Trump is coming for student protesters, and Columbia is just the start

The Trump administration is embarking on a massive university speech crackdown, starting with Columbia University, where it’s demanding external control of entire departments and punishment for student activists. Its first test case, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student with a green card, offers a hint of what’s to come: a state of intentional chaos that undermines free speech and due process rights. Thus far, Columbia appears to be complying with the administration’s demands, even as its students gear up to fight back.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents raided Columbia University’s campus on Thursday night, looking for students in two residential buildings, according to a university-wide email sent by Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong. At a press conference on Friday, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said the Justice Department is investigating whether student protesters at Columbia violated federal terrorism laws and that it would prosecute “any person engaging in material support of terrorism.” Hours before the raids, Columbia received a joint letter from three government agencies demanding that it punish student protesters; empower “internal law enforcement”; and put its Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under an “academic receivership” for at least five years, among other demands — or else risk losing its “financial relationship with the United States government.”

That same day, the university announced that it had suspended, expelled, and in some cases temporarily revoked the degrees of several students “in connection with” the occupation of a university building last spring. Grant Miner, the president of the Student Workers of Columbia union, was expelled and fired from his campus position, the union said on Thursday. Miner’s expulsion was announced the day before the union was supposed to start bargaining with university administration. Columbia did not publicly disclose how many other students were punished.

In an emailed statement to The Verge, Columbia spokesperson Samantha Slater said the university is “reviewing the letter from the Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, and General Services Administration” and is “committed at all times to advancing our mission, supporting our students, and addressing all forms of discrimination and hatred on our campus.” Slater declined to comment on Khalil’s arrest, as well as the arrest and visa revocations of other Columbia students. Slater also declined to disclose how many students were disciplined in relation to the 2024 protests.

The students are pushing back. Thursday afternoon, eight Columbia and Barnard students asked a federal judge to stop the university from giving the government access to pro-Palestine protesters’ disciplinary records, alleging that doing so would expose students to “public threats, hate speech, and physical danger” in retaliation for their advocacy. It’s not just a hypothetical. Khalil, who is currently detained at an ICE facility in Louisiana, was among the students who filed the suit. On Friday, his legal team announced that they were filing an emergency bail motion in the Southern District of New York. Khalil, who is Palestinian, faces deportation to Syria depending on the outcome of his immigration case. Court filings note that aside from his permanent US residency — also known colloquially as a green card — he is effectively stateless: he grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, from which his family was later displaced by the civil war there. His relatives are now scattered throughout Europe and West Asia, his attorneys said. (While permanent residents are subject to deportation under certain circumstances — usually after being charged with a crime — Khalil’s case is especially unusual in that it relies on an obscure McCarthy-era statute that has rarely been used to deport anyone.)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have since arrested a second person who participated in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia, DHS announced on Friday. Leqaa Kordia, who is from the West Bank of Palestine, had her student visa terminated in January 2022 for “lack of attendance,” DHS claims. According to DHS, Kordia had previously been arrested in April 2024 over her involvement in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia. In an email to The Verge, a spokesperson with the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Information said it had no arrest report for Kordia. DHS did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

DHS also claimed that Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia student who was in the country on an F-1 student visa, “self-deported” using Customs and Border Protection’s new “CBP Home” app. Immigration reporter Tanvi Misra confirmed that the student did leave the country voluntarily but was unable to verify whether the student used the app to do so.

Thursday’s raids — in which no one was arrested, according to the interim university president’s email — occurred just five days after plainclothes ICE agents arrested Khalil in his university-owned apartment building. The government alleges that Khalil, a permanent resident, is a threat to the US’s “foreign policy interests.” Since being arrested by ICE, Khalil has largely been unable to communicate with his legal team, his attorneys said during a Wednesday hearing before a New York federal judge.

On Wednesday, Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York ordered the government to grant Khalil two privileged conversations with his legal team, but didn’t issue a decision on the habeas corpus petition requesting Khalil’s release from ICE detention, which his attorney Amy Greer filed the night of his arrest. That petition has turned into a legal battle of its own as government attorneys fight to keep Khalil in ICE custody.

“Habeas corpus” is Latin for “you have the body,” and, in most cases, the phrase is only somewhat related to what a habeas petition — a request to a federal judge that a person be released from government custody — is for. In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, “you have the body” is all-too-apt of a phrase: the question of where the government put him, physically, at specific times is looming over his deportation proceedings.

During the Wednesday hearing, DOJ lawyers claimed Furman didn’t have jurisdiction over the case — and therefore couldn’t order the release — because Khalil wasn’t in New York when the petition was filed.

An amended habeas petition filed in federal court Thursday night provides further details about Khalil’s arrest — and alleges that the Southern District does have jurisdiction over his case. Khalil’s attorneys contest the government’s claim that he wasn’t in New York when the initial petition was filed, and also note that he is being detained “at the discretion of” William P. Joyce, the acting director of ICE’s New York field office, who is named as a respondent in the complaint.

The ICE agents who arrested Khalil told his wife that they were taking him to 26 Federal Plaza, a DHS building in Manhattan, the complaint claims. Khalil’s wife captured part of the arrest, as well as her interactions with the ICE agents, in a video that was released by the ACLU on Friday. Khalil’s legal team told reporters that the agents initially did not identify themselves and refused to say what agency they were with.

