Since October 7, 2023, critics of Israel in Europe and the United States have faced serious repression. In the United States, college student protests against the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza were met with a heavy-handed response by police and university administrations.

Repression of pro-Palestine activists intensified with Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, as the Trump administration began detaining and deporting noncitizen residents for their criticisms of the United States’ policy toward Israel. Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and former Columbia University graduate student, was an early victim of the crackdown. Though Khalil has been freed from detention, the government is still seeking his deportation; Khalil is now suing the Trump administration in turn for alleged violations of his rights.

In an interview for The Jacobin Show, Khalil spoke to David Griscom about his lawsuits against the administration, the repression of pro-Palestine voices, and the state of the movement for Palestine in the United States today. You can watch the full interview here. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

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David Griscom

You have this new lawsuit against the Trump administration. What’s being argued in this suit?

Mahmoud Khalil

I now have multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration. The first one, which we consider the biggest one, is the conspiracy lawsuit. We’ve already filed a lawsuit against members of the Trump administration — Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, the attorney general and a couple others, as well as the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, Betar, these right-wing Zionist hate groups. We’re suing them for conspiring together to deprive me of my civil rights under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

That act was passed by Congress during the Reconstruction era, more than a century ago, to prevent local governments from conspiring with the Ku Klux Klan to deprive newly freed black people of their rights. Today, unfortunately, we’re seeing ourselves in similar situations. You have private and public actors conspiring together to make public examples of Palestinians and their supporters, to send a message to others that if you speak, then they will come after you — the same way the Klan sought to do during Reconstruction.

In this lawsuit, we’re saying the federal government should not be colluding with private groups to target and persecute people for their First Amendment–protected rights, whether it’s about supporting Palestine or not. It’s not only about Palestine; it’s about this plot between private actors and public actors.

David Griscom

Could you talk a little bit about the Canary Mission? This organization’s operations are pretty offensive to free speech.

Mahmoud Khalil

Canary Mission is a shadowy, unaccountable group. Newly reported investigations have uncovered that it’s actually being run from Israel by American Israeli citizens there. Its main function used to be to intimidate those who speak out in support of Palestine by posting their profiles online, contacting their employers, doxing them, smearing them. [Being targeted by Canary Mission] was a risk I knew about when I got into Palestine advocacy. A lot of pro-Palestine people use it like a dating app, if you have a profile there . . . 

David Griscom

I got my start on the Left doing Students for Justice in Palestine back in the day. And I remember these organizations. People did kind of see it like, “Oh, it’s nice to be noticed!” But this is gallows humor. The repercussions from this can be quite severe.

Mahmoud Khalil

The most dangerous thing is they use it as an intimidation tactic. They use it to smear people so they stop advocating for Palestine. I made that calculation: If an employer wouldn’t hire me for my advocacy for Palestine, why would I work for them?

But I never imagined that the anti-Palestinian bigotry would become institutionalized. That the government would go to Canary Mission’s website and would communicate with Canary Mission to actually target and deport people. It’s not only happening to noncitizens but also to citizens.The federal government should not be colluding with private groups to target and persecute people for their First Amendment–protected rights.

Court records have uncovered that the government used and communicated with Canary Mission to target people. They got five thousand names from Canary Mission to surveil and to go after. I was one of those people whose name was communicated by Canary Mission and Betar and others to the administration. [These organizations have had] no accountability whatsoever. They’re like a shell company. The same with Betar. Betar is known to be a very racist right-wing Israeli organization that adopts a very extreme pro-Israeli position. Recently, New York actually banned Betar from operating there, because of the pervasive intimidation and threats coming from this group against activists and advocates in the country.

David Griscom

What is Project Esther, and how is the Heritage Foundation rolled up into this conspiracy?

Mahmoud Khalil

The Heritage Foundation — we know that since Trump got into office the first time — they’ve been advising him on how to change American politics, change American society. They issued Project 2025, which they are famous for. But they’re less famous for Project Esther, which was issued the year after October 7, after they saw the amount of support that Palestine received on college campuses and in the streets. They issued Project Esther, which is a blueprint for the government to follow. It talks about private-public partnerships to intimidate those speaking out for Palestine, so that you can make an example out of them, and then no one would speak out.

For international students, they said you have to deport them, then other international students in the country wouldn’t speak out for Palestine. This was one of the things in Project Esther. And because it was issued before Trump was in power [a second time], it said that we need an administration willing to collaborate with these private institutions. So they already had a very well-established network of these shady groups like Betar and Canary Mission, but they were missing the willing administration to support them. Once Trump was in power, he was more than willing to collaborate with them. Project Esther is about criminalizing support for Palestine in a way that would intimidate people, would chill speech across the country. That’s the main purpose of it, because they know they can never win on the merits. They can never win on the argument of supporting a genocidal apartheid state like Israel.

David Griscom

I live in Texas, and I hear all the time from Republicans about how people are trying to indoctrinate the kids, and that we need to protect young people. But here we have, at the highest level of government, people acting at the behest of a foreign government trying to shut down free speech at our college campuses and using serious threats to achieve those ends.

If you’re worried about what’s being forced upon the next generation, this is something that you probably should be worried about.

Mahmoud Khalil

That’s the base of it. Because what they’re trying to do is to stop any argument, any free inquiry, any academic freedom. They’re trying to push Anti-Defamation League trainings into school curricula. What we’re saying is it’s freedom of speech. The First Amendment is there to protect that. America is the land of the free; they can’t employ and inflict such violence on people for speaking out on their ideas.What’s happening to me is only the tip of the iceberg of what these groups are willing to do.

For so many years, Israel and its lobby have criminalized the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign in a lot of states. Although that’s very First Amendment: I don’t like something, I want to boycott it.

