Mahmoud Khalil...Then You?

Wake up, because you're not safe either.

Protesters gather to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil at Foley Square on March 10, 2025, in New York City. (David Dee Delgado / Getty Images)

FASCISM IS HERE!

It doesn't sleep; it slithers, slides quiet beneath your door at night, slips between pages of books you don't read, through mouths of men you don't listen to. Ignore it long enough, call it by softer names, look away—and soon you’ll wake up choking, unsure of how the smoke curled thick into your lungs.

One morning, you’ll ask how the fire found you. But the truth, hard and simple, is you let it burn slowly all around, mistaking the smoke for weather, mistaking flames for distant warmth. Wake up, before the it knows your name.

FASCISM IS HERE!

By now, many of you have likely encountered the name Mahmoud Khalil—perhaps in passing conversations, fleeting news segments, or posts on social media. Yet, for those who remain unacquainted, allow me to illuminate his story—a narrative that intertwines with the very fabric of our collective conscience and freedoms.

Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Palestinian activist and recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, has been a prominent voice in advocating for Palestinian rights on campus. He served as the lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student-led coalition demanding the university sever financial ties with companies profiting from Israeli occupation. His leadership in organizing peaceful protests, his eloquence in debates, and his unwavering stance against injustice have been lauded by thousands. But in an era where resistance is punished, where speech is conflated with crime, such leadership does not go unnoticed by those in power.

On March 8, 2025, Khalil’s life took a harrowing turn. Federal agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrived unannounced at his university-owned apartment. Despite his status as a lawful permanent resident holding a green card, Khalil was detained under the pretext of revoking his student visa—a visa he no longer required. His wife, eight months pregnant and a U.S. citizen, bore witness to this abrupt intrusion, capturing the ordeal on video. In the footage, her voice trembles as she narrates the scene: “They just handcuffed and took him. I don't know what to do.”

The Trump administration, under the guidance of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, justified this action by alleging that Khalil’s activities aligned with Hamas, designating him a threat to national security. Rubio asserted that the government would be “revoking the visas and/or green cards” of individuals perceived as Hamas supporters to facilitate their deportation.

FASCISM IS HERE!

This is not an isolated incident but a manifestation of a broader campaign to suppress dissent. Under newly signed executive orders, the administration has empowered federal agencies to target activists, conflating legitimate protest with terrorism, and sowing fear across campuses and advocacy spaces. The goal is clear: to silence, intimidate, and make examples of those who dare speak out.

After his arrest, Khalil was not held in New York. Instead, he was transferred to a detention center in Louisiana, thousands of miles from his home and support system. Louisiana, with its history of ICE detentions and legal bottlenecks, is a known purgatory for immigrants and detainees. It is a place where due process is slowed to a crawl, where detainees are cut off from legal resources, where the machinery of the state grinds away at their hope. He has been placed there because it makes his deportation easier, because it distances him from protests and advocacy, because the state wants him forgotten.

As this has all transpired, Khalil’s alma mater, Columbia University, has not stood tall. It did not shield its students, did not wield its supposed commitment to free expression like armor against the encroaching shadow of authoritarianism. No, Columbia University folded. It folded like parchment in the rain, like brittle paper between trembling fingers, until it was no longer recognizable as the institution that once prided itself on harboring debate, dissent, and discourse.

When the Trump administration came knocking, Columbia did not resist—it opened the door. It laid out the welcome mat, ushered in the men with badges and billy clubs, handed them the names and records of students who had dared to speak against empire. And what was the charge? That they had protested too loudly? That they had demanded divestment? That they had refused to pretend the line between scholar and activist did not exist?

In the days after Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest, Columbia distanced itself from him with surgical precision. There was no public outcry from the administration, no firm stance against ICE’s intrusion into the home of one of their own. Instead, statements were released in the usual bureaucratic tone—vague nods to the “importance of diverse viewpoints,” the necessity of "civil dialogue," the institution’s “commitment to student safety.” But safety for whom? Certainly not for Khalil, shackled in a Louisiana detention center. Not for the students who now feared that their activism, their words, their very presence on campus could be deemed criminal.

FASCISM IS HERE!

Then, came the policies. The university quietly revised its student conduct guidelines, tightening the noose around campus activism. Protest restrictions expanded. The list of “prohibited disruptions” grew longer. Degrees of many activists were revoked. The administration, citing “security concerns,” began providing student disciplinary records to federal authorities, a move condemned by civil rights groups but defended by university