Deportation for disfavored speech – Daily News

I’m one of those people who definitely believe that the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is at its core anti-Semitic and eliminationist in its character. I also believe that in a normal American academic or opinion piece context, if one employs the Supreme Court’s Brandenburg v. Ohio case law as the benchmark, the “river to the sea” chant is First Amendment-protected speech.

In the case of former Columbia graduate student and Palestinian political activist Mahmoud Khalil, the Trump administration believes his speech and political activities make him a terrorist supporter and thus deportable under U.S. immigration law.

Over the past weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Khalil and subsequently rendered him from his home in New York City to an ICE facility in Louisiana. Khalil has been a legal permanent resident (LPR or a.k.a., a “green card” holder) for several years and is married to an American woman who is within a month of giving birth to their child.

That Khalil has been a central figure in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia over the past two years is not in dispute. What no Trump administration official has so far offered is any evidence that Khalil has ever been a member of or provided any kind of material support to Hamas, which has been a U.S. designated terrorist organization for 30 years.

However, other immigration-related statutes and case law may still give them a facially legal basis to try to deport Khalil.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) at 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(4)(A)(iii) states that “Any alien who has engaged, is engaged, or at any time after admission engages in any terrorist activity (as defined in section 1182(a)(3)(B)(iv) of this title) is deportable.”

And how expansive is the definition of engaging in “terrorist activity” under this statute? Very, including applicability to an LPR who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.”

Even so, the Trump regime may find that attempting to use a terrorism-related provision in one federal law to deport a LPR engaged in political speech and organizing activity will run afoul of Supreme Court precedent in a case dealing with a civil society organization prosecuted by the Obama administration under another federal law, the material support to terrorism statute referenced above.

In the 2010 landmark case Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the high court ruled 6-3 that while HLP’s attempts to provide legal advice and training to the Turkish PKK terrorist group did constitute a form of “material support” for terrorism under federal law, the majority also stated that the law, “does not prohibit independent advocacy or membership in the PKK…”

Unless Trump’s Justice Department lawyers can convince a federal court that Khalil directly coordinated his protest and speech activities with Hamas or solicited money for Hamas through his speech and political advocacy, they may well lose any deportation action against Khalil.

The ramifications of ICE’s arrest and rendition of Khalil go well beyond the fate of one man, however.

Trump has declared Khalil’s arrest to be just the first of “more to come” and has warned American colleges and universities that with respect to future roundups of alleged “terrorist supporters,” they expect “every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”