Then They Came for Me: Mahmoud Khalil, the LA 8, and the Threat to Free Speech
Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by ICE agents on the night of March 8, 2025. Photo courtesy of the Associated Press.
The immigration enforcement agents came in the night, without warning, and arrested the man in front of a member of his family. He was taken to a maximum security prison and detained for three weeks without bond. The government gave the reason for his arrest as the alleged promotion and membership in an armed Palestinian group. The year was 1987, and his name was Michel Shehadeh.
Nearly 40 years later, Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents late at night, from his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His wife watched as he was led to a car and driven away. Khalil was first shuttled to New Jersey before being sent to a detention center in Louisiana, where he remains today. When asked for the reason for his arrest, an ICE agent reportedly told Khalil’s lawyer, Molly Greer, “They were following orders from the State Department to revoke Khalil’s student visa.” When Greer responded that Khalil was a green card holder and, therefore, a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR), the agent reportedly quipped, “They were revoking that instead.”
Khalil is a recent graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and was active as a student negotiator and spokesman in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment protests at the school last spring. The protestors erected an encampment on the school’s central lawn, demanding that the university divest financially from “corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.” He was briefly suspended for refusing to leave the encampment, but the suspension was quickly overturned. At the beginning of March 2025, Khalil participated in a protest in Barnard College’s Milstein Library. Photos taken of him at the March protest spread, and some online Zionist groups advocated for his deportation. Less than a week later, he was arrested.
The Trump administration provided the rationale for Khalil’s arrest in public statements; they have not yet issued formal charges. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused Khalil of participating in activities “aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” His arrest came on the back of an executive order issued by Trump in which he promised: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” And the deputy secretary of the DHS claimed that “the Secretary of State can review [Khalil’s] visa process at any point and revoke it."
The legal basis for the administration to order Khalil’s deportation is unclear, if not dubious. A green card holder is entitled to all of the same protections as a citizen, though they cannot vote or hold certain government jobs. It is rare for someone to lose their status as a green card holder, which occurs most often if the resident commits a crime. Only an immigration judge can give a final order for deportation, and only the Department of Homeland Security can revoke a green card. Yet, White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claimed the Secretary of State “...reserves the right to revoke the visa of Mahmoud Khalil under the Immigration and Nationality Act” and “has the right to revoke a green card or a visa for individuals who are adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.” The legislation that Leavitt references does, in fact, allow the Secretary of State to determine a green card holder to be “deportable;” however the case must be tried in immigration court before Khalil’s LPR status is removed.
Just over a week has passed since Khalil’s arrest, and it is unclear when and how his case will be resolved. There is no substantive evidence publicly provided by officials that Khalil promoted or celebrated the illicit actions of Hamas or supported the group in any way. Regardless, the arrest of a lawful permanent resident, a legal status that confers nearly all the same rights as granted to a citizen, has unleashed a flood of concerns about Trump’s brazen challenge to the First Amendment, which does not differentiate between citizens and noncitizens. Media coverage has elevated the most pressing questions arising from the arrest: Why is Khalil’s protest not protected by the First Amendment? And, can any dissenting opinion be criminalized? These concerns have not been allayed by the admission of an official from the White House who reportedly told The Free Press that Khalil’s arrest was a “blueprint” for the arrest of other students. The shock of the arrest may seem singular to the forceful (and potentially illegal at times) approach of the Trump administration. The Trump administration has mounted many unprecedented legal challenges to US courts in the first two months of his term. Similarly, ICE’s arrest of Khalil has been represented as untested legal waters. However, nearly two decades ago, a strikingly similar case was resolved. In reviewing the history of this case, government officials and the public alike stand to learn a great deal.
In 1987, federal agents arrested seven Palestinians, including Michel Shehadeh, and one Kenyan at their homes in California. All eight were initially detained under the charge of the Immigration and Nationality Services (INS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for their alleged affiliation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist armed group under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In the 80s, the PLO was engaged in a war with Israel and the United States government designated the organization and its subsidiaries as terrorist groups. They were charged under an early version of the Immigration and Nationality Act passed during the height of the Cold War, which classified support for “world communism” as a deportable act. The INS quickly realized the futility of basing the government’s case against the so-called “Los Angeles Eight” (LA 8) on McCarthy-era argumentation and dropped the charges against the six non-immigrant visa holders. The charges against the two green card holders, Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, however, were augmented to fit a contemporaneous statute that judged the support of any group involved in “the destruction of property,” a deportable offense. For the next twenty years, Hamide and Shehadeh would be locked in a legal battle across multiple administrations and charged with a garden variety of deportable offenses, each of which pertained to their alleged support of the PFLP.
