Trump’s arrest of a pro-Palestinian student moves the U.S. one step closer to Tyranny

Trump hates us for our freedoms

You are at home on Saturday with your eight-month pregnant wife only to be startled by a loud knock on the door. The people behind the door aggressively identify themselves as federal officers. Your mind immediately races to your involvement in peaceful protests that the current regime wants to silence.

The government agents enter your apartment, declaring that your student visa has been canceled. When you reply that you have been granted permanent legal status in the country, the agents inform you that the regime has cancelled that as well. When your pregnant wife asks the agents if you have been charged with crimes, they tell her to shut up or she will be arrested as well--despite the fact she is a citizen.

From there, you are swept away to a clandestine government facility. When your wife and lawyer visit the facility that the regime told them you are being held at, you are not there. Instead, the regime has imprisoned you in another location across the country.

Did that happen in Vladimir Putin’s Russia? North Korea or China? No. It happened Saturday in New York City to Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate student at Columbia University and his eight month pregnant wife. Khalil was not charged with any crimes—nor has he in the past.

But the regime—in this case the Trump regime—ordered Khalil arrested and are working to strip him of his green card because he dared to champion a cause they very much oppose: The humanity of Palestinian Christians and Muslims. That is no exaggeration. Khalil has not committed acts of violence, incited a Jan. 6 type attack on a government building nor provided material support to those who waged such an attack. If he had, he would’ve been charged with crimes long ago.

Khalil was arrested solely for being one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests last year at Columbia University. In fact, Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told us that noting Khalil’s arrest was “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.” That means if you engage in what Trump and his right regime has dubbed as “anti-Semitism,” you can be arrested and deported even if you have a green card.

Even more alarming was that the specific conduct cited by the DHS as the basis for the arrest sounds like something Joseph Stalin would’ve used as a fabricated basis to imprison critics. The DHS spokesperson said, Khalil had “led activities aligned to Hamas.”

What is “aligned to Hamas”? Hamas called for humanitarian relief to be allowed into Gaza to feed the women and children being starved by Netanyahu’s blockade. Is a person “aligned to Hamas” and subject to arrest for repeating that very goal? Are the Jewish students who bravely led some of the pro-Palestinian protests on various campuses also “aligned to Hamas” for objecting to Benjamin Netanyahu’s collective punishment of two million Palestinians?!

The Trump regime’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio gleefully proclaimed on Twitter after the arrest, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” Did Rubio provide concrete evidence of that very serious charge? Nope.

And on Monday, Trump took a victory lap for the arrest writing on social media, "Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.” Of course, Trump provides no evidence to back up this very serious charge but then again this is the same convicted felon who repeatedly lied that the 2020 election was stolen and incited the Jan. 6 terrorist attack on our Capitol.

If Khalil had been convicted of crimes-such as providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization--that would be a valid basis to rescind a green card under U.S. law. Yet even Fox News.com reported, “the detention of a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime marked an extraordinary move with an uncertain legal foundation.” And we just learned the Trump regime have cruelly moved Khalil away from his family to a holding facility in Louisiana.

If you think Trump will stop with just punishing people with student visas or green cards who engage in speech he opposes, you have not been paying attention. We are just 50 days into the Trump regime and he already has launched a relentless, multi-front war on free speech. It began with Trump banning the Associated Press from White House briefings for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” as Trump has demanded.

Then last month-as I detailed in an article—Trump’s FCC chair, the blindly loyal Brendan Carr, targeted liberal media outlets PBS and NPR for investigations. Carr then reinstated complaints/investigations against CBS and NBC—brought by right wing groups—but not one against Fox News filed by a liberal organization. FCC commissioner Anna Gomez—a Democratic appointee—slammed Carr’s actions, saying, this is “designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions.”

And as I wrote about Saturday, Trump has now engaged in what well-known national security lawyer Mark Zaid called this, “the most un-American thing I’ve ever heard.” Zaid is referring to Trump using the power of the federal government to target law firms that represent his political enemies. This began a few weeks ago when Trump stripped security clearance of lawyers at a law firm that simply provided free legal services to former Special Counsel Jack Smith—who Trump despises.

And on Thursday, Trump went further by punishing another major law firm with Democratic lawyers by barring them from working with the Trump regime and worse, opening an investigation into their hiring practices. Why? This firm in the past represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and was involved in retaining a company that drafted what was known as the “Steele dossier” that documented Trump’s ties to Russia.

In response to these actions, the American Bar Association slammed Trump. Mark Zaid was even more blunt stating, “By taking these actions against these major law firms, it is effectively sending a message to all the lawyers that you best not challenge this administration, or you, your lawyers and your clients will suffer.”

Trump is following the authoritarian playbook of making a few people visible examples to scare others into silence and submission. We’ve seen Trump’s ally Vladimir Putin engage in this very move.

As The Atlantic Council recently noted, “the Putin regime has learned that targeted cases of persecution are sufficient to exercise control over the wider population.” Adding, “The quantity of people who have been frightened into silence is many thousands of times greater than the relatively small number of Russians currently being held as political prisoners.”

That is exactly what Trump is doing here. And the more Trump can get away with it, the further he will go until the United States is no longer recognizable to us. As Timothy Snyder wrote in his book, On Tyranny, “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.” As unbelievable as it is to may sound, we are now closer than ever to that very choice.

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