WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was unable to say what crimes had been committed by a student protester arrested and set for deportation by the Donald Trump administration.
Federal immigration agents on Sunday arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the U.S. and recent graduate student at Columbia University, and sent him to a detention facility in Louisiana because he helped organize protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Asked at a press conference what crime he believed Khalil committed, Johnson said Khalil had been the “mastermind” of dangerous protests that the speaker personally witnessed when he visited Columbia’s campus last April. He said Jewish students feared for their physical safety and that school administrators failed to control the situation.
“This guy apparently was a mastermind of those very things when the gnashing of teeth and the ripping of clothes and the people screaming at me, wanting to rip me limb from limb because I was there talking about moral clarity and how there’s a right and a wrong,” Johnson said. “They were threatening physical violence of their fellow students.” (Johnson and several other Republicans were heckled from a distance, according to a HuffPost reporter on the scene that day.)
Khalil hasn’t been charged with a crime, but experts say the U.S. has leeway to deport green card holders if officials have reasonable grounds to suspect they could engage in terroristic activities.
“Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” the Department of Homeland Security said Sunday.
Civil liberties groups, free speech advocates and congressional Democrats have raised alarms about Khalil’s arrest representing an assault on First Amendment rights.
“The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate,” the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ben Wizner said Monday in a press release.
“Mahmoud Khalil is a legal permanent resident whose wife, an American citizen, is eight months pregnant,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Monday. “To the extent his actions were inconsistent with Columbia University policy and created an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students and others, there is a serious university disciplinary process that can handle the matter.”
Not all Democrats disagreed with the arrest. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told HuffPost that Columbia protesters broke the law when they took over and occupied campus buildings.
“Taking over a campus is not free speech,” Fetterman said.
In a statement over the weekend, Trump pointed to executive orders he signed in January amid vows to deport “Hamas sympathizers” on student visas.
“Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University,” Trump said on TruthSocial on Monday. “This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
A wrinkle in Khalil’s case is that he’s a lawful permanent resident with more legal protection than a student visa holder would have, according to immigration policy experts. The officers who arrested Khalil initially told his lawyers they were revoking his student visa; Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested Sunday that his legal status didn’t make a difference.
“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” Rubio said.
Johnson echoed Trump’s vow to deport student visa holders.
“If you are on a student visa and you’re in America and you’re an aspiring young terrorist who wants to prey upon your Jewish classmates, you’re going home. We’re going to arrest your tail and we’re going to send you home where you belong,” Johnson said.
Igor Bobic contributed reporting.