who his administration claims are terrorist sympathizers or supporters of Hamas. This is something that President Trump himself campaigned on during the 2024 election.
Under my administration, we will proactively send ICE to pro-jihadist demonstrations to enforce our immigration laws and remove the violators from our country.
To be clear, Khalil has no known ties to Hamas or any terrorist organization. And of course, protesting is a right protected by our First Amendment. As soon as this story went public, people, and I mean everyone from political pundits to regular everyday folks were like, how is this possible? Isn't this a violation of the First Amendment?
You know, one of the things that we're taught makes America America. You know, what makes Americans American is that we all have the right to free speech and the right to peaceably assemble. So in what ways is this one protester's arrest a rewriting of what it means to be an American? So, Rick, Chenjerai, the question on everyone's mind.
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Chapter 2: Is Mahmoud Khalil's arrest a violation of the First Amendment?
Is Mahmoud Khalil's arrest the beginning of the end of the right to protest?
Donald Trump only has one power, and that's to give orders. The rest of us 300 million have the power to refuse or accept those orders, right? And so it's up to us whether the First Amendment survives or dies. But this is a real gut check moment. It's kind of one of those first they came for the Palestinian activist. And I did not speak because I was not a Palestinian activist.
And we all know how that story ends.
Hmm. Hmm. Chandra, what do you think? Is the First Amendment essentially kaput?
Well, so many of these executive orders and actions aren't legal and they don't stand up in court. So what Trump is really doing here is actually performance, right? I mean, he wants to create a sort of spectacle and performance that's so compelling to his audiences that no one even cares about the law or the First Amendment. But, of course, Trump is good at this, right?
We didn't meet this guy because he was a legal expert. Most folks met Trump because he was performing a kind of silly reality show or being like a kind of— rich but cartoonish business person, right? So, like, he understands performance, and unfortunately, it's not just performance, right? There's a real cost here.
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Chapter 3: What does the right to protest mean in America?
Okay, I want to get deeper into this fighting for the right to protest because of two reasons. One is that we have seen both Republican legislatures and Democratic cities attempt to curb in the last couple of years the right to assemble. All of this was happening after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
But at the same time, both Democrats and Republicans are vocal about wanting to protect the right to free speech. I mean... Even conservative pundit, Ms. Ann Coulter, Ann Coulter, was pushing back against the Trump administration's arrest of Khalil.
Ann Coulter posted on X this week, there's almost no one I don't want to deport, but unless they've committed a crime, isn't this a violation of the First Amendment? So all that said, why is protest historically so important in the U.S. ?
Yeah. I mean, I think every right that I have that the vast majority of Americans have in this country is because people protest. At times, people challenge the law. Sometimes people broke laws as part of civil disobedience. And it's interesting because that aspect of protest is what sometimes people who are really proud to be American is usually what they're bragging about.
The problem is that protest also challenges whoever is in power at that time. And so there's always an incentive to put protests down.
Yeah. And when you say put protests down, talk to me about what that can look like in terms of how protesters who are speaking out against those in power are regarded or treated.
Well, historically, the way that this has played out is that people who are often fighting to make America a more robust democracy are cast as some kind of internal enemy. And that internal threat often has to do with people's ethnicity, their immigration status. I mean, there's a long history, right?
It's not just like when you hear Trump sort of saying that there's an internal enemy, which he was saying on the campaign trail.
I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics.
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Chapter 4: How has protest historically influenced American rights?
I mean, in all these cases, the government cast these people as actually the danger, even though now most of the things they were fighting for are like uncontroversial.
And that makes me wonder why, of all the campus protesters, Mahmoud Khalil was targeted. Like, what message is the Trump administration trying to send? And how does the university play into all of this? Help me wrap my brain around this.
So this guy, William F. Buckley, he burst onto the scene in his early 20s in 1951 with a book called God and Man at Yale. It launched his career as the most important intellectual on the right. And the entire argument of that book was that universities and college professors specifically should not be the ones deciding what young people learn, right? They should not be able to set their curricula.
The curricula should be set by the boards of trustees because they're rich people. Christians who have skin in the game. And so that's been a kind of a generational project ever since. Decade after decade, Ronald Reagan in the 1960s, one of the first things he did as governor was end free tuition for the University of California. That was a reaction to the protests there.
