A Palestinian human rights advocate, Mahmoud Khalil, has been kidnapped from his Columbia University residence and illegally detained by ICE/DHS agents, first in New Jersey, and now in a private prison in Louisiana.

Khalil is a legal resident of the U.S. with a Green Card. His wife is an American citizen, and eight months pregnant. He has broken no U.S. laws, or at least none his ICE captors will name, and he is entitled to all the protections of the U.S. Constitution. He is a self-described human rights advocate, and what he has done is participate in campus protests against the ongoing Israeli genocide against Gazans and residents of the West Bank, where his family is from. During these protests, he was the designated negotiator between the students protesting and the Columbia administrators, working to avoid any undue conflicts.

Why call this a kidnapping? First, the four plainclothes DHS agents entered Khalil’s housing space illegally. He gave them no permission. The agents claimed they had a “warrant.” This was a lie, they had no legal warrant at all. They claimed they had a warrant to revoke his student visa. Khalil informed them he wasn’t on a student visa. He had a green card. After a quick phone conversation, the agents claimed they now had authority to revoke his green card. Another lie. They did not. They simply seized Khalid, rejected any queries from his lawyers, and quickly flew him to Louisiana. Why? To separate him from family and effective legal advice, the opposite of habeas corpus.

What did the agents have? Simply a directive from Trump and Mario Rubio, via DHS, to arrest and deport him for being pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic, and thus disruptive of U.S. foreign policy. None of this is true, and even if it were, it is still protected speech under the First Amendment. How was he likely targeted? An Israeli professor at Columbia who disliked Khalil intensely contacted Mario Rubio and asked him to do something. Rubio then discussed the matter with Trump, fishing for a rationale to justify Khalil’s persecution.

Rubio found an obscure State Department regulation allowing him to deport legal residents, even with green cards and breaking no laws, if he thought their ongoing presence would have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” (The architect of that 1952 regulation, Nevada Senator Patrick McCarran, portrayed Jews as Soviet agents and “subversive rats that need to be kept out.”) The regulation is obscure and odious, and it is not at all clear it could be applied to Khalil as an individual. Moreover, Rubio would first have to have an immigration court take away Khalil’s green card protections, which is not within the State Department’s reach.

Rubio’s foreign policy reasoning? “There are kids at these schools that can’t go to class. You pay all this money to these high-priced schools that are supposed to be of great esteem, and you can’t even go to class. You’re afraid to go to class because these lunatics are running around with covers on their face, screaming terrifying things.” (Lunatics like the pardoned January 6th criminals?)

We need to see that the Trump attack on Khalil is the tip of the spear. The first stab is ideological. All protests against Israel’s actions regarding Palestinians are, ipso facto, by that very fact, anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas. Never mind the fact that large numbers of Jewish students, through their peace and justice groups, and hundreds of Rabbis, have joined many of these same protests. Trump even sends Mike Huckabee as the new ambassador to Israel, who asserts “there is no such thing as a Palestinian,” a view shared by Pete Hegseth, his new Defense Secretary.

The second stab is political. Trump wants to isolate and divide any emerging peace movement critical of him. He proclaims that “this is just the beginning” and we can expect hundreds of more arrests, since being pro-Palestinian also means you are “pro-terrorist” and can be arrested or deported under any of the several post 9/11 draconian laws regarding terrorism. At the top of the list are some six million Palestinian-Americans, then perhaps a hundred million U.S. citizens who think Palestinians in Israel have rights to be respected by all. Most of these are Democratic voters, and they are thus warned to shut up and stay out of politics.

The third stab is institutional. Trump is taking aim at nearly all universities and colleges, which he believes are controlled “by the radical left.” Unless they are purged of all critical thought, he will cut off millions in government support. He already took $400 million from Columbia. More than anyone, we on the left know this is ridiculous. Despite a few reforms won in the 1960s regarding Black, Women’s, and various other studies departments, it is quite clear to us that higher education remains firmly in the hands of the capitalist class and serves its interests. That was one reason motivating the students at Columbia in the first place, the university’s support for the war machine, especially in the Middle East.

Many of us have seen this movie before. In the early days of the 1960s civil rights protests in the South, students were labelled “outside agitators” and “paid agents of the Kremlin and the communists.” Early protestors against the Vietnam War were called “traitors” and “unpatriotic,” with some ROTC hecklers throwing red paint on them. Universities threatened to take away any federal loans. With J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO assault, things turned worse. We saw the assassination of Fred Hampton and the murders of many other Black Panther Party members. Hoover started the program in 1956 against the CPUSA, but widened its scope against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, many others in Black-led movements, and the entire New Left. (This writer was on COINTELPRO’s short list of “those to be neutralized.”)

We stood up to these attacks fearlessly from the start. As far as we were concerned, “McCarthyism” was dead and over. If called before hearings or the courts, we would disrupt or otherwise protest them with guerilla theater. The House Un-American Activities Committee died the day Jerry Rubin showed up to testify wearing a Santa Claus suit, claiming he wanted all the kids watching TV to see HUAC attacking Santa Claus. Eventually, especially after returning GIs joined a massive antiwar mobilization in D.C. and threw their medals back at Congress, the tide turned. A militant minority had become a progressive majority.

That points to the task before us: we have to turn today’s militant minority in solidarity with Gaza and the West Bank into a progressive majority demanding a ceasefire and cutoff of funds to Israel. In some ways, the stakes are higher and more difficult. Antisemitism, in many ways, is a more difficult label for many to see through than “communism,” especially with a population divided into separate media silos.

We know all the instruments to play. Circulate and sign petitions, get a letter in your local paper (worth tens of thousands of leaflets), get your local Dems, unions, and independent political organizations to demand freedom for Khalil, put the heat on your local members of Congress, turn out for all the street protests, and so on.

We know the drill, and we have to engage this fight today in a big way. What’s happened to Khalil is a huge injustice, and we need to reverse it. But this reaches far beyond Khalil, even beyond the movement around Gaza. It reaches to Trump’s overall efforts to reverse all progressive gains and return the United States to the era of his new high-tariff seizor-of-foreign-lands hero, President William McKinley. To the degree that we can’t stop it here, it will only get worse. We have no desire to see a new era of bloodletting that we saw in the 1960s and 1970s. Nor can we go back to an old “normal.” We have to move forward, shifting the terrain to defeat MAGA fascism and win governing power for the wide alliance of a Third Reconstruction. For that position, we will face even newer prospects, but we have to get there first.

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