On Saturday, March 8, ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a foreign national and leader of the Palestine solidarity protests at Columbia University. Those who oppose the move see it as a frightening blow against free speech. Those who support it see it as a long-overdue response to a movement that supports terrorists, hates America, and intimidates innocent people with its destructive mob actions.
Among those who support the deportation, much has been made of a statement attributed to Khalil’s organization, Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. . . As the fascism ingrained in the American consciousness becomes ever more explicitly and irrefutable, we seek community and instruction from militants in the Global South, who have been on the frontlines in the fight against tyranny and domination which undergird the imperialist world order.” Surely, they say, someone who would promote such an anti-American program doesn’t deserve to be in our country.
The controversy recalls the campus wars of the 1960s, in which students cheering for Ho Chi Minh were told to “love [America] or leave it,” but there is an even more apt historical analogy available: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. These Acts gave the government the power to deport any foreign national deemed a threat to the country and made it a crime to criticize the government in terms deemed “false, scandalous, and malicious.” The context was the specter of war with France stemming from that nation’s aggressive post-Revolution foreign policy and the simultaneous presence in America of a movement to bring French-style revolutionary doctrines to our shores.