Campus protesters have faced deportation threats before
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It's been very overwhelming. It's like when I wake up in the morning, it's a lot of like, just go, go, go, call after call after call. It really, I don't think it like hits me until like, sorry, I'm a mess this morning. That's Nora Abdallah speaking with NPR. Her husband, Columbia graduate student and legal U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the evening of March 8th. He's like, are you Mahmoud Khalil? Mahmoud said, yes.

And he says, "I'm with the police. You have to come with us."

I think at that point, like, honestly, like, my heart sank. Khalil was taken to a detention facility in Louisiana and has been there since. He has not been charged with a crime. The government has instead accused him of being a Hamas sympathizer, a claim his wife vehemently denies. I just want to be clear that the smears against Mahmoud are exactly that. They're smears. He has and always will stand up for what's right. And the way that he was taken from his family was...

was not right. Since his arrest, the government has also alleged in a court document that he failed to disclose some of his employment history in his application for a green card. And Mahmoud Khalil is not the only Columbia student for whom federal agents have come knocking. I did not answer the door. My roommate did, and I'm grateful to her for that. She asked them to identify themselves repeatedly, and they refused. They first said they were police.

Ranjani Sreenivasan is a 37-year-old architect who was set to finish a doctoral program at Columbia in May when she was notified that her visa had been revoked.

She told NPR's Here and Now that the Department of Homeland Security is accusing her of advocating for violence and terrorism. She'd attended a handful of protests against killings of civilians in the war between Israel and Hamas. Rather than risk arrest, she fled to Canada. I'm not a terrorist sympathizer. I'm not pro-Hamas. And I think it's really dangerous to label any free speech that...

you know, somebody disagrees with or any sort of peaceful objection to global issues as, you know, terrorism. I think it just creates a climate of fear. Consider this: The Trump administration's efforts to deport foreign-born students have set off alarm bells about where and when the First Amendment is applied. But it's not the first time our government has tried to deport student activists for pro-Palestinian speech.

Almost 40 years ago, it tried to do the same thing on different legal grounds. Coming up, we'll hear from a lawyer who defended those students about what's at stake. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.

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One morning in January of 1987, Michel Shahada, a Palestinian man who'd lawfully emigrated to the United States as a teenager, was taking care of his toddler son at home when federal agents arrived at his door and arrested him at gunpoint.

Shahada soon learned he was one of eight immigrants, mostly students and known as the L.A.A. arrested on charges relating to their pro-Palestinian activism. Fast forward to this month when federal agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate student, and Georgetown professor Badar Khan Suri.

Like the L.A. 8, both are in the U.S. legally being threatened with deportation, and both are targets of the Trump administration's crackdown on what they describe as anti-Semitic pro-Hamas speech on college campuses across the country.

For insight into this moment and what we can learn from the plight of the LA-8, we turn now to David Cole. He represented the LA-8 over their 20-year fight to remain in the United States. David Cole, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. I just want to start by asking you, as briefly as you can, could you just walk us through what happened to the LA-8? Well, as you indicated in your opening, they were arrested at gunpoint. They were all detained initially as national security threats,

When we challenged that assertion, the government said it wanted to rely on secret evidence that we couldn't see to show that they were security threats. The judge said, no, I'm not going to look at secret evidence unless you can show it to the defendants, essentially. And the government said, okay, well, then we're not going to show it to the judge either. And they were allowed out. So they were free after about the first month, they were free for the entire 20-year saga of their case, which

But it took 20 years to prevail in a case in which the government targeted our clients not for engaging any criminal activity at all, but for essentially advocating for Palestinian self-determination. As you mentioned, these cases went on for more than two decades. How did that affect the lives of the L.A. families?

Well, because they were free, they were able to work. Some of them got green cards while the case was going on. The principal restriction on them was that they weren't able to leave the country without

without giving up their case. And so a number of them lost parents who were living back in Palestine and were unable to go see their parents in the last, you know, years, months, days of their lives without giving up their right to stay in this country. And they just had for two decades hanging over their heads the fact that they may lose the right to be in this country and

despite the fact that they engaged in no unlawful activity because of what they said and what they believed in. What are the similarities that you see between their case and those that are being brought today against Mahmoud Khalil and the others?

