Mahmoud Khalil's Detention Is A War on Terror Milestone

ICE turned a campus activist for Palestine into a political prisoner. Witness a coalescence of several post-9/11 currents that threaten your most basic freedoms 

Edited by Sam Thielman

IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (ICE) came for Mahmoud Khalil on Saturday night as he returned home from a post-Ramadan iftar meal. Khalil, who recently graduated from Columbia University's School of Public Affairs and who lived in a Columbia-owned residence, is a Palestinian (with Algerian citizenship) who played a leading role in the Columbia student body's ongoing protests against Israel's genocide of his people. In 2025, that is enough to make him a political prisoner. 

Khalil's pregnant wife is a U.S. citizen. He himself holds a green card, making Khalil a lawful permanent resident. On paper, that's supposed to keep Khalil from being the kind of person ICE can lawfully detain and potentially deport. 

But everything about the long 9/11 era, which created ICE, tells us that Mahmoud Khalil is exactly the kind of person ICE and its champions want to detain and deport. 

Khalil's attorney, Amy Greer, told the Columbia Spectator that the plainclothes ICE agents who snatched Khalil from his home initially claimed Khalil's visa had expired. Again, Khalil isn't in the country on a visa. But his detention is not an innocent mistake or bureaucratic snafu. On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration will revoke "visas and/or green cards" of what he called "Hamas supporters" to expedite their deportation. ICE's bureaucratic parent, the preeminent post-9/11 creation called the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said that Khalil was in fact "arrested" for leading "activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization." 

"Activities aligned to… a designated terrorist organization" is a construction previously unheard of in the generation-long history of tortured official circumlocutions designed to obscure lawlessness in the guise of counterterrorism. When Israel's genocide in Gaza began and accordingly provoked campus protests against it last fall, the Anti-Defamation League urged administrators to investigate protesters for the absurd claim of providing material support to terrorism. Thinking about this for 10 seconds unravels it: what material thing is a broke college student demanding their university divest from Israel supposed to be providing Hamas, whose funding Israel itself facilitated? But what DHS said Sunday night goes far, far further. Now the detainable/arrestable offense is anything "aligned" to the presumed prerogatives of a designated terrorist organization. In this case, that's a series of protests on behalf of the position that Palestinians have the right to stay alive. And advocacy for Palestinians here is deliberately indistinguishable from "activities aligned to" Hamas.

Drop Site News and the Spectator both reported that Khalil's detention followed days of Zionist social-media agitation, including by Columbia Business School Professor Shai Davidai, urging the Trump administration to specifically detain and deport Khalil. It also follows months of advocacy from administration figures to examine campus protests against Israel for the potential of deporting participants, as well as Friday's decision to revoke $400 million federal funding for Columbia for not sufficiently repressing the anti-genocide protests. [Even after all that, Columbia’s interim president sent an email to staff assuring them she was “committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns.”—Sam.] Ostensibly, caging Khalil (like the funding cancellation) is meant to protect the safety of Jewish students on campus. 

All of this obscures the realities that Jewish students on campus are not in any meaningful danger from protests on behalf of Palestine; and that the government has not charged Khalil himself with committing any act of violence, let alone terrorism. 

These are the wages of replacing actual antisemitism, a virulent danger that opens the violent panoply of authoritarian ambitions, with anti-Zionism, a legitimate political perspective relentlessly validated by the behavior of the Israeli state. Shortly after Khalil was arrested, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen announced that there will be no more electricity entering the Gaza Strip, which will mean that a wastewater treatment plant in Gaza will cease to function, imperiling the ability of Palestinians to access clean water. I hope you can understand the disgust a Jew such as myself feels to see the suppression of antisemitism replaced by the suppression of anti-Zionism for the purpose of expanding the remit of the Security State to abridge the most basic political freedoms the Constitution allegedly protects. 

"The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is designed to spread terror throughout immigrant communities and social justice movements on college campuses," Jonah Rubin of Jewish Voice for Peace said in a prepared statement that hit my inbox this morning. "Even as we work to free Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia and every other college and university must stop complying with the illegal and unconstitutional orders of the Trump regime, and must start taking active measures to protect their students."

