I’ve tried writing this column several times now. It started purely as a reaction to the news that Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian activist, had been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March. The video of the arrest shows plainclothes officers detaining Khalil in the lobby of a university-owned apartment building in front of and to the surprise of his wife. I was chilled by this news, as anyone who values free speech should be, and needed to publish something, anything, about it.
But then it kept happening. Yunseo Chung, another Columbia student and pro-Palestine activist, was also targeted by ICE until it received an injunction from a federal judge prohibiting her arrest. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, was also arrested right outside her apartment building after publishing an op-ed in the student newspaper critical of the university’s response to pro-Palestine protests.
As of April 2, according to CNN, nearly a dozen students and faculty members across the country are known to have been detained by federal agents in an executive campaign that has specifically targeted pro-Palestinian activists.
Of course, this is all simply the tip of the iceberg: According to The New York Times, as of April 8, nearly 300 students across the country have had their visas revoked and are at risk of facing deportation. A “small” number of students here at IU are among that cohort. It should go without saying that not all these revocations are related to alleged involvement in any protest organizations. In some cases, students have been given no reason why their stay in the country has been terminated. Nevertheless, these matters are undeniably intertwined — both are a matter of grievous injustice, and both work to paint a picture of a state willing to squash descent at any cost.
We shouldn’t have been all too surprised though. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order, in the name of combating antisemitism, indicating that the federal government would take steps exactly like this one to quell pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. His administration has broadly denounced students like Khalil as “Hamas sympathizers” and has used this deceptive justification to target them for arrest and, eventually, deportation.
To date, Khalil has yet to be charged with any crime. Neither he nor the public at-large has seen any evidence to support the federal government’s claim that he represents a threat to foreign policy. But, in reality, it’s hardly worth even trying to tiptoe around the true reasoning for his arrest.
The only threat Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Rumeysa Ozturk and every other university activist whom this administration has targeted pose is a threat to American hegemony. They were arrested because they represent a view that is unfavorable, and even harmful, to the power of the state. They were arrested because they exercised their right to protest the complicity of our government in the violent actions of governments abroad. I don’t believe the matter is any more complicated than that.
This is certainly not the first time in history legal U.S. citizens have been arrested for their political activities. In 1918, for example, Eugene V. Debs, a prominent socialist from Indiana, was arrested for speaking out against World War I. Around the same time, the Palmer Raids were initiated to arrest and deport whomever the Woodrow Wilson administration deemed to be communists or anarchists: a range of estimates claim that anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 people were targeted, many of whom were Italian and Eastern-European Jewish immigrants.
But this shouldn’t make the issue with Khalil any less alarming. The simple fact that the targeting of political dissidents isn’t totally unprecedented in America should only make us angrier that the alleged freest country in the world consistently perpetuates these injustices, and that it feels so comfortable doing so to this day.
It’s also true that universities are just as complicit in the actions of the Trump administration as any other institution. The fact Columbia — a private university — allowed the arrest and detention of one of its students on university property is abhorrent. The fact the university would treat a portion of its student body as sacrificial lambs in the name of federal funding is abhorrent. And the fact the university ever allowed matters to get to this point, that it allowed over 100 students to be arrested for protesting last year, is abhorrent.
In an open letter published by the Columbia Spectator on April 4, Khalil focused not just on his own detention by federal authorities but on the other students who’ve been treated similarly. But, more than anything, in the letter he centered the movement he was targeted for fighting for in the first place. He specifically called out the students — and, indeed, community members more broadly — who have remained apathetic on both the issue of Palestinian liberation and freedom of speech on campus.
“When the time comes for the federal government to target other causes, it will be your names that Columbia will offer on a silver platter,” he wrote, “it will be your pleas that fall on deaf ears, it will be your just causes that are stonewalled.”
If and when international students here in Bloomington are detained by federal immigration authorities for their participation in those protests — and if and when the student body more broadly is targeted for resistance of any kind — we should not hope to rely on an institution like IU to protect them. We can’t forget that IU, after quietly changing its assembly ground policies, oversaw the arrests of 57 protesters at the encampment in Dunn Meadow last spring.
After that, how could we possibly trust this university to help us?
The systems we have in place offer no safety net because they are not designed with the peoples’ welfare in mind. But giving up on the movement to liberate oppressed peoples everywhere — both here and abroad — is not an option. There might be little we can do in the face of an increasingly authoritarian domestic policy, but what we absolutely cannot do is stop caring about and fighting for the possibility of a genuinely better future.
Joey Sills (he/him) is a senior studying English, political science and comparative literature.
