For months now, President Trump has been threatening to deport foreign students who took part in last year’s campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
Behind the scenes, his administration got to work.
Investigators from a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that typically focuses on human traffickers and drug smugglers scoured the internet for social media posts and videos that the administration could argue showed sympathy toward Hamas, administration officials said. The investigators handed over reports on multiple protesters to the State Department, which used an obscure legal statute to authorize the arrest over the weekend of a 30-year-old lawful permanent resident: Mahmoud Khalil.
Mr. Trump said this week that Mr. Khalil’s case was the first of “many to come.”
Civil rights groups say the arrest of Mr. Khalil, who is a legal permanent resident and is married to an American citizen, is a clear violation of the First Amendment. But it also illustrates how Mr. Trump is using the tools of the federal government to launch a crackdown not only on those who break the law — but also on dissent more broadly.
“Freedom of speech has limitations,” Thomas D. Homan, who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s deportation operation, said on Wednesday during a meeting of New York lawmakers in Albany. “We consider him a national security threat.”
Mr. Khalil has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the government is using a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act to argue that his actions during protests at Columbia University harmed U.S. foreign policy interests by fomenting antisemitism.
The statute says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
Mr. Khalil was a negotiator and a spokesman for the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia, from which he graduated in December with a master’s degree. His lawyers said Wednesday that they had not been able to hold a private conversation with him since his arrest.
Stephen Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said there was only one other case he was aware of where similar powers were cited in deportation proceedings.
The case involved Mario Ruiz Massieu, the former deputy attorney general of Mexico who entered the United States in 1995 on a visa. That year, the U.S. government tried to send him back to Mexico, where he was wanted on money laundering and other charges.
The secretary of state at the time, Warren Christopher, said deportation was necessary for foreign policy reasons. Allowing Mr. Ruiz Massieu to stay would undermine the U.S. push for judicial reforms in Mexico, Mr. Christopher argued. The case against Mr. Ruiz Massieu was held up on appeal.
The cases differ in important ways, Mr. Vladeck said. Mr. Ruiz Massieu was a foreign government official accused of corruption who was in the country on a temporary visa. Mr. Khalil has a green card — which allows a person a path to stay in the United States permanently — and was engaged in what appears to be constitutionally protected speech.
“The government certainly appears to be retaliating for constitutionally protected, even if offensive, speech,” Mr. Vladeck said.
The Trump administration has argued that Mr. Khalil’s role in protests at Columbia showed he was “aligned with Hamas,” but officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it.
Mr. Trump has talked openly over the years about using the power of the presidency for retribution and reprisals. He has fired or launched investigations of government officials deemed to be disloyal and revoked security details for people with whom he has fallen out. He has put federal employees embracing diversity programs that he disagrees with on leave.
But critics of the president say Mr. Khalil’s case seems designed to intimidate.
“We cannot allow this nation to slide into a system of presidential authoritarianism, where people are seized at their homes, arrested and detained simply for expressing disfavored political viewpoints,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and ranking member of the judicial committee.
Mr. Raskin said the detention of Mr. Khalil “sets an extremely dangerous and chilling precedent from an administration that is hellbent on wielding fear and intimidation as weapons to crush political dissent.”
Legal experts say Mr. Trump’s attempts to stifle dissent can have a chilling effect.
“Even if Khalil is eventually able to prevail, the government may get the short-term win of sending the message to immigrants of every status that they risk arrest, detention and perhaps even removal for having the temerity to speak out in favor of unpopular causes, even if they might win their lawsuit in the end,” Mr. Vladeck said.
Mr. Trump has used his powers in the past to muzzle forms of protest.
In 2020, as demonstrations against police brutality and racism swept the nation, Mr. Trump deployed various federal agencies, including the Bureau of Prisons and Customs and Border Protection officials, to crack down on protests in Washington. His administration even deployed military helicopters to fly low in the nation’s capital to try and disperse protesters.
The Trump administration also considered making use of the Hobbs Act, which was put into place in the 1940s to punish racketeering in labor groups, to charge the protesters.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has shown leniency when it comes to protests he agrees with.
One of his first acts when he came into office in January was granting clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people who committed both violent and nonviolent crimes on Jan. 6, 2021, including assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. The rioters ransacked the Capitol in Mr. Trump’s name after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the election.
