The Trump administration has fallen short of its promise to deport millions. The White House now seems focused on attention-grabbing arrests, including that of a Palestinian activist and leader of the Columbia student protests. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Mahmoud Khalil, who was a student negotiator in the pro-Palestinian protest encampments on the Columbia University campus last year. AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Mahmoud Khalil and why was he arrested?
When his wife went to visit him there on Sunday, she was told that he wasn't there. And for a while, his wife and his attorney didn't know where he was until it was revealed that he had been transferred to a different ICE detention facility in rural Louisiana. And so while he was still detained in New York City, 4.40 a.m.
on Sunday, his attorney filed a habeas petition with the Southern District of New York. So this was before any of the transfers happened. And a federal judge on Monday ordered that he not be deported for now and set a court hearing for today. Who is this guy?
Mahmoud Khalil is a recent graduate of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a very prominent pro-Palestine activist on campus.
Free, free, free Palestine. Free, free, free Palestine.
So starting in late 2023, Columbia University had a series of protests on campus where student activists were trying to get the university to divest from military contractors and from certain companies that were based in or do business with the Israeli government.
We demand divestment. We will not be moved unless by force.
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Chapter 2: What accusations are being made against Mahmoud Khalil?
And those protests kind of culminated in the spring of 2024 with an encampment on Columbia University's lawn that the university ended up calling in the NYPD or allowing the NYPD to arrest students. The protests didn't end at the end of the academic year and have been ongoing.
In the spring of 2024, when the encampments had, you know, sprung up and had been there for a while, he actually wasn't prominently involved in the encampments. And he spoke at a press conference where he said that he hadn't attended a ton of protests and he hadn't been doing a ton of interviews. He wasn't really in the public eye because he, at that point, was in the U.S. on a student visa.
I did not participate, feeling that I will be arrested and ultimately deported from this country. And this is why a lot of the Palestinian students here, they feel very uncomfortable. very very uncomfortable participating and protesting the genocide of their people. That's why we are very grateful for everyone on campus for protesting on our behalf.
But that wasn't to say he wasn't involved with this movement. He was one of the students involved with negotiating with the administration and trying to push the administration to divest while other students were doing like the encampment, the more like on the ground stuff. He was like in these meetings with the university administration. What will happen in court?
Has he been charged with anything? This is kind of a tricky thing. The judge that set that hearing is a federal judge in the Southern District of New York. And this is a hearing basically just requesting his release from immigration custody. That isn't going to affect the outcome of his immigration case.
Because ultimately, an immigration judge is the one who decides whether to order him deported or not. These are two different courts, different jurisdictions. So his hearing today was about whether he should remain in ICE custody or be let out. But it's not about whether he's going to be deported. When asked to explain this, what has the Trump administration said?
So a White House official told the free press that he has not been charged with a crime, there's no allegation that he's broken the law, but that he poses a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Secretary of State has the right to revoke a green card or a visa for individuals who serve or are adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.
The official White House Instagram and Twitter accounts posted this picture of him saying Shalom Mahmoud, and Trump himself has said there will be more. In a post on Truth Social, Trump called him a radical foreign pro-Hamas student and said this is the first arrest of many to come.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the Trump administration's actions?
And there are also a number of organizations that both before and since Trump's reelection have kind of dedicated themselves to naming and shaming what they say are students on campus who are either promoting anti-Semitism or in some cases promoting terrorism. One of these organizations, Canary Mission, makes these kind of dossiers of pro-Palestine activists on college campuses across America.
Canary Mission's simple interface allows you to easily explore profiles of radical individuals and organizations. It is your duty to ensure that today's radicals are not tomorrow's employees.
Another more recent one is the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther, which has kind of tried to weaponize the Canary Mission model to encourage retaliation against these students.
Students that are engaged in pro-terrorist activities should be deported. The United States federal government itself should embark on a mission to deport such visiting students that are expressing support for Hamas and other terrorist entities.
And then there's another group, Batar, which claims it made lists of students who are in the U.S. on visas or otherwise non-citizens and also claims that it showed that list to immigration authorities and has encouraged these students to be arrested and removed from the country.
President Trump said on Truth Social the following, 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 and the Trump administration will not tolerate it. It sounds like a threat. There will be more of this. Should we expect more of this?
We should absolutely expect more of this. Just days before Mahmoud was arrested, Axios reported that the State Department under Marco Rubio was using AI to identify students who were in the US on visas who had either been arrested at pro-Palestine AXA on campus or off campus, or who had posted anti-Israel content on social media.
It claimed that there were no visas that were revoked under the Biden administration, which was proof that they were not taking this seriously, and that this new administration would be taking this seriously. Reuters and the AAP have also reported that ICE has been looking for at least one other student on campus.
Let me ask you, Lesley, What does this tell us about how President Trump and his administration are thinking about deportations, about how to do them, about how to utilize them, about who to target for deportation?
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