A barometer of how far we’ve moved toward dictatorship

Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 11, 2025

Student negotiator Mahmoud Khalil pictured on the Columbia University campus at a pro-Palestinian protest encampment in April 2024.

Paging Franz Kafka, the 20th century literary master of bizarre paranoia. In 1991, a Kafka biographer, Frederick R. Karl, told the New York Times: ”What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.” On Saturday night, that surreal force in an authoritarian 2025 America “disappeared” a young Palestinian scholar named Mahmoud Khalil off the streets of New York City.

Last spring, the 24-year-old Khalil — a Palestinian, born in a refugee camp in Syria, who was successfully earning his master’s degree in international affairs at Columbia University — served as a lead negotiator between the Ivy League school and the pro-Palestinian protest encampment. Just this week, as the Trump administration moved to sanction Columbia for what it claims is antisemitism on campus, Khalil was quoted in a Reuters article criticizing the government. “Clearly Trump is using the protesters as a scapegoat for his wider agenda fighting and attacking higher education and the Ivy League education system,” he said.

At 8:30 p.m., federal agents who said they were with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, knocked on the door of the Columbia-owned Manhattan apartment where Khalil lived with his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant. They announced that Khalil’s student visa had been revoked and that he was slated for deportation. When Khalil and his wife protested that he actually holds a green card, or permanent residency, the agents took him away anyway.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” The unprecedented action sparked an immediate debate among legal scholars over whether Rubio truly has the authority to revoke Khalil’s green card, or whether he used proper legal procedures — not to mention the lack of immediate evidence that Khalil is “pro-Hamas.” Getting back to Kafka, efforts by his wife and lawyer to see Khalil at a nearby ICE facility in New Jersey were foiled before the government admitted he’d already been flown to Louisiana.

Needless to say, the disappearing of a legal U.S. resident over his political activities is a shockingly dangerous escalation of the government’s dual wars against both legitimate dissent and also higher education generally — exactly as Khalil alleged to Reuters rights before his arrest. His high-profile seizure is clearly intended to send a chilling message to anyone who protests the Trump regime. The warning for America’s college administrators is even more stark. Columbia called in city cops to clear the 2024 encampment and imposed a harsh crackdown on new protests, only for Team Trump to still accuse the school of antisemitism, cancel $400 million in grants, and watch ICE arrive to intimidate the student body. The curious case of Mahmoud Khalil isn’t so much a test of America’s immigration laws as much as a barometer of how far we’ve moved toward dictatorship.