The kidnapping, imprisonment, and attempted deportation of human rights activist Mahmoud Khalil by DHS agents under the Trump administration should awaken us like a baseball bat to the head. This attack on Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and legal resident, is part of a broader assault on free speech to silence dissenting voices at a time of growing unrest on college campuses. As Khalil, who now considers himself a political prisoner, writes in an open letter from a detention center in Louisiana, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.” Despite his own circumstances, Khalil speaks of the appalling conditions that exist for the men all around him.
He tells us, “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law. Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here.”
Khalil’s struggle reveals how the fight for free speech and prison reform are inextricably linked. State power frequently attempts to silence dissent, whether through direct incarceration, censorship, or legal bullying within the U.S. prison system.
Trump’s attempts to silence dissent by jailing activists come from an old playbook. We could go back to the labor movement at the beginning of the 20th century when political prisoner Eugene Debs won a million votes for president from Chicago’s Cook County Jail, or to the 1960s, when Martin Luther King and Angela Davis were jailed for their political beliefs. Black Panther Party and Young Lord members were routinely harassed and jailed by police. BPP member George Jackson spent over a decade in prison—mostly in solitary confinement–for stealing $70 of gas and was eventually murdered by guards. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ran the COIN TEL Program, which allowed the government to spy, infiltrate, obstruct, and arrest anyone. Political Prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, who became the human face of the anti-death penalty movement in the 1990s, remains in prison, framed for killing a cop. Native American activist and political prisoner Leonard Peltier was only just released after spending almost 50 years in a federal prison.
But even though we might have seen this before, there is something qualitatively different in how Trump operates. A close counterpart might be Ronald Regan, the one who said, “The man with the badge will keep the jungle at bay,” created the image of the welfare queen, and brought us trickledown piss down economics, but Regan operated more covertly on the international stage. We all remember the Iran Contra scandal, where he and his side-kick Ollie North sold guns to the Iranians to raise funds to help the Contras defeat the revolutionary Sandinistas in Nicaragua. These were all covert operations. On the domestic front Trump is getting away with things that Reagan could salivate over.
There’s nothing covert about Trump and his assaults on the First Amendment.
Since he has been in office, he has restricted the AP’s access to White House press conferences and events (for not recognizing the “Gulf of America”), put Voices of America on administrative leave, signed an order eliminating the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), VoA’s parent company, along with six other federal agencies, and attacked mainstream media. He said in a contentious speech at the DOJ, “I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat [sic] party and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal, what do they do is illegal.” He’s also taken over 400 million dollars from Columbia for its handling of pro-Palestine demonstrations and of Jewish students on campus.
The only modern president who comes the closest to the sheer viciousness of Trump is Bill Clinton, who shredded the social safety net while tripling the rates of incarceration and execution. It was Clinton who brought us the inhumane three-strikes your-out laws. Prison building reached an all-time high while he was in office. Frankly, it’s because the Democrats have been pitching the ball to the right all these years and away from the interests of the working class that we have Trump in the first place. Biden and Harris are no exceptions. Even Obama was lukewarm in his response to the Black Lives Matter Movement, particularly in acquiescence to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who murdered the young and unarmed Trayvon Martin.
Now we have a different type of political leader who’s certainly not a populist, even though he rode in as one, sort of. Instead, he would be king and do anything he wanted to satisfy himself and the pockets of his billionaire buddies. The gloves are off. Musk has been on TV with a chainsaw to show how serious they are about cutting the “corrupt” bureaucracies, which equals the dismantling of worker protections and the cutting of jobs and the welfare of millions abroad. And don’t think this extra money made from the destruction of the Department of Education, the Department of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and USAID will soon be in our pockets. This is crony capitalism. All one has to do is look into Trump’s gilded Oval Office where he is surrounded by shimmering golden objects, to know where his budgeting priorities lay.
But that’s just it. Even if he does rub shoulders with Muskian border-line fascists, history still matters, and history shows us that the only way we will be heard by the state is for all of us to finally stand together without exception in solidarity and say in unison “enough is enough!” The calvary isn’t coming. It’s up to us. That’s why we need to stand with Mahmoud Kahlil. He may be the first, but he won’t be the last. Already, there is a second student from George Town University who has been detained. If our government can be so emboldened to kidnap a U.S. resident from his or her family—Khalil’s wife is eight months pregnant–for the “crime” of speaking out against the genocide going on in Gaza right now–this morning another newborn was killed–then anyone could be at risk of incarceration and prosecution. Angela Davis’s words say it best: “If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.”
What’s next—secret police monitoring our conversations and combing through our social media? As someone who pounded the pavement and shouted through many a bull horn as a leader in the historic Chicago Death Row 10 struggle, I can attest that they are listening in. While fighting the state to free death row prisoners, I received terrifying phone calls with gunshots ringing out in the background, my phone was likely tapped, and, on another occasion, I was threatened to be killed and put in a trunk. Prisoners face this type of censorship and worse every day. Their mail is screened, phone calls monitored, conversations overheard, and tablets scrutinized. They’re even threatened with solitary confinement for arbitrary infractions.
Now, more than ever, the role of incarcerated journalists is critical. We must amplify our papers to speak truth to power and champion justice. With any luck, Khalil will become a lightning rod, sparking a larger movement against the relentless attacks on free speech, both inside and outside prison walls. The time to speak out is now!
“What’s next—secret police monitoring our conversations and combing through our social media? It’s probably happening already.”
It is. Smart revolutionaries don’t use social media. Stupid revolutionaries who care more about looking cool to everyone than their cause get caught by putting evidence against themselves on social media.
“He’s also taken over 400 million dollars from Columbia for its handling of pro-Palestine demonstrations and of Jewish students on campus.”
He hasn’t ‘taken’ it so much as is using it as leverage to get Columbia to change their policies. And what was that last part about Jewish students? There seems to be a missing subject on that phrase giving it no meaning.