The war on the right to protest

Big thought, small step, and deep breath for March 11, 2025

BIG THOUGHT

Trump comes for the universities, students, and the First Amendment

This past Friday, the federal government served Columbia University notice that they’d be shutting off $400 million in already-approved grants. The freeze came just five days after the announcement of a review of Columbia’s federal contracts for its alleged failure to curtail campus anti-semitism.

You may recall that former Columbia president Minouche Shafik did quite a lot to satisfy the demands of congressional anti-antisemites during last spring’s wave of protests against the war in Gaza. Unlike many campuses, Columbia called in city police and allowed arrests on campus property. Shafik ultimately lost the confidence of university administrators and faculty and resigned just before the beginning of the fall term.

Funding freezes were only the beginning. This past weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Mahmoud Kahlil, a former student at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs set to graduate this May. Khalil had been a visible spokesperson for campus protestors and a negotiator with the university. He’s married to an American, and is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. — a green card holder. Reportedly he’d feared arrest or worse and had asked the university for help, but had received none; ICE officers were allowed access to his on-campus apartment.

But Kahlil wasn’t simply arrested — he was threatened with the revocation of both his visa and his green card, and then disappeared, taken from his home without being given access to a lawyer or his family being informed of his whereabouts; his family and lawyers later tracked him to a federal detention center in Jena, Louisiana.

Yesterday, Khalil’s lawyers filed a writ of habeas corpus, and his deportation was blocked by a federal judge. A hearing — in New York City — is set for this Wednesday.

So why did this happen, and, you might ask, how could this have happened? Even if you think Khalil is in the wrong, his actions — which have been widely reported — were clearly speech, and while green cards can be revoked for all kinds of reasons, like involvement in actual terrorist activities, there’s no provision in the law for revoking them on speech grounds — that’s why the First Amendment exists. Its free-speech protections do cover non-citizens.

But so far as anyone knows, Khalil hasn’t been charged with anything specific.

The language the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and others in the administration have been using in their mounting threats against student protestors has been very vague — they suggest his activities are “aligned to” Hamas. But what that means relies on some obscure legal wrangling.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reportedly relying on a clause in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act that suggests he has the power to deport noncitizens whose actions he feels “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The government’s theory, according to The New York Times, is that Khalil’s speech — and protests against Israeli actions in Gaza in general — were by definition antisemitic, and given the United States’s “foreign policy of combating antisemitism around the world” they “undermine this policy objective” and thus warrant Khalil’s deporation.

That’s a chilling argument to stay, and even if the government can somehow make the case that speech against Israel is by definition antisemitic (while organizations like the ADL have made the argument and House Republicans have attempted to enshrine the idea in law, there’s a long historical debate and it is far from settled, among Jews or anybody else).

Even so, there’s plenty of precedent that antisemitic speech is protected under the First Amendment. Remember the ACLU’s successful defense of a Nazi group’s right to march in Skokie, Illiinois? So it all comes back to the government making an argument that’s never been made before — that the First Amendment doesn’t protect immigrants who say things the government doesn’t agree with. A deeply unconstitutional, un-American argument. And another constitutional crisis to add to the pile.

Trump posted on Monday that the actions against Columbia and Khalil were the first of “many to come.” Today, letters went out to 60 more colleges and universities, warning of funding freezes and actions against foreign students. And the State Department floated plans to use A.I. to review foreign students’ social media postings to identify supposed Hamas supporters.

Because the point is to bring the universities and their students to heel, and to restrict the right to protest altogether.

While Columbia seems to be complying (interim university president Katrina Armstrong pointed to her office’s “commitment to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” whatever those may be), Khalil’s arrest was met with large protests demanding his release. The people still know their rights, as do the students — even as they understand those rights are under attack. As Wesleyan University president Michael Roth — one of the few higher-education leaders to make clear his recognition of and support for students’ rights during the protests — told us last year:

We must remind the new regime in Washington (and governing bodies of various institutions) that there is a basic democratic right to protest…It will be even more important, I think, to engage with activists in building connections to new coalitions of voters and in building the foundations of democratic practices that might energize new coalitions. Civic engagement should help young people build a healthier democratic culture. That’s not just to protest against things, it's building things together.

The university after the election

SMALL STEP

Join together!

Tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, Anand will be hosting Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin for a Substack Live chat. We hope you’ll join us — but why not join Indivisible too? It’s a great way to get involved in practical, focused steps to fight the Trump-Musk administration, and since it’s a nationwide coalition of local groups it’s a way to build community where you are. So while you’re waiting for tonight’s conversation, visit Indivisible and find a group near you. And we invite you to revisit our previous conversations with Levin at the links below.

Despair is not an option

Building group power to push back against Trump 2.0

DEEP BREATH

In like a lion

Maybe it’s a little early for it, technically, but for those of us in the Northeast, today sure felt like spring. Daffodils are starting, the birds are returning. Life, however fragile it can seem, is resurgent, reminding us again of its power and persistence. And even in the current darkness, new life suggests there’s always a chance to look ahead to a brighter season. Which puts us in mind of a stanza from Amy Gerstler’s “In Perpetual Spring.”

Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.

—Amy Gerstler

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A programming note: More Lives!

We’ve got two very special Live conversations planned for this week: Tonight, Tuesday, March 11, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern we’ll be joined by Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin. And Thursday, March 13, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern we’ll be speaking with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit. We hope you’ll join us for both!

To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.

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Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images