After Mahmoud Khalil, the Press is Next

Unless they don't want to be

There is a quote I can't stop thinking about today, on Purim: "He who saves one life, saves the world entire." How lucky we should all be, to be faced with such a choice, to have a moment in our lives where we have the chance to be on the right side of another person's history.

The press, right now, has that choice. They have the chance to save the life of Mahmoud Khalil, to make his deportation so untenable that he be released. But beyond a single life, they have the chance to save their own profession - to draw a line in the sand that says deportation of permanent residents for political speech is a bridge too far.

And yet, the press sits mostly silent while Mahmoud Khalil continues to sit in an ICE detention facility down in Louisiana. They're so busy capturing the elusive Truth in front of them that they don't see how their camera flash creates a silhouette behind them where their shadow stands directly on the tongue of the same mouth that seeks to swallow their subjects.

But let us not kid ourselves: this is a five-alarm fire moment. For the moment a single U.S. permanent resident can be legally stripped of all protection under the law, simply due to a disagreement in political opinion with the party in charge, is the moment that everyone - journalists especially - are under the same threat.

The Facts of Mahmoud Khalil’s Case So Far (March 13, 2025)

On March 8, 2025, while most Americans were settling into their weekend routines, Mahmoud Khalil was being stripped of his entire life. ICE agents followed him and his wife home from an Iftar dinner, cornered him in the lobby of his Columbia University housing, and within minutes had him handcuffed and forced into an unmarked vehicle. No warrant presented. No time to call a lawyer. Just the swift, practiced efficiency of a state that had decided this particular permanent resident no longer deserved the protection of law.

This wasn't some border-crossing migrant or visa overstay. Khalil is a lawful permanent resident who had done everything by the book. He had grown up as a refugee in Syria, earned a computer science degree from Lebanese American University, and then pursued a master's at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. By December 2024, he had completed his coursework. His graduation was just two months away.

His crime? Negotiating for pro-Palestinian students during Columbia's campus protests. Serving as a voice of moderation who told CNN: "As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-in-hand... you cannot achieve one without the other." A man who explicitly stated "there is, of course, no place for antisemitism," while pointing out the anti-Palestinian sentiment sweeping through American discourse.

For this, he was disappeared.

When his lawyer, Amy Greer, managed to reach one of the ICE agents by phone, the agent claimed they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil's student visa. When Greer explained that Khalil was actually a permanent resident with a green card, the agent's response was chilling in its casual brutality: they would "revoke the green card instead." When asked for a warrant, the agent simply hung up.

The legal pretense for this abduction? Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act: an obscure provision allowing deportation if the Secretary of State believes a person's presence might create "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences." Not terrorism. Not criminal activity. Not even material support for a proscribed organization. Just the possibility that keeping this Palestinian voice in America might create diplomatic inconvenience.

As of this writing, Khalil has never been charged with a crime. There is no evidence he engaged in anything illegal. The government has made vague assertions about "activities aligned with Hamas" without offering a shred of proof. His attorneys call the claims "false and preposterous." The White House press secretary claimed he distributed flyers with a Hamas logo, yet neither she nor ICE have produced these alleged flyers.

What they have produced is a man torn from his pregnant wife, held incommunicado, and shuttled between detention facilities to prevent his legal team from effectively representing him. When his wife tried to visit him at a New Jersey detention center, she was told he wasn't there. He was eventually located at a facility in Louisiana, a place that is as far as possible from his support network.

This is how America now treats its permanent residents: guilty until proven innocent, deportable until proven essential, silenceable for political convenience. The machinery of state, built for counter-terrorism, has been retooled for counter-activism.

And Mahmoud Khalil had the misfortune of being the test case.

The Test Case: Your Turn is Next, I Promise

Mahmoud Khalil is just the first drop of what threatens to become a monsoon. His arrest marks the inaugural deportation effort targeting pro-Palestine activism under the new Trump administration, but the infrastructure for a much broader purge has already been carefully assembled, brick by legal brick.

