{"id":71551,"date":"2025-03-24T16:30:32","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T23:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=71551"},"modified":"2025-03-24T16:30:32","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T23:30:32","slug":"mahmoud-khalil-deportation-revives-century-of-citizen-rights-violations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=71551","title":{"rendered":"Mahmoud Khalil Deportation Revives Century of Citizen Rights Violations"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Christopher Alam<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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For student activists, visa-holders and immigrants, history is repeating itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Protests in Thomas Paine Park against the detention of Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. (Via Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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For student activists, visa-holders and immigrants, history is repeating itself.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s latest moves to deport Mahmoud Khalil over first amendment-protected speech \u2014 and more recently, Brown University professor Dr. Rasha Alawieh and Georgetown graduate student Badar Khan Suri \u2014 has imperiled the rights and legal status of communities nationwide.<\/p>\n

The administration contends that Khalil can be deported according to Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which\u00a0gives<\/a>\u00a0the Secretary of State the authority to deport non-citizens when they have \u201creasonable ground to believe that their presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Columbia University graduate student and permanent U.S. resident, who played a major role in campus protests against Israel, was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entering his apartment the night of Saturday, March 8.<\/p>\n

Khalil\u2019s deportation notice did not mention any crimes that the federal government believes he may have committed; there are still no criminal charges against him.<\/p>\n

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said as much on CBS on March 16th, before vowing to \u201ckeep doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Commentators across the political spectrum \u2014 including pro-Palestinian voices,\u00a0liberal Jewish groups<\/a>\u00a0like J Street and\u00a0members of Congress<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 have criticized the move as an assault on free speech.<\/p>\n

President Trump, Rubio and ICE Director Tom Homan have all stated openly they are willfully defying the courts on this and future deportation decisions, as Khalil was detained and relocated from New York to Louisiana without any charges, hearings or immigration violation.<\/p>\n

Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations, said the level of alarm over deportation threats in citizen and non-citizen immigrant communities nationwide is unprecedented.<\/p>\n

Lately, she has been going to multiple Bay Area mosques nightly to update attendees on news and resources.<\/p>\n

Almost everywhere, people have approached her panicking about themselves or their parents; one visa-holder she spoke with has delayed her wedding abroad, fearing that she can\u2019t return to the U.S.<\/p>\n

Billoo detailed how unpredictable the situation has been.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn March 6, I did a training for interfaith leaders about how to protect their congregations in case of an ICE raid,\u201d said Billoo. \u201cI told them U.S. citizens and green card holders were among the safest people, that they should not worry, and we need to prioritize protecting people who don\u2019t have those statuses.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo days later, Khalil was abducted at his house,\u201d she continued. \u201cOne week later, I stood before the leaders and told them the things I said may no longer hold true. The law hasn\u2019t changed, but the Trump administration has demonstrated its increasing disregard for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Student activists nationwide are undeterred, despite Khalil being arrested for involvement in campus protests.<\/p>\n

At UC Berkeley, the weeks since Khalil\u2019s arrest have seen multiple protests in his defense, drawing a broader coalition of support from student organization and faculty than past pro-Palestine demonstrations.<\/p>\n

Since Khalil\u2019s arrest, student mobilization at Berkeley has had a second wind.<\/p>\n

A November walkout for Palestine saw about 200 to 300 people, while an early March walkout for Khalil saw nearly double that.<\/p>\n

Most recently, a\u00a0petition<\/a>\u00a0statement protesting the deportation of students is circulating amongst Jewish faculty and staff.<\/p>\n

Zaid Yousef, an activist and law school student at Berkeley, said that while student organizers are not afraid to continue demonstrating, they have taken greater risk assessment measures.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em>A lot of the messaging has been: be cautious, don\u2019t do anything crazy, don\u2019t make yourself more of a target, don\u2019t go into panic mode, don\u2019t spread news without verifying it, don\u2019t freeze up in fear. Don\u2019t stop organizing,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if you are an international student, or you\u2019re here on a visa, really gauge your risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are entering into uncharted waters,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt\u2019s now the time to choose where one stands in terms of history. Do you stand on the side of McCarthyist, Patriot Act-style repression, or do you think that the First Amendment has value?\u201d<\/p>\n

This recent spate of deportations has also led many experts to draw comparisons to when the US violated citizen and resident rights in the years leading up to the mass internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.<\/p>\n

That period saw over 100,000 Japanese, including citizens, relocated and disenfranchised.<\/p>\n

Japanese Americans have been organizing in response to this issue for decades.<\/p>\n

The National Coalition for Redress Reparations (NCRR), for instance, successfully organized throughout the 1980s to get reparations for imprisoned Japanese Americans, in accordance with a list of goals they named Principles of Unity \u2014 one of which was a pledge to support the struggles of other oppressed peoples.<\/p>\n

In 1988, after years of activism by groups like the NCRR, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, providing a formal\u00a0apology<\/a>\u00a0to interned Japanese Americans who were interned, acknowledging that the government\u2019s actions were motivated largely by \u201cracial prejudice\u201d and \u201ca failure of political leadership\u201d; $20,000 to each surviving internee; and a public education fund to prevent similar injustices in the future.<\/p>\n

Susan Hayase and her husband Tom Izu, who were part of that movement, are now co-founders of The San Jose Nikkei Resistors, a Japanese grassroots community organization that formed in 2018 to respond to Trump\u2019s immigration policies, particularly the \u201cMuslim Ban.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe model minority story tries to split off the Japanese American incarceration story as exceptional, but we know that it wasn\u2019t exceptional,\u201d said Hayase.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe smearing of Japanese Americans is identical to what is happening now with Khalil,\u201d she continued, adding that the current targeting of community leaders also echoes the government\u2019s targeting Japanese Americans as national security threats.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people picked up under the Alien Enemies Act were community leaders, spokespeople, teachers, publishers, religious leaders,\u201d explained Hayase. \u201cKhalil was a leader. He was not dangerous, except to the idea that the government should be able to squash all political speech.\u201d<\/p>\n

This comes as President Trump\u00a0invoked<\/a>\u00a0the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the first time since the 1940s to deport Venezuelan nationals alleged to be members of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s unique this time around is that Trump invoked a wartime power authorization outside of a war, and the detainees were deported despite a federal court order\u00a0block<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The \u2018Issei,\u2019 too \u2014 the first generation of immigrants born in Japan \u2014 were imprisoned through the Alien Enemies Act and barred from citizenship.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the present government\u2019s failure to live up to past victories for civil rights violation reparations, Hayase said \u201cThe United Nations has a definition of reparations and one of the requirements for it is a guarantee of non-repetition. You could say you\u2019re sorry for oppressing people, but if you go right back and start doing it again, there\u2019s no point. That\u2019s not true reparations. You have to make sure that it doesn\u2019t happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody in this country, according to the Bill of Rights, has individual due process rights,\u201d said Tom Izu.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you start taking that away, you\u2019re basically allowing the executive branch to do whatever it wants. They could declare anybody an enemy of the state,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd then if people believe it, then democracy is really in danger.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ByChristopher Alam Mar 24, 2025 For...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71552,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71551\/revisions\/71552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}