They’ve been working on this for so many years. What’s happening to me is only the tip of the iceberg of what these groups are willing to do.

I’m always baffled by politicians and institutions that are willing to sacrifice the Constitution of the United States. They are willing to sacrifice the rule of law, the safety of their own people, just to protect Israel.

David Griscom

You wrote a piece a while ago where you asked the question: Who has the right to have rights? I think about this in your case but also in many other cases. For my friends who do labor organizing, for example, the question of citizenship comes up. Like, if I join a union, I might lose my legal status in this country. You see the violence in the streets all across the country, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and all these areas where this country makes exceptions. It says, “We are the land of the free, we have all these rights,” and then, in this circumstance, that doesn’t count anymore.

Mahmoud Khalil

I’m still struggling with that question, of who has the right to have rights. The first thing I said upon my release from detention is, “No human being is illegal.”

We’re all equal. We were all born equal, and we should continue to be equal. This government is trying to divide people into tiers: first is an American-born citizen, then a naturalized citizen, then a permanent resident, then an undocumented person. [They want to say] what rights you have are based on these things. This government is trying to take all these rights that generations in this country, since its founding, [have been working to achieve].

That’s my problem: that the state thinks that it grants these rights and people accept them. When they say a green card is a privilege or a visa is a privilege, I’m like, “Yeah, it is a privilege of the law — it’s a right. It’s not a privilege of Trump or a privilege of this administration.” But this is what this administration is trying to do: to make everything a privilege. Federal funding is a privilege. Medicare is a privilege. Freedom of speech is a privilege. They’re trying to turn everything into a privilege, while in reality they are rights. And they are rights that everyone in this country deserves and should claim.

Now I don’t want to be naive about what citizenship is, or borders. We don’t live in utopia [where we can] say, we don’t need any borders. But what’s happening is dehumanization; it’s divide and conquer.

David Griscom

We’re seeing it across the board. Regularly we have candidates in Texas, who are very likely to be elected to office, who have called not just for deportations of migrants, or of people who were born in other countries and got citizenship, but of people who just have political opinions that they disagree with.

I want to turn toward the movement for human rights through the movement for Palestinian people in this country, and to hear your thoughts on where we’re at in this moment. In many ways, being able to talk openly about this subject, to speak the truth about Israel, has become more accepted than it ever was before. We are seeing major public officials, like Zohran Mamdani, say things that a lot of others wouldn’t in the past. Yet we are still watching horrors in Gaza; we are still watching horrors in the West Bank.

Mahmoud Khalil

At the outset, I would say we shouldn’t take for granted that now more people are speaking their minds on Palestine or on other issues. Because we fought for this — whether it’s the students who got suspended or expelled, whether it is the individuals who were sacked from their jobs, fired for speaking out for Palestine. I don’t want to take that for granted, because again, that’s the thing about rights being taken away from us.

Public memory is usually short, and that’s what Israel is banking on. [A lot of people think the genocide in Gaza] is only a Benjamin Netanyahu phenomenon. This is what Israel has been since its founding. Since 1948, Israel has been a genocidal state. Since ’48, Israel has been an apartheid state. It’s nothing new; it’s not about Netanyahu.

That’s why I wouldn’t take anything for granted and would continue to push more and more. The movement, in the past few years, has made huge successes in shifting public opinion in the country. If we’re talking about the American public as a whole, we have the majority of them opposing sending arms to Israel, a lot of them favoring Palestinian human rights. Which is great. But also, at what expense that came — it came at the expense of over one hundred thousand people killed in Palestine and Syria and Lebanon and Iran, all across the region. A huge cost was paid to get to this level of public opinion.We shouldn’t take for granted that now more people are speaking their minds on Palestine. We fought for this.

Now we’re cashing in on this, thankfully, with the election of Zohran, with the election of Darializa Avila Chevalier, of Claire Valdez, of others. But it’s not enough. We have to realize that the movement for Palestine in this country is facing an incredible amount of suppression of intimidation, and it’s not unique to this administration.

Everything that Trump is doing now, Joe Biden paved the way for it. It’s not like Trump is coming up with all these ideas or was able to do all of what he has done in one day. The previous presidential administrations really paved the way for this administration to be able to do what it’s doing right now. And to think about the amount of violence that was inflicted on this movement in this country — whether through sham congressional hearings, whether through ICE and weaponization of the immigration system, or the weaponization of antisemitism, or through expelling hundreds of students to make examples out of them. . . . 

What I really look forward to, in terms of accountability — accountability comes not only through courts, not only through winning lawsuits, it comes also from the public punishing Rep. Adriano Espaillat for not standing up for his constituents and the students at Columbia University, for punishing Dan Goldman for being a staunch supporter of Israel.

David Griscom

We are going into the midterms right now. What should these basic demands be, of anyone who wants to earn a vote? What does accountability look like here?

Mahmoud Khalil

I speak as first as a Palestinian but also a father of an American citizen and a husband of an American citizen. Really, it’s about human rights first. And even when they say, “America First,” to me that wouldn’t change much: when you put human rights first, America would be first, but all other human beings would be first as well. I paid thousands of dollars this year for taxes. Why am I spending that money on Israel and not for my son to have a better playground?

I think the most important thing is — that’s what I like about the candidates I mentioned, that they were very unequivocal and unapologetic about the principles they stand for. Because what we’re seeing now with a lot of Democrats, especially those who [only recently signed a bill] to stop arming Israel, they only did that because their constituents were mad at them, not because they’re principled.

That’s what Palestine exposed about people. A lot of people did not vote for Zohran just because of his views on Palestine. But when you’re wrong on Palestine, that exposes how rotten your politics are. To miss that very clear principle says a lot about who you are and how you would represent your own people.

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