Don't Give the Bastards an Inch

Organizing to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil is the kind of thing that allows you to keep your soul.

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Since Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and permanent legal resident of this country, was torn from his pregnant wife in the middle of the night by ICE and summarily disappeared to a detention center in Louisiana, I can’t get a grip. Even for an administration that’s already made life incalculably more cruel for people around the world, Khalil’s arrest feels like a new rupture in just how far the Trump administration will go to punish its political enemies.

That anyone could look at this as anything short of an all-out assault on the First Amendment is chilling. Khalil hasn’t been charged with any crime and was prevented from speaking with his lawyers for days. The White House has openly admitted that he didn’t break any laws, and has explicitly conflated pro-Palestinian protest—of any sort—with support for terrorism. There’s no hiding what this is about: creating a test case for turning once-protected political speech into grounds for being stripped of your rights and deported—especially if that speech is advocating for Palestinian liberation. Trump personally promised that Khalil’s persecution is “the first arrest of many to come.”

Khalil’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, released a statement after her husband’s arrest. She hasn’t publicly released her name for fear of reprisals.

“Instead of putting together our nursery and washing baby clothes in anticipation of our first child, I am left sitting in our apartment, wondering when Mahmoud will get a chance to call me from a detention center,” she said. “US immigration ripped my soul from me when they handcuffed my husband and forced him into an unmarked vehicle.”

“Ripped my soul from me”—these are the unimaginable stakes. If that doesn’t rend your heart and shame you for even living in this country, nothing will.

I’m naturally given to despair. Particularly in our new political reality, I slip into believing that nothing can get better and nothing ever will. But indulging in despair is the height of luxury, one that so many can’t begin to afford. So yesterday, I attended a rally to demand Khalil’s release outside the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, where his first hearing was held. Surrounded by hundreds of people, I felt, for the first time in a long time, heartened. To be in common cause with hundreds of people refusing to sit idly by during an unprecedented assault on our actual freedoms—not the “freedom” weaponized by the right wing to sell nootropics, guns, and racism—is powerful. Organizing is the best known antidote to despair, and we need it now, more than ever.

Here was another scene in New York today, where 98 people were arrested for occupying Trump Tower in a protest organized by Jewish Voices for Peace.

This is a real battle for the soul of a nation, and for what we as Americans will countenance happening in our names, and on our watch. Some day, I want to be able to tell my children that I was on the right side of history. I also need to be able to look at myself in the mirror for a lifetime to come. If you’re still refusing to speak up about Mahmoud Khalil and the plight of the Palestinians, I don’t feel confident you’ll be able to say the same.