Trump Vowed To Pursue Undocumented Immigrants. Now Legal Immigrants Are Targets, Too.

The arrest of a Palestinian graduate student who represented anti-Israel protests at Columbia University marks a significant shift for the U.S. government, even from an administration that has prioritized cracking down on both immigration and campus anti-war protests.

Mahmoud Khalil, who enraged conservatives with his central role in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war, both entered the U.S. legally as a student and had legal permanent status as a green card holder — making his arrest over the weekend by immigration agents a radical departure in enforcement that is already facing legal challenges and causing widespread outrage.

President Donald Trump vowed during the campaign to deport foreign students who participated in the protests over the war in Gaza. But his immigration rhetoric over the last year focused more on removing undocumented immigrants from the country — particularly those who have committed crimes — than those immigrants living here with legal status. The administration’s announcement that it will revoke the protesters’ visas and green cards and deport them marked a rhetorical turn and a major escalation.

Some Democrats who have treaded carefully around immigration enforcement since the election see an open door in the Khalil case. Khalil is also married to a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant, potentially eliciting broader sympathy.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee — led by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the second highest ranking Democrat in the chamber — called Khalil’s detention “Straight up authoritarianism.”

Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, said she was “extremely concerned” about the arrest and that her office is monitoring the situation. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the only Palestinian-American member of Congress, said “This is straight out of the fascist playbook.” And Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller who is running for mayor against incumbent Eric Adams, called the arrest an “unconstitutional and egregious violation of the First Amendment, and a frightening weaponization of immigration law.”

Khalil’s attorney told The Associated Press she was unaware of Khalil’s location on Sunday night. As of Monday afternoon, a person with Khalil’s name was being held in a detention facility in Louisiana, according to ICE’s detainee locator.

The arrest also concerned some Republicans who have condemned the campus protests. “These are very, very dangerous waters for Secretary [Marco Rubio] to assert himself in,” Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and State Department appointee in Trump’s first administration, told POLITICO, referencing Rubio’s post that said the administration would revoke the visas and green cards of “Hamas supporters.”

“We are the party of ‘Why did Elon Musk buy Twitter? For free speech.’ Now we’re going to start playing around,” he added.

Free speech has been a Trump administration talking point, with Vice President JD Vance slamming European laws and social media platforms for “censorship” and chilling right-leaning voices. “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” Vance said last month in Munich.

The Trump administration has also waded into murky legal territory. The Department of Homeland Security, as it did in Khalil’s case, is authorized to arrest and initiate deportation proceedings against green card holders, including for certain criminal convictions. But only a judge can take away a person’s permanent residence status.

“One of the most disturbing features of what has happened here is that the administration has not been transparent about the grounds that they have relied on to revoke Khalil’s green card,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute. “They haven’t pointed to any crimes that he was convicted of. They haven’t articulated the specific statutory authority they’re relying on here.”

Krishnan noted that the extraordinary action “will have the effect of chilling the kinds of student protests that this administration has threatened to retaliate against since the very beginning,” adding that the “political deportation” hearkens back to “repressive moments in America’s history,” such as the McCarthy era.

Trump officials, including border czar Tom Homan, claim Khalil violated the terms of his visa by supporting Hamas — a designated terrorist organization. But Khalil has never been charged with or convicted of any crimes.

“Did he violate the terms of his visa? Did he violate the terms of his residency? Committing crimes, attacking Israeli students, locking down buildings, destroying property, absolutely any resident alien that commits a crime is eligible for deportation,” Homan said on Fox News. “And that’s just one of many.”

Khalil’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Khalil told Al Jazeera that he was concerned joining the protesters could jeopardize his immigration status, so he decided instead to act as the lead negotiator between the student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, and members of the Columbia administration. “Since the beginning, I decided to stay out of the public eye and away from media attention or high-risk activities,” he told the outlet. “I considered the encampment to be ‘high risk.’”

Columbia briefly suspended Khalil before rescinding the suspension, according to Al Jazeera. He said the university president’s office even called him to apologize.

Trump on Monday called Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and said his arrest was the “first arrest of many to come” and that “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.” He added, without evidence, that “Many are not students, they are paid agitators” — a longstanding, but inaccurate, talking point among critics.

CUAD, a coalition of dozens of student groups that includes much of Columbia’s undergraduate student body, has continuously maintained that it is anti-Zionist, but not antisemitic. Some of its leaders identify as anti-Zionist Jews. The group has not explicitly endorsed Hamas, but a POLITICO analysis found that some members had engaged with pro-Hamas content via a web of channels on an encrypted messaging app.

The GOP’s 2024 platform, which Trump and his team played a major role in shaping, calls for “revoking Visas of Foreign Nationals who support terrorism and jihadism” and to “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS.” So does “Project Esther,” a Heritage Foundation blueprint to “combat antisemitism,” which equates the “pro-Palestinian movement” with a “Hamas Support Network” and calls on “pro-Palestinian” university faculty and staff to be fired, and students to lose their visas and be deported.

“SHALOM, MAHMOUD,” the White House said Monday on X, using a Hebrew word that can mean “hello,” “goodbye” or “peace.” A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has long railed against the high-profile, anti-war protests at universities across the country in the months after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. He announced a federal task force on antisemitism to visit 10 college campuses that had antisemitic incidents since the attacks and pulled $400 million in funding from Columbia last week.

“Let me be very clear to all those individuals who are defending this individual: A student visa is a privilege,” Leo Terrell, who heads the administration’s antisemitism task force, told Fox News on Monday. “Yes, you’ll get your day before an immigration judge, but it can be revoked. So I want these individuals who are practicing antisemitic behavior, if you are an individual on a student visa, you’re not an American citizen, you’re a foreign national. And you can expect deportation proceedings or revocation of your right to attend a prestigious university in the great country of America.”

When students at Columbia erected tents on a campus lawn last April and declared it the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” they thrust the Manhattan university into the eye of a political firestorm. Members of Congress descended on the Ivy League school, with some progressive “Squad” members joining student protesters while both Democrats and Republicans slammed what they claimed were incidents of antisemitism. Speaker Mike Johnson, overlooking the encampment, called for the National Guard to dismantle it as students chanted, “Mike, you suck.”

The tension reached a crescendo when dozens of demonstrators forcibly entered Hamilton Hall, a campus building famous for being occupied by anti-war demonstrators five decades earlier. The next night, in a stunning show of force, Columbia’s then-president authorized hundreds of New York Police Department officers to swarm the campus and arrest over 100 people, mostly students.

The group’s demands, which included that the school cut all financial ties to Israel, ultimately went unmet. The “autonomous group” that occupied the campus building was independent from CUAD.

The campus remains a hotbed of anti-war protest activity. Last week, NYPD officers arrested nine students at Barnard, one of Columbia’s affiliate institutions, for refusing to leave a sit-in at a campus library.

In a statement, Columbia said it was aware of reports of ICE agents on campus and “is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community.” The school noted that “law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including University buildings.”

A Columbia spokesperson did not comment on Khalil’s detention specifically.

Bianca Quilantan contributed to this report.