The cornerstone of this architecture of suppression is Executive Order 14188. Signed with the flourish of a man who believes his signature changes reality (and in this case, it does), the order explicitly calls for the deportation of students with visas who have "broken laws during any anti-Israeli protest since the October 7, 2023 attacks." But its vague language creates a dragnet far wider than its stated target.

Consider what "broken laws" means in the context of protest. Did you block a sidewalk momentarily? Did you use a megaphone without a noise permit? Did you stay in a public space after receiving a dispersal order you couldn't hear? Congratulations – you very well now may be deportable. The order doesn't distinguish between violent crimes and technical violations, after all. Hell, it doesn't require convictions or even charges. It requires only accusation and administrative decision.

We've seen this movie before, and the ending never changes, does it?

In the 1950s, the McCarthy era began by targeting alleged Communist Party members, then expanded to sympathizers, then to liberals, then to anyone who questioned the witch hunt itself. The Palmer Raids of the 1920s started with anarchists but quickly engulfed labor organizers, peace activists, and immigrants regardless of political affiliation.

The Nixon administration's COINTELPRO began with the Black Panthers but metastasized to include environmental activists, anti-war groups, and eventually journalists who reported on government overreach.

“Oh I’m not a threat” someone says while reading this. “I just make art and the occasional swipe graphics for mutual aid groups on Instagram.” Go ahead and ask Pete Seeger how kind the US government is to creatives with a heart.

The terrifying efficiency of Khalil's detention – the speed with which he was identified, located, and disappeared – speaks to an apparatus that's been waiting, engines idling, for the green light. The online campaign against him, led in part by Columbia affiliates who fed his information to "multiple contacts" and knew that "ICE was aware of his home address and whereabouts," reveals the eager civilian infrastructure ready to point the state toward its next target.

The statements from Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing plans to revoke more visas and green cards should send ice through the veins of every immigrant, every activist, and yes, every citizen and every journalist in America. Because make no mistake: when states begin silencing political speech through deportation, the press is never far down the list.

‘First they came for the immigrants on temporary visas. Then they came for the permanent residents. Then, they came for…’ Go on. Finish the sentence with either the words ‘citizens’ or ‘journalists’. Neither sounds far-fetched, do they?

“Cornpop, you sound paranoid”. You may say. And to that I say: “You sound like someone who will let them put the cuffs on you now so you don’t receive the baton later, not realizing that the baton is waiting for you at the station, too.”

Paranoia, my god. This is pattern recognition. And the pattern is screaming at us to pay attention before the zone of acceptable speech narrows to a chokepoint that none of us can navigate safely.

The Sky is Falling, and What I Say to Chickens

I can already hear the responses from my colleagues in newsrooms across America, their objections delivered with the practiced restraint of people who've trained themselves to speak in measured tones even when discussing catastrophe.

"You're asking us to commit career suicide," they'd say, eyes darting to check if their editor might be within earshot. "Do you understand what happens to journalists who go rogue on stories like this? We're not all tenured columnists with bestselling books as safety nets. Some of us are one controversial story away from joining the growing ranks of laid-off media workers competing for jobs at corporate communications firms. We have mortgages. Children. Student loans that will follow us to the grave."

They're not wrong. Every journalist brave enough to place Khalil's story above the fold, to frame it as the constitutional crisis it is, risks becoming the next Emily Wilder – fired from the Associated Press after conservative activists targeted her for coveraging pro-Palestinian college activism. Or Wesley Lowery, pushed out of the Washington Post for challenging "objectivity" that prioritizes institutional comfort over truth-telling. The industry's graveyard is full of reporters whose courage exceeded their job security.

But this fear-driven calculation misses something crucial: there is safety in numbers that individual courage can never provide. When the New York Times and Washington Post simultaneously published the Pentagon Papers, neither could be singled out for retribution. When multiple outlets revealed the NSA's warrantless surveillance program, no individual journalist bore the full weight of government fury. The antidote to individual vulnerability is solidarity, not sielnce. One journalist covering Khalil's case is a target; a hundred journalists covering it simultaneously is a movement that even the most powerful cannot easily dismiss.

