For student activists, visa-holders and immigrants, history is repeating itself.
The Trump administration’s latest moves to deport Mahmoud Khalil over first amendment-protected speech — and more recently, Brown University professor Dr. Rasha Alawieh and Georgetown graduate student Badar Khan Suri — has imperiled the rights and legal status of communities nationwide.
The administration contends that Khalil can be deported according to Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the Secretary of State the authority to deport non-citizens when they have “reasonable ground to believe that their presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
The Columbia University graduate student and permanent US resident, who played a major role in campus protests against Israel, was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entering his apartment the night of Saturday, March 8.
Khalil’s deportation notice did not mention any crimes that the federal government believes he may have committed; there are still no criminal charges against him.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said as much on CBS on March 16th, before vowing to “keep doing it.”
Commentators across the political spectrum — including pro-Palestinian voices, liberal Jewish groups like J Street and members of Congress — have criticized the move as an assault on free speech.
President Trump, Rubio and ICE Director Tom Homan have all stated openly they are willfully defying the courts on this and future deportation decisions, as Khalil was detained and relocated from New York to Louisiana without any charges, hearings or immigration violation.
Zahra Billoo, executive director of the nationwide Council on Arab-Islamic Relations, said the level of alarm over deportation threats in citizen and non-citizen immigrant communities nationwide is unprecedented.
Lately, she has been going to multiple Bay Area mosques nightly to update attendees on news and resources.
Almost everywhere, people have approached her panicking about themselves or their parents; one visa-holder she spoke with has delayed her wedding abroad, fearing that she can’t return to the US.
Billoo detailed how unpredictable the situation has been.
“On March 6, I did a training for interfaith leaders about how to protect their congregations in case of an ICE raid,” said Billoo. “I told them US citizens and green card holders were among the safest people, that they should not worry, and we need to prioritize protecting people who don’t have those statuses.”
“Two days later, Khalil was abducted at his house,” she continued. “One week later, I stood before the leaders and told them the things I said may no longer hold true. The law hasn’t changed, but the Trump administration has demonstrated its increasing disregard for it.”
Student activists nationwide are undeterred, despite Khalil being arrested for involvement in campus protests.
At UC Berkeley, the weeks since Khalil’s arrest have seen multiple protests in his defense, drawing a broader coalition of support from student organization and faculty than past pro-Palestine demonstrations.
Since Khalil’s arrest, student mobilization at Berkeley has had a second wind.
A November walkout for Palestine saw about 200 to 300 people, while an early March walkout for Khalil saw nearly double that.
Most recently, a petition statement protesting the deportation of students is circulating amongst Jewish faculty and staff.
Zaid Yousef, an activist and law school student at Berkeley, said that while student organizers are not afraid to continue demonstrating, they have taken greater risk assessment measures.
“A lot of the messaging has been: be cautious, don’t do anything crazy, don’t make yourself more of a target, don’t go into panic mode, don’t spread news without verifying it, don’t freeze up in fear. Don’t stop organizing,” he said. “But if you are an international student, or you’re here on a visa, really gauge your risk.”
“We are entering into uncharted waters,” he continued. It’s now the time to choose where one stands in terms of history. Do you stand on the side of McCarthyist, Patriot Act-style repression, or do you think that the First Amendment has value?”
This recent spate of deportations has also led many experts to draw comparisons to when the US violated citizen and resident rights in the years leading up to the mass internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.
That period saw over 100,000 Japanese, including citizens, relocated and disenfranchised.
Japanese Americans have been organizing in response to this issue for decades.
The National Coalition for Redress Reparations (NCRR), for instance, successfully organized throughout the 1980s to get reparations for imprisoned Japanese Americans, in accordance with a list of goals they named Principles of Unity — one of which was a pledge to support the struggles of other oppressed peoples.
In 1988, after years of activism by groups like the NCRR, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, providing a formal apology to interned Japanese Americans who were interned, acknowledging that the government’s actions were motivated largely by “racial prejudice” and “a failure of political leadership”; $20,000 to each surviving internee; and a public education fund to prevent similar injustices in the future.
Susan Hayase and her husband Tom Izu, who were part of that movement, are now co-founders of The San Jose Nikkei Resistors, a Japanese grassroots community organization that formed in 2018 to respond to Trump’s immigration policies, particularly the “Muslim Ban.”
“The model minority story tries to split off the Japanese American incarceration story as exceptional, but we know that it wasn’t exceptional,” said Hayase.
“The smearing of Japanese Americans is identical to what is happening now with Khalil,” she continued, adding that the current targeting of community leaders also echoes the government’s targeting Japanese Americans as national security threats.
“The people picked up under the Alien Enemies Act were community leaders, spokespeople, teachers, publishers, religious leaders,” explained Hayase. “Khalil was a leader. He was not dangerous, except to the idea that the government should be able to squash all political speech.”
This comes as President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the first time since the 1940s to deport Venezuelan nationals alleged to be members of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua.
What’s unique this time around is that Trump invoked a wartime power authorization outside of a war, and the detainees were deported despite a federal court order block.
The ‘Issei,’ too — the first generation of immigrants born in Japan — were imprisoned through the Alien Enemies Act and barred from citizenship.
Reflecting on the present government’s failure to live up to past victories for civil rights violation reparations, Hayase said “The United Nations has a definition of reparations and one of the requirements for it is a guarantee of non-repetition. You could say you’re sorry for oppressing people, but if you go right back and start doing it again, there’s no point. That’s not true reparations. You have to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Everybody in this country, according to the Bill of Rights, has individual due process rights,” said Tom Izu.
“Once you start taking that away, you’re basically allowing the executive branch to do whatever it wants. They could declare anybody an enemy of the state,” he added. “And then if people believe it, then democracy is really in danger.”
