First, they disappeared an activist

Last Saturday night in New York City, ICE agents went into a Columbia University residential building to arrest a legal resident of Palestinian descent, a graduate of the university, married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant. The agents, acting on instructions from Homeland Security, seemed to believe Mahmoud Khalil was in the country on a student visa, and told him it was being revoked and he would be deported. His wife explained he had a green card, showed it to them, and put their lawyer on the phone. The agents appeared confused, then declared they were revoking the green card, too. The lawyer explained they could not do that, only a judge could do that. The agents hung up on the lawyer and took Mahmoud Khalil away. They said they were transferring him to a detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but when his wife went there the next morning, she learned he had never been there. It seemed he had been disappeared.

This recent graduate of the school of international and public affairs, soon to be a father, was taken from his home in the night despite having committed no crimes. He had merely exercised his first amendment right to free speech last year as spokesperson for his fellow students, who were camped out on Columbia's lawns in protest of the war in Gaza. Outside agitators entered the campus at certain points during the weeks that the protest continued to incite trouble and spew hate, but the student action remained peaceful. Nevertheless, the university's president eventually called in police to remove the students and their tent city from the area south of College Walk. 

Many in the city gasped in shock and outrage as police in riot gear and brandishing rifles swarmed the campus, aggressively detaining students as they razed the encampment. I had a close up view because I still live in this neighborhood where I went to college and to grad school. My children played on that campus when they were growing up, splashing in its fountains, running on those same lawns, playing hop scotch on the wide library steps. The gates to College Walk were always open and welcoming to the community, but after the police assault on the students' right to assemble last spring, the campus became a locked prison. Now, students and anyone else wishing to enter its gates must show proof of their reason for being there.

With all the bad actions that have already been taken by this new administration, with all the people whose lives have been placed in literal jeopardy, somehow this abduction from an Ivy League campus of a lawful permanent resident accused of no crime feels like a chilling escalation by an authoritarian state designed to incite fear. We don't need to agree with all the political positions Mahmoud Khalil took to defend his right to take them. But we do need to understand that if the state can make one activist in a tower of ivy simply disappear, then they can disappear anyone.

On cue today, 47 chimed in that this arrest was "the first of many to come." Some are saying Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is a test run to see how we, as a nation, will respond. Many marched in New York City to demand Khalil's freedom yesterday, and civil liberties organizations are mobilized. By last night, a New York judge ruled that Mahmoud Khalil must not to be removed from the country and that his attorneys and the government's representatives are to appear in court tomorrow. It now seems that Khalil was taken to a detention center in Louisiana, where the laws more easily support his deportation. The court has ordered that he be returned to New York. And yet, as of this writing, Khalil still has not been allowed to speak to his lawyers. Many people, some in quite high places, are keeping eyes on this, marching, making phone calls, bringing lawsuits, staying tuned.