"But you're ignoring the political realities," my colleagues would continue, their voices dropping even lower. "This isn't some abstract free speech case. It involves a Palestinian activist at a time when anything touching Israel-Palestine instantly becomes radioactive. Half our audience will immediately accuse us of antisemitism; the other half will call us complicit in genocide if we don't go far enough. There's no winning here."

True again – as far as it goes. The conflict creates a trap where balanced coverage pleases no one and every word choice becomes a potential land mine. But this framing accepts a fundamental category error: that defending Khalil's constitutional rights means taking a position on the underlying conflict. It doesn't.

One can believe Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism while also believing America has a constitutional obligation to protect political speech. One can support Palestinian liberation while condemning antisemitism in all its forms. (Readers of my blog know where I stand on this issue, so I will not exhaust you be litigating my positon here.)

By allowing Khalil's case to be swallowed by the broader conflict, journalists abandon their duty to distinguish between policy debates (where reasonable people can differ) and constitutional crises (where the foundations of democracy are at stake).

I am not asking journalists to choose sides between Israelis and Palestinians. I am asking them to choose sides between a government claiming the power to punish speech and a constitution explicitly forbidding that power. These are not equivalent choices requiring journalistic neutrality.

"But that's precisely the problem," comes the final, most potent objection. "What you're advocating is activism itself. We are journalists, not activists. Our credibility depends on reporting facts without campaigning for outcomes. Once we cross that line, we've abandoned the very principles that give our reporting its authority."

This argument lands with the weight of professional identity itself. Journalists build careers on the distinction between reporting and advocacy. For many, objectivity is a sort of calling, a professional religion separating the worthy from the compromised.

Yet this conception of objectivity has always been selectively applied. When Russia detains American journalists, no editor worries that demanding their release might compromise objectivity. When China censors reporters, no one suggests balanced coverage requires giving equal weight to arguments for state control of information. When Saudi Arabia dismembers a Washington Post columnist, no one argues that sustained front-page coverage constitutes inappropriate advocacy.

The press recognizes threats to its own freedom with crystal clarity – until those threats arrive wrapped in the form of a Palestinian man mummified by American flags and choked by legal memoranda, I guess. Then, suddenly, the rules change. Objectivity transforms from a commitment to truth-telling into a mechanism for maintaining access and avoiding uncomfortable confrontations with power.

The historical record speaks with devastating clarity: when journalists have failed to recognize that certain moments demand sustained attention – McCarthy's witch hunts, Japanese internment, the early days of the Iraq War – they’ve outsourced their ethical responsibilities to the very power structures they're meant to hold accountable.

Each time, the pattern repeats. The press reports "objectively" on early warning signs without raising sufficient alarm. The crisis expands. More people are harmed. And eventually, journalists look back with institutional regret, wondering how they missed what was happening right before their eyes.

We are standing at exactly such a moment now. A permanent resident has been detained for protected political speech under a provision that could apply to any foreign journalist working in America. The constitutional firewall between government power and free expression has been breached. And the press is responding with the same institutional paralysis that has preceded every major failure of American democracy.

So I don’t ask whether covering Khalil's case constitutes activism. I know it doesn’t.

I ask: does failing to cover it with vigor and without reproach constitute abdication of journalism's watchdog role, of its commitment to the First Amendment that makes its very existence possible, of its responsibility to recognize patterns of government overreach before they become irreversible?

I say, resoundigly: yes, of course it does.

Because here's what my colleagues aren't saying out loud: if they wait until the threat is undeniable, until the government comes directly for journalists themselves, it will already be too late. The time to stand firm is now, while the precedent is still being set, not after it has hardened into established practice.

If you are a journalist reading this, know that your colleagues’ reticence to raise hell is doing more than condemning one man: it is helping build the gallows you will kneel beneath, too. The tools being assembled for Khalil’s removal are being forged in a workshop that won't close once his case is complete.