The administration intends to detain and deport more Khalils at scale, and they have the tools to do so. Axios reported on Thursday that Rubio intends to use an artificial intelligence program to identify visa holders who've protested against Israel, under an initiative called "Catch And Deport." (Or saying/doing something similar; the reporting on this is filled with "supporting terrorism" euphemisms about what speech or behavior actually qualifies.) If this program didn't identify Khalil, you can rest assured it will identify many Khalils in the future, whatever their actual immigration status. Using AI for this purpose represents a turn of the ratchet in the use of post-9/11 counterterrorism tools to suppress dissent. The Counterintelligence Field Activity that gathered intelligence on antiwar protesters at military facilities during the Bush administration, for instance, could never have operated at such scale or with such efficiency. 

I have been reading well-meaning writers I respect start to talk themselves into embracing AI. They are looking to hypothetical, industry-spun fables about the great advancements in human civilization AI will provide someday. What they are overlooking is that today, right now, AI is a tool for political repression and mass slaughter, and Palestine is its laboratory. The consensus application for AI, today, embraced by both political parties, is militarization. Palantir's Alex Karp, an AI industry leader whose company began with $2 million of CIA investment money because of the utility of datamining to the War on Terror, is the sort of person who compares himself to Batman and says things like "saving lives and on occasion taking lives is super interesting." 

Columbia University houses the Knight First Amendment Center, which is awkward considering Columbia's breathtaking revocation of free speech on campus, not just on Saturday but since last spring. Its executive director is Jameel Jaffer. Jameel is someone I've known for literal decades thanks to his work taking the War on Terror to court throughout the 9/11 era. Jameel issued the following statement last night: 

“Arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world’s most repressive regimes. It’s genuinely shocking that this appears to be what’s going on right here. Universities must recognize that these actions pose an existential threat to academic life itself. They must make clear, through action, that they will not sit on the sidelines as the Trump administration terrorizes students and faculty alike and runs roughshod over individual rights and the rule of law."

Not to put words in Jameel's mouth, but I saw so much of the War on Terror between the lines of his statement. The War on Terror's long assault on freedom of association has not only conflated Supporter of Palestine with Supporter of Terrorism but now is making a bid to erase the legal predication of actual material support that prompts a counterterrorism response. (At the risk of digression, the threat to free association posed by the War on Terror is very often obscured by the ceaseless and cynical discourse about "free speech on campus"; the suppression of Palestinian speech is what Bari Weiss has worked for since she was herself a Columbia student.) That is the meaning of the "activities aligned to" phrasing, and Rubio's "supporters of Hamas" locution. The maturation of AI means they can erase the distinction between terrorism and advocating for the freedom of an out-group—if they are allowed to get away with it. Remember this when congressional Republicans aided by certain Democrats reintroduce a bill targeting nonprofits that serves as a backdoor domestic-terrorism list. 

Finally, there are many fast-moving reports about where exactly Khalil is. After it became unclear that ICE's detention-tracker had accurately listed his whereabouts, my Zeteo colleague Prem Thakker tweeted this morning that he's in a Louisiana ICE facility. I would suggest that Khalil's disappearance, for however long a length of time, is a harbinger. The Trump administration is not supercharging migrant detentions at Guantanamo Bay for no reason. Before we get there: free Mahmoud Khalil.  

ON MARCH 17, I'll be part of a fun panel looking at IRON MAN through the prism of resistance to the military industrial complex. If you've enjoyed, disliked or otherwise been curious about the political currents that inform my IRON MAN run, take some time during your St. Patrick's Day noontime break (I hope you have one) to check out a conversation I'll have with Josue Pierre of the Dissenters network and one of my favorite military economists, Miriam Pemberton. Miriam's excellent book Six Stops on The National Security Tour has been a particular inspiration for my run, and I got to tell her that in person when she showed up for my Big Planet signing in Maryland for the issue 1 launch. Here's the promo graphic, which has sign-up information. See you next week!

But before that, be sure to buy IRON MAN #6, which is out this Wednesday. This is where what I've been meaning to do with Iron Man from the start properly kicks off. I'll say more about this in our next edition, which is going to spoil the whole issue and only be available to paid subscribers, so buy a subscription!

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.