“The government now claims “he had willfully failed to disclose his membership in several organizations, including a United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees, when he applied to become a permanent U.S. resident last March,” reports The New York Times. “The government also said that Mr. Khalil failed to list his continuing employment with the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, after 2022.” If these allegations are true, they may put the deportation on firmer footing: It is easier for the authorities to argue that the First Amendment isn’t a relevant factor when the issue is whether Khalil disclosed relevant information during a green card application.
But even if that is true, the Justice Department has shown its true motivation, even if it may be able to weasel out of the hole it’s dug. Since it told The Free Press that “the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law” and suggested that “he was mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the U.S.,” it sure seems obvious that it was Khalil’s role in the Columbia protests that attracted ICE agents initially. If officials can now find a better pretense to deport him, that may pass more legal muster, but they already made clear that this is retribution for protest. This will have a chilling effect on speech. And if they legitimately believed he was a threat, they should have actually spent the time to substantiate this.”
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“As for what actually happens to Khalil, it’s not clear these new allegations will make much of a difference: “In order to deport Mr. Khalil on the basis of the new allegations, the government would have to convince an immigration judge that any failure to disclose the relevant information was willful, and that it would have made a difference in his chances of receiving legal permanent residency status””
“Does it matter that Khalil is not a U.S. citizen? In the 1945 case Bridges v. Wixon, the Supreme Court held that “freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.” That case involved a longtime legal resident from Australia who was deemed deportable based on the allegation that he had been affiliated with the Communist Party.
“Once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country, he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders,” Justice Frank Murphy wrote in a concurring opinion. “Such rights include those protected by the First and the Fifth Amendments and by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. None of these provisions acknowledges any distinction between citizens and resident aliens.””
“the First Amendment is understood as a general restriction on the government’s behavior, as The Volokh Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin points out.
“The First Amendment’s protection for freedom of speech, like most constitutional rights, is not limited to US citizens,” he writes. “The text of the First Amendment is worded as a general limitation on government power, not a form of special protection for a particular group of people, such as US citizens or permanent residents.”
Setting aside the constitutional issue, the detention of a student activist for engaging in what would clearly be considered First Amendment–protected activity under other circumstances is very alarming. If the State Department wishes to proceed with this course of action, the burden is on the government to sufficiently explain why Khalil should be deported. Authorities must persuasively demonstrate that his conduct crosses some very, very red line.
Yet, at present, the government’s justifications don’t come anywhere close to satisfying such a requirement. On the contrary, the official explanation for Khalil’s detention is so woefully insufficient as to be laughable—except, of course, this matter isn’t funny at all.”
“The administration maintains that it has the power to revoke Khalil’s green card and deport him because he helped lead pro-Palestinian protests. Indeed, it’s becoming clear that Khalil was targeted because of his speech, rather than any other conduct that might be reasonably construed as criminal behavior.”
“In a previously unreported interview, Khalil also told Reason about his life story. “I was born in a refugee camp in southern Damascus. My grandparents were ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948,” he said. “They stayed in the closest camp to Palestine, and they lived and died in that refugee camp.”
As Syria fell into civil war, Khalil moved to neighboring Lebanon. He worked as a local manager for two British government programs, the Chevening Scholarship and the Conflict, Stability, and Security Fund, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2023, he enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs.
Khalil told Reason that he was not worried about the political repercussions of being such a high-profile activist, because he wasn’t planning to go back to Lebanon and Syria. Nor was he worried about how it would affect his career prospects in America, because “I wouldn’t work for an institution that doesn’t value Palestinian lives. So if they don’t want to employ someone who is standing for Palestine, that’s my gain,” he said.
The prospect that he might be arrested by the U.S. government seemed so remote that it didn’t come up.
It’s not clear exactly which legal authorities the Trump administration used to revoke Khalil’s green card, nor how that will hold up in court. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.”
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“”The Trump administration’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder studying in this country legally—is targeted, retaliatory, and an extreme attack on his First Amendment rights,” the New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman declared in a statement. “Ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campus. Political speech should never be a basis of punishment, or lead to deportation.””
