Above photo: Yuki Iwamura/AP.
We Need Mass Opposition To His Detention.
Mahmoud Khalil’s immigration hearing represents an important gauge of the fight against repression of the Palestine movement. It will take a mass movement to stop these attacks.
Mahmoud Khalil’s immigration hearings began in Louisiana on April 8. Supporters who tried to observe the proceedings virtually were not allowed in.
ABC News reported that during this hearing, Judge Jamee Comans determined that the Trump administration has 24 hours to provide evidence of allegations they’ve made to justify Khalil’s deportation. The administration has made bogus claims that Khalil poses a threat to national security. Once Khalil’s team has reviewed and responded to whatever information the Trump administration provides, Comans will decide at another hearing this Friday if Khalil can stay in the United States.
The hearing came one month after Khalil was abducted by plainclothes federal agents in front of his 8-month pregnant wife. Khalil’s detention turned out to be just the first of many incidents of university activists for Palestine being targeted by ICE. Prominent names include Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, and Momodou Taal, but there are countless others whose abductions have not received much attention.
Across the country, universities are reporting that their international students are having their legal status revoked, and it seems that increasingly these are not just pro-Palestine students who are losing their right to remain in the United States. Rather, Muslim and non-white students in general are being targeted. The number of international students and recent graduates who have had their legal status changed by the State Department is already in the hundreds.
In this context, the outcome of Khalil’s immigration hearing represents an important gauge of the fight against repression of the Palestine movement, the war on immigration, and attempts by the Far Right to control universities — three attacks deeply intersecting in the developing purge of international students.
Hundreds mobilized in Newark on March 28 at a rally that united Palestine movement activists with immigrant rights activists. This pressure in the streets likely contributed to a federal judge ruling that a habeas petition filed by Khalil’s legal team must be heard in New Jersey instead of Louisiana. The habeas proceedings are playing out in federal court separately from Khalil’s immigration hearings. A petition demanding Khalil’s freedom received millions of signatures, and even institutions, public figures, and news outlets that have generally been hostile to the movement have raised alarm over Khalil’s persecution.
As we have been writing at Left Voice, the courts have never been institutions meant to represent workers and the oppressed. Immigration courts are even less democratic, as they fall within the Department of Justice, which is part of the executive branch. It is necessary for Khalil’s supporters and the Palestine movement and immigrant rights movement broadly to keep organizing against Trump’s attacks.
Massive demonstrations across the United States this past weekend, and protests that have taken place before that, show that many people are eager to fight Trump’s authoritarian maneuvers and austerity. It is essential that solidarity develops between those who want to fight Trump’s cuts on federal and public sector workers and those who are fighting the attacks against oppressed communities including immigrants and Palestinians.
As the Trump administration increases its authoritarian measures against Palestine activists, immigrants, universities, and more, it is essential that all those fighting these attacks rely on ourselves, not the institutions of capitalists. We need to start organizing spaces that can bring our movements together to debate and decide on how to fight these attacks. It will require broad democratic campaigns that mobilize masses across the country. And it is essential that unions, especially academic workers’ unions, take a stand and use the power of their labor to disrupt business as usual at universities, especially since so many administrators are caving to the Far Right.
It is already clear that Mahmoud Khalil is just the starting point of much larger attacks. We have to use the fight to free him as a lesson for how to launch the strongest fight possible in defense of the movement for Palestine and basic democratic rights.