On Saturday night, March 8, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICD) agents entered Columbia University student housing and detained Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian origin and recent Columbia graduate, is now being held at an ICE detention center (perhaps as far away as Louisiana), despite having a green card and being a lawful permanent U.S. resident.¹

This outrageous detention is the latest in an escalating series of Trump fascist assaults on opposition to Israel and support for Palestine and on academic freedom and freedom of speech on colleges and universities nationwide. 

Under the guise of combatting “anti-Semitism”—which the MAGA fascists and leading Democrats define as most any criticism of Israel—their aim is to basically outlaw any opposition to Israel or support for the Palestinian people. 

This past week, on March 4, Trump posted this threat:

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.

On March 7, Trump’s Department of Education announced it was cancelling $400 million in federal grants and contracts for Columbia because of the University’s supposed failure to combat anti-Semitism and protect Jewish students from harassment. Among other things, withholding these funds could have a very damaging impact on various research projects, including medical research. At least four different government departments are also threatening further cuts in the future, cuts which could seriously damage Columbia.² 

Columbia is also the target of three different federal investigations into trumped-up charges of rampant anti-Semitism on its campus which have been announced in recent weeks.

Protests Met with Arrests, Suspensions, Expulsions 

In the past several weeks there have been important protests at Columbia and nearby Barnard College. They’ve included a class disruption, sit-ins, demonstrations and marches to protest Israel’s ongoing crimes in Gaza, support the Palestinian people, and demand the reinstatement of three students expelled by Barnard for disrupting a class on the history of Israel. Nine students were also arrested for non-violently sitting in at Barnard, and four who were Columbia students were suspended by the University.

Barnard’s February 24 expulsions were met by a wave of support from the highest levels of government, and the students’ February 26 sit-in protesting them were met by a wave of vitriolic slanders and condemnations. 

Republi-fascist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson posted, “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Pro-Hamas mobs have NO place on our college campuses.” Trump’s nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, declared the students “an anti-Semitic pro-Hamas mob” which should be “immediately expelled and prosecuted by law enforcement.”³

Columbia: A Chilling Climate, Equating Free Speech with Anti-Semitism

One Columbia student told a revcom that it’s chilling just to enter and move around the campus, which now has checkpoints that screen students, faculty and campus employees and keep out anyone else: 

Why are they keeping the gates shut? I realized one of primary reasons isn’t preventing outsiders from coming in. It’s so they know who everyone is from the moment they swipe in with your ID card and are being recorded by cameras above. This sets a tone for anyone walking in. Then you have to swipe to get into any building. So anywhere you go they know who you are—even with a mask—and where you are. So you’re right in the heart of the security zone, and this has chilling impact, because any misstep can get you disciplined by the University’s kangaroo courts.

A recent piece at Drop Site News—"Columbia University’s Secret Disciplinary Process for Students Critical of Israel”—paints a picture of these secretive “kangaroo courts,” which have targeted dozens of Columbia students.⁴ 

One student told Drop Site News that students were being investigated for putting up posters on campus: “The posters said things like ‘Condemn Israel,’ and ‘Israel is a Terrorist State’, which I am now being told by Columbia constitutes discriminatory harassment under Civil Rights Law. If one of them had said ‘Kill Zionists’ or something like that I would understand, but they were nothing like this,” the student said. “In my meeting I made the point that it seems that I am free to criticize the U.S. government at Columbia, but not Israel, and they had no answer for this.”⁵

Silence In the Face of Repression = Complicity in Genocide

This wave of outrageous repression is coming as Israel and the U.S. are threatening to take their genocide in Gaza and violent displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank to potentially holocaust levels. Shamefully, the Democrats and university administrators are actively, or tacitly, supporting these fascist moves.  

This is a damning exposure of the bankruptcy of U.S. society and the capitalist-imperialist system it rests on.

At the same time, far too many people, including far too many Jewish people, are standing silently as terrible crimes are being committed against the Palestinian people, and terrible repression is being unleashed against those who are courageously speaking out against these crimes.

This silence is complicity in one of humanity’s greatest crimes—genocide. This silence must end! Join the struggle to stop U.S.-Israeli genocide, and the struggle to stop Trump MAGA fascism!