The most disturbing discovery in the saga of Hamide and Shehadeh’s prosecution occurred outside of the courtroom and has resounding implications for the case against Mahmoud Khalil. Following the initial arrest of the LA 8, one of the lawyers representing the group received an unmarked envelope that contained a secret government memo. The memo was labeled “Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan,” and it contained instructions for the mass deportation of Arab immigrants from the US as well as a detailed plan for a large detention center to be built in Louisiana, reminiscent of the Japanese internment camps erected during World War II. Not only did the memo propose to summarily strip all lawful residents of a specified nationality of their visas, but it advised the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to exclude the “general public from the hearings on the basis of national security.” This clause, concealed deep in the 40-page document, alludes to the much greater implications of the arrests of Michel Shehadeh, Khader Hamide, and Mahmoud Khalil. Rather than simply deporting individuals who had broken the law, the memo suggested a plan to detain and deport individuals based purely on their nationality. With the explicit intent to hold proceedings outside of public scrutiny, the detainment of the LA 8 was not only a challenge to the courts but a challenge to the public as well. Once the memo was released to the public, the group responsible for its creation and implementation was disbanded, and the plan was discarded. Yet, it was made clear that the arrest of the LA 8 was related to the Contingency Plan and the dismissal of the fundamental rights of legal residents in the name of national security. As David Cole, one of the lead counsels for Shehadeh and Hamide, said, “[The memo] felt like a kind of blueprint for the case against our clients.” The arrests of Hamide and Shehadeh were intended as the beginning, not the end.
As David Cole said in a 1996 interview about the Hamide/Shehadeh case: “[The INS] saw that if they could deport these individuals on such evidence, they would establish a very effective tool that could be used against disfavored political groups.” The DHS, under Trump’s thumb, sees a similar legal path toward escalated repression. Like the Bush and Reagan administrations, the Trump administration would seek to overstate the distance between citizen and noncitizen, immigrant and natural-born, between Mahmoud Khalil and other political dissidents, until he has established the precedent and authority to wield such power against citizens who may believe they are standing on much firmer legal and political ground. Just as the INS memo confirmed, the Reagan administration was not planning to stop with the LA 8, nor should one expect Trump to remain satisfied with Khalil’s detainment. In the weeks following Khalil’s arrest, a Georgetown University postdoctoral student was detained by ICE, and a Brown University transplant specialist was deported to Lebanon without a hearing on her removal.
The Bush administration took one final swing at the case against Hamide and Shehadeh in 2003, charging them retroactively with violating the post-9/11 Patriot Act in their “material support of a terrorist group.” Finally, in 2007, the men were granted a reprieve when Immigration Judge Bruce Einhorn dismissed the case against them in a searing ruling, writing, “The attenuation of these proceedings is a festering wound on the body of respondents and an embarrassment to the rule of law.” Einhorn ruled that the government violated the due process of Hamide and Shehadeh by prolonging the proceedings over multiple decades, and the Bush administration did not appeal the decision.
By 2007, six different charges had been brought against Hamide and Shehadeh by three separate administrations. They had been accused of promoting communism, providing material support for terrorism, and membership in a terrorist organization. Their case had been heard in federal court, district court, the Immigration Court, and at the Board of Immigration Appeals. Their long-sought victory cannot be attributed to Judge Einhorn alone. Across all levels of the American legal system, the judges who issued rulings on Hamide and Shehadeh’s case consistently denied the government the authorization to deport them. As a team of lawyers assembles around Mahmoud Khalil and prepares for what will likely be an arduous court battle, the health of the American legal system has never been under greater strain. Only the power of legal institutions, the doggedness of their lawyers, and the scrutiny of the public stood between Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, and the stripping of their rights as legal residents of the United States. The same forces will decide the fate of Khalil and those who will inevitably follow.
Eva Atkins (CC ‘26) is a junior at Columbia College studying political science and Middle Eastern studies.