“Did the social justice protests of 2020 cause a wave of police officers to leave the force? A recent study suggests the truth may not be so simple.
In May 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by pinning him to the ground with his knee. When video of the encounter circulated online, the image of a white police officer nonchalantly kneeling atop a black man until he asphyxiated ignited a powder keg: Americans, stir-crazy from sheltering in place for the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, took to the streets to protest police brutality, in some cases violently.
The conventional wisdom says that amid a nationwide spike in crime and mounting protests in which demonstrators proclaimed that “all cops are bastards,” many officers simply gave in.”
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“A June 2021 survey from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) found a 45 percent increase in retirements in 2020–2021 when compared to the previous year, as well as an 18 percent rise in resignations.
But a new study from Duke University law professor Ben Grunwald challenges this narrative. To assess the validity of the claim that officers resigned en masse after the 2020 protests, Grunwald collected data “on every job held by every officer in all 6,800 local law enforcement agencies across fifteen states that, together, cover half the U.S. population.” That database came to encompass over 972,000 officers between the mid-1990s and 2022, though for the study, he focused only on 2011–2021.
Grunwald found that “the increase in separations” among those agencies “after the summer of 2020 was smaller, later, less sudden, and possibly less pervasive than the retention-crisis narrative suggests.”
“Separations were nearly stable in 2020 compared to the year before,” he writes, while “in 2021, separations increased by historically large numbers but substantially less than the most widely reported figures for that period.” Specifically, separations in 2020 increased “by less than 1% compared to 2019” while they “rose far more in 2021, by 18% relative to 2019.” Grunwald notes that while this increase “was historically unusual, larger than any two-year period in the previous decade,” it is also much smaller than the 2021 PERF study suggested, and about one-third of it “can be explained by pre-existing trends that long predate the events of 2020.”
“All told, the cumulative effect on aggregate employment by the end of 2021 was just 1%,” Grunwald concludes. “This was not because of increased lateral mobility [officers transferring to another department or another role within law enforcement], as some have wondered. Rather, [the database] shows that the vast majority of excess separations in 2021 were by officers leaving the field, at least for a while.” He does acknowledge, though, that “a substantial minority of large departments [those with 500 or more officers] were meaningfully hit, losing over 5% of staff by the end of 2021.””
“It is absolutely true that the right to self-defense is vital. And to argue that Perry—who, prior to killing Foster at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, wrote that he wanted to “shoot the [protesters] in the front and push the pedal to the metal”—acted in self-defense is to make a total mockery of that right and those who’ve had to exercise it.”
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“In July 2020, Perry ran a red light and drove into a crowd of protesters. That in and of itself, of course, is not enough to deduce that he was looking for a fight. His own statements prior to doing so, however, add a great deal of helpful context and show his frame of mind at the time. “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex,” he wrote on social media on May 31, 2020. Also in May, he threatened to a friend that he “might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” And then in mid-June, he sent that message about going to a protest, “shoot[ing] the ones in the front,” and then careening his car through the hubbub.
This was part of a pattern. Austin police detective William Bursley testified, for instance, that Perry searched on Safari for “protesters in Seattle gets shot,” “riot shootouts,” and “protests in Dallas live.” It is not hard to connect the dots between his searches and messages.
So what about that stand-your-ground defense Abbott alleges the jury nullified? Core to Perry’s case and trial was whether he reasonably feared for his life that July evening. Foster indeed had a rifle on him—because open carry is legal in Texas. The Second Amendment does not solely exist for people with conservative views. The big question then: Was Foster pointing the gun at Perry when he approached his vehicle? For the answer, we can go to Perry himself, who told law enforcement that he was not. “I believe he was going to aim at me,” he said. “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” But that is not a self-defense justification, as Perry cannot claim clairvoyance.
That the jury reached the conclusion they did is not a mystery, nor is it an outrage. What is outrageous, however, is that a governor who claims to care about law and order has made clear that his support for crime victims is at least in part conditional on having the “right” politics.”