That night, Greer, Khalil’s attorney, used ICE’s detainee locator to determine his whereabouts. Around 1:35 am, the locator said he was in custody in New York. When Greer checked the locator again before filing the habeas petition around 4:40 am, the locator still said Khalil was in custody in New York. By the next morning, however, the locator said he was at a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

That night at 26 Federal Plaza, ICE agents gave Khalil paperwork, including a custody determination and a Notice to Appear (NTA) in immigration court, and told him to sign it, the complaint claims. The NTA — ICE’s equivalent of a charging document — read:

YOU ARE ORDERED to appear before the immigration judge of the United States Department of Justice at: 830 Pinehill Rd, Jena, LA, 71342, LASALLE DETENTION FACILITY on March 27, 2025 at 8:30 AM to show why you should not be removed from the United States based on the charges set forth above.

The copy is dated March 9, 2025, timestamped at 12:40 a.m., and signed by Supervisory Special Agent Timothy Moran at 26 Federal Plaza, New York, NY.

The agents denied Khalil’s request to speak to his attorney, the complaint claims. Khalil refused to sign the papers, and later that night, was transferred — in handcuffs and shackles — to the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Agents told him he’d be returning to 26 Federal Plaza the next day but couldn’t sleep there. However, instead of returning Khalil to the New York building, agents took him to JFK airport, from which he was flown to Dallas, Texas before being put on another flight to Alexandria, Louisiana. After arriving in Alexandria, Khalil was driven to Jena, Louisiana, where he remains. He was handcuffed and shackled for the entirety of the trip, the complaint alleges.

Khalil’s attorneys claim that his ongoing detention is harmful to both the outcome of his case and his family’s well-being; his wife is eight months pregnant and cannot travel to Louisiana to visit him. Khalil’s attorneys are not only demanding his release from ICE detention but alleging that his immigration arrest violates his First Amendment right to free speech and the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, is arbitrary and capricious as defined by the Administrative Procedure Act, and violates the Accardi doctrine requiring government agencies to follow their own regulations and internal guidelines. As the complaint notes, unless someone in deportation proceedings poses a danger to the community, the purpose of ICE detention is to ensure that they attend their immigration hearings. The government, Khalil’s lawyers argue, have made “no credible argument” that he can’t be released to his family.

“His detention is also preventing him from adequately litigating his removal proceedings, which the government has chosen to justify only in the press,” the complaint claims.

The government has not only justified Khalil’s arrest in the press; officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump have celebrated it, promising that others will follow. Conflating pro-Palestinian activism with antisemitism, the Trump administration has sought to use every resource at its disposal to go after student demonstrators — and the universities that it claims fail to adequately punish them. The administration pulled $400 million in funding from Columbia days before Khalil’s arrest, and a multi-agency task force investigating antisemitism on college campuses has said it will visit other universities across the country.

On February 13, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce demanded that Columbia and Barnard produce all student disciplinary records related to eleven incidents, including last year’s Hamilton Hall occupation, a demonstration protesting the university’s financial ties to Israel. The students who sued Columbia on Thursday, including Khalil, are asking a federal judge to prohibit the university from handing over those records, which they warn could be used to dox and harass students.

Khalil’s arrest illustrates the high stakes of these harassment campaigns. Just one day before his arrest, Khalil wrote to Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, asking the university to protect him from what he described as a “vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign” led by a Columbia professor and a fellow student. After Khalil’s arrest, the Forward reported that activist Ross Glick had personally mentioned Khalil to government officials, including aides for Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Fetterman (D-PA). Glick is the former executive director of Betar, a far-right Zionist organization that claims it has compiled a list of foreign students who have criticized Israel, and shared those students’ names with the Trump administration in the hopes that it will deport them.

In their complaint against Columbia, Khalil and other students allege that the Trump administration’s repression of protesters is “akin to the threat that McCarthyism and the broad overreach of the role of the House Unamerican Activities Committee (“HUAC”) posed fifty years ago.”

In fact, Khalil’s deportation case rests on a statute in the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act that lets the attorney general render someone “deportable” if their presence in the country would “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”

“He’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity,” Edgar said before falsely claiming that the secretary of state can revoke Khalil’s right to be in the country. Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act — the so-called Foreign Policy Bar — does say the secretary of state can declare any noncitizen deportable if they threaten the US’s foreign policy interests. But the decision to revoke a permanent resident’s green card ultimately lies with an immigration judge.

Edgar refused to answer whether any criticism of the US government is considered a deportable offense.

Khalil’s attorneys claim that the Foreign Policy Bar is being misapplied. In 1987, they note, Congress passed the Moynihan Amendment, which lifted the McCarran-Walter Act’s provisions barring foreigners because of their political beliefs. Troy Edgar, the deputy DHS secretary, defended Khalil’s arrest in a Thursday interview with NPR, claiming again that the Secretary of State “can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.” Khalil, for the record, has had a green card since 2024.

While the Foreign Policy Bar remains in place, his attorneys note it has “been rarely invoked and reserved for cases involving high-ranking government officials or an alleged terrorist removable on other grounds.”

Not, in other words, a graduate student involved in campus protests at a university that touts its students’ history of civil disobedience.