Well, it's really deja vu all over again. The government is targeting Palestinians engaged in nothing more than protest activities on campuses. Why? Because the government disagrees with the viewpoints expressed by

And so they are seeking to deport people for their speech. And what we established in the LA-8 case was that the First Amendment protects all of us in the United States. It doesn't limit its protections to citizens. It protects everyone in the United States, whether you're a citizen or an immigrant, whether you're here on a student visa or a permanent resident visa, or even if you're here illegally, you have First Amendment rights. The government can't prosecute you

for burning an American flag or for saying something offensive or for advocating in favor of Palestinian rights or against Israel. And it also can't deport you for doing the same thing.

Why do you think it is that the government has gone after folks on college campuses in particular when it comes to this kind of speech? Well, I think it's really a weaponization of anti-Semitism to target campuses, to target universities. The right...

disagrees with many of the perspectives that are prevalent on universities, and they have sought to attack universities for that very reason. And this charge of anti-Semitism has given them a pretext to

to go after a set of institutions that they don't like because it is liberal. And I think the Trump administration has escalated that because universities are an important part of civil society that provide a source for checking government abuse, for providing criticism of government,

And they don't like that. So they are seeking to neutralize that opposition by targeting students who engage in activism and targeting universities like Columbia if they don't crack down sufficiently harshly on that activism.

In order to pursue these deportations, the government is using a rarely invoked part of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the U.S. Secretary of State to deport any non-citizen whose presence in the U.S. could be deemed to have, and I'm quoting here, adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made the claim that, Khalil's case at least, it's not about free speech, but it's about who is and who is not allowed to be in the country to begin with.

What do you make of that argument? Well, I think, first of all, the notion that a college student's speech on a single campus in the United States somehow poses serious adverse foreign policy consequences is laughable. We're stronger than that. We can tolerate the fact that people, students speak out on campus without our foreign policy going down the tube. So the assertion is blatantly pretextual.

But in addition, it's a violation of the First Amendment because what is the basis upon which he says Mr. Khalil's activities undermine our foreign policy? Nothing more than his pure speech. And speech is protected for all of us.

The use of this obscure legal provision, to me, it seems really similar to what happened with the LA-8. How might you counter such an argument in a case like this? Well, I think, you know, what we did in the LA-8 case, they were initially charged with a similarly obscure provision. It made you deportable for being a member of a group that advocated world communism.

And we challenged the constitutionality of that provision as a violation of the First Amendment. We said citizens have the right to be members of groups that advocate world communism or to advocate world communism themselves and can't be prosecuted for it. And so non-citizens also have the same right to engage in that activity because the First Amendment does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens.

We won on that ground. And I suspect that Khalil will make the same arguments that he has the same First Amendment rights as citizens. And if you can't

prosecute a citizen for criticizing Israel's attacks on Gaza, you can't deport a foreign national for doing so. That violates the First Amendment. If the government is successful in deporting someone like Khalil or Badr Khonsuri, what kind of ripple effects might that have for free speech in the United States? Well, it will send a tremendous chill across this country, and that is its intention.

President Trump on Truth Social essentially said, you know, this is the first step. We're going to go after anyone who engages in what he calls illegal protests, which he seems to define as protests he doesn't like. And so if you, you know, if you're a student on any campus and a foreign national and you see what the government is trying to do to Khalil and Mr. Kansuri simply because of their pure speech,

You're going to shut up. You're going to not engage in your speech rights. And that's precisely what it is designed to do, to shut down speech that the government doesn't like. But the First Amendment is here to say that is not the government's prerogative. The government in the United States has to tolerate speech, even speech that it disapproves of, especially speech that it disapproves of.

David Cole is a former lawyer for the LA8 and National Legal Director for the ACLU. He is now at Georgetown Law. David, thank you so much for talking with us. Thanks so much for having me. This episode was produced by Kira Wackeem with audio engineering by Hannah Glovna. It was edited by Sarah Handel and Nadia Lansi. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.

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