|
Listen to article
|
The U.S. government has embarked on a resolute campaign to expel foreign students entangled in last year’s fervent demonstrations against Israel’s military incursion into Gaza, a policy shift igniting fierce debate over free expression and national security.
Those protests erupted across American campuses in April 2024, a visceral outcry against Israel’s offensive, unleashed in retaliation to the audacious “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” mounted by Hamas on October 7, 2023—coinciding with the Jewish observances of Simchat Torah and Shemini Atzeret.
That Palestinian assault, blending aerial barrages and ground forays by Hamas and allied militants, left a grim toll—hundreds of civilians slain or seized, among them Israelis, Americans, and nationals from afar—shattering the fragile calm and galvanizing a global reckoning.
Upon his return to the presidency, Donald Trump castigated the anti-Israel fervor that swept educational institutions, pledging stern reprisals against overseas students who lent their voices to the cause.
In late January, he affixed his signature to an executive decree fortifying measures against antisemitism, tasking the Attorney General with wielding civil-rights tools to enforce compliance—a directive now bearing fruit.
Over the weekend, agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), nested within the Department of Homeland Security, apprehended Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student, marking a tangible escalation in this contentious crackdown.
Khalil was inside a university-owned residence near Columbia’s Manhattan campus when ICE agents entered his apartment Saturday night and took him into custody.
Read also: Israel Pauses Prisoner Release After Gaza Hostages Rescued
Secretary of State, Marco Rubio commented on the operation on Sunday in a post on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
Khalil, a US permanent resident with a green card, played a major role in the widespread pro-Palestinian demonstration that saw encampaments at the Columbia University in New York.
Mahmoud Khalil emerged as a pivotal interlocutor, engaging with university officials to quell the anti-Israel protests that flared across Columbia University and rippled outward, ensnaring other campuses where demonstrators commandeered public spaces in a bold stand against Israel’s Gaza offensive. Raised amid the stark realities of a Palestinian refugee enclave in Syria, Khalil later served the British Embassy in Beirut, a journey that now finds him ensconced within the confines of the ICE detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
In a parallel escalation, the Trump administration has wielded its fiscal authority, axing $400 million in federal allocations and agreements previously destined for Columbia University, a punitive stroke confirmed by a triad of agencies—the Departments of Justice, Education, and the General Services Administration.