Right, right, right, right. And in fact, Reagan's education advisor famously said to be selective about who is allowed to go to college. Otherwise, his words, we are in danger of producing an educated proletariat.
It was basically manufacturing liberals. Hmm, hmm. And the people who protest, protest are, you know, what we call conservatives, right? And the conservatives are on the catbird seat right now.
Again, one of the things that, you know, those who are patriotic, you know, brag about is that America is a place where you can do some things, you can say some things and are supposed to have some freedoms to say some things that you can't say other places, right? And that's been crucial to securing certain kind of rights.
And it's funny, you know, I think personally about, you know, my father, right? My father was worked with an organization called the Congress of Racial Equality. Yeah, CORE, one of the major civil rights organizations. And my father was participating in a protest against police brutality. He handcuffed himself inside a police station.
And a couple of weeks later, the police commissioner at the time, Michael Murphy, said that he was dangerous, had sinister motives and a lust for power. What he was basically saying was this kind of protest is protesting the wrong way. We're cool if you do it the right way.
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Chapter 5: What role do universities play in political dissent?
People who formerly disagreed over certain things are saying, this is too far. This, I can't abide. Like a galvanizing moment. This galvanizing and not just protesters, right? Artists, right? educators, journalists, people from all sectors of life are saying, we're not going to take this. And so there are those who support it.
But when I'm there with people across all these differences, right, that have divided us, and I'm seeing them actually take to the streets and find their ways, whether big or small, to protest, I'm like, this is the America I want to be a part of.
Coming up, Mahmoud Khalil's arrest also raises some other really big cultural questions, like what does it mean that a green card holder can be deported? And why many Americans and Jewish people are skeptical this arrest has anything to do with curbing anti-Semitism?
The idea that these protests are anti-Semitic is a project of gaslighting. After a quick break.
Is America sliding towards authoritarianism? Hundreds of academics say yes.
It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy.
Where is American democracy heading? Listen now to the Sunday story on the Up First podcast from NPR.
Going back to Mahmoud Khalil, Khalil's wife, who has not been named publicly and also is eight months pregnant, she was also threatened with arrest by ICE. She is an American citizen. And it's notable to me that she was told that Khalil would be detained somewhere close to their home in Manhattan, but he wound up being transferred about a thousand miles south to Louisiana. Wow.
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Chapter 6: How does the current political climate affect protests?
What's the purpose of these tactics and what effect are they meant to have on green card or visa holders?
Yeah, I mean, we're talking about intimidation and humiliation, right? I mean, when I thought of a prison in Louisiana, you know, I immediately thought of this classic movie from 1967, Cool Hand Luke. Cool Hand Luke, I was gonna say, yeah. Right? It was a classic 60s movie. Because it was about a guy who just kind of instinctively defied authority.
He went to jail for cutting the heads off parking meters when he was drunk. And he was sent to this prison that was basically run like a concentration camp. And the plot of the movie is basically very simple. This one guy, this one charismatic guy, Paul Newman, refuses to submit.
You know... The administration, the Trump administration, has tried to frame its thwarting of protest as a way to combat anti-Semitism. Oh, my. And that's a claim that some Americans... You're my wheelhouse, Brittany. That is a claim that some Americans have been quite skeptical of. I have seen plenty of Jewish Americans be quite skeptical of that claim.
I quite frequently go to Shabbat dinner at the house of a friend of mine, and I pray alongside the most religiously serious people I know, people who actually study the holy text in Hebrew of Judaism, and they are all Palestinian solidarity activists. So the idea that these protests are anti-Semitic is a project of gaslighting.
I want to point out, though, that Donald Trump has been closely connected in the past with anti-Semitic figures like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.
If you look at some of the people he pardoned for January 6th, one guy was wearing a Camp Auschwitz t-shirt. If you look at the Doge worker who was fired because of all his tweets saying they were discovered – You know, saying I wouldn't marry anyone outside my ethnic group if you paid me or I want more eugenics. Right. And the vice president of the United States says, oh, he's not such a bad guy.
You know, give the kid another chance. Right. Compare that to Mahmoud Khalil.
Yeah. And so I wonder, why do you think anti-Semitism is often ignored on the American right?
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