THEY were waiting for Mahmoud Khalil outside his apartment building in New York City.
Last Saturday evening, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested the Columbia University student-activist and put him in immigration detention. Khalil’s wife produced paperwork showing that he was a legal permanent resident, or a Green Card holder, but the agents continued to handcuff him and took him away. His wife, eight months pregnant, could do nothing to help.
Mahmoud Khalil’s case is notable for many reasons. First, it represents the overhaul of immigration being undertaken by the Trump administration. In general, a Green Card holder is a legal permanent resident of the United States, and not a visa holder.
This usually means they cannot be arbitrarily arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and threatened with deportation. However, the Trump administration appears to have decided that they can argue that Green Card holders can also face deportation proceedings.
In court, the Trump administration is relying on a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which allows the US secretary of state to authorise the deportation of a Green Card holder if they act in contravention of US foreign policy.
The Trump administration can effectively ‘disappear’ its political opponents who are not US citizens.
Mahmoud Khalil is a prominent activist in the Free Palestine Movement and was involved in the student encampments protesting the Israeli bombardment of Gaza last summer.
Second, the case is important because it shows how the Trump administration can effectively ‘disappear’ its political opponents who are not US citizens. Khalil was detained and not allowed to call his lawyers. For a good while, no one knew where he had been taken. It turned out he had been transported thousands of miles away to an immigration detention centre in Louisiana. His lawyers in New York filed a case and got a judge to order a stay on Khalil’s deportation.
In a Wednesday hearing, however, the judge did not order Khalil to be freed. At the hearing, his lawyers complained to the judge that they had not been able to have private conversations with him and that the detention centre officials had told them they did not have the ability to arrange for them. The judge ordered that such conversations be made possible.
The case should be a lesson for anyone on a visa or Green Card in the US. While it is unclear whether Pakistan will be on the travel ban list that the Trump administration is set to issue on March 21, restrictions on non-citizens’ rights will likely impact people in the diaspora. In this case, there was no violation of any immigration law or procedure. If Khalil had been an American citizen his activism would have been given cover by the First Amendment of the US constitution, which protects political speech.
However, the Trump administration seems to have decided these protections for free speech do not apply to Green Card holders. Undoubtedly, the case is meant as a warning for all those on visas and Green Cards who must now worry about being deported if they say anything against the administration’s politics or foreign policy.
As part of this project of excluding everyone with whom they have a political qualm, border agents at airports have started using AI tools to scan the information on the mobile phones of people arriving at US ports. If they find any information that can be construed as opposing US foreign policy à la Trump, or if, for example, you are arriving on a student visa and have texts on your phone about a job, then this can be used as the basis for sending you back home.
In Khalil’s case, he had completed a Master’s degree at Columbia University but was married to a US citizen. It is likely, however, that he was still in the two-year probationary period during which a Green Card based on marriage is deemed “conditional”. This period opens the Green Card holder to greater scrutiny.
Pakistani citizens who have Green Cards but do not reside in the US full-time will likely face pressure to either move to the US permanently or abandon their Green Cards. This is especially true if they spend more than five months a year away from the US on a regular basis. The Trump administration wants to make it impossible for people to hold Green Cards if they do not live in the US full-time. In recent weeks, many of these individuals have been pressured to sign a form at the airport in which they agree to give up their cards.
One hopes that Pakistani officials will be able to convince Trump administration officials to keep Pakistan off the travel ban list. If they are unable to do so, the situation is likely to become extremely difficult for Pakistani Americans and Pakistani students, doctors, and engineers. If the ban is passed, then perhaps the only way to obtain a visa to the US would be through marriage to an American citizen.
Those who already have visas but are not currently in the US will likely not be able to go. Those who have visas but are currently in the US may be able to stay there until their visas expire but will have trouble renewing their visas if they leave.
The age of immigration to the US appears, at least in the short term, to be over. For decades, the US considered immigration violations to be a civil issue — now, however, everyone who makes the tiniest mistake, and sometimes even those who make no mistake at all, are not just visa violators but criminals.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, March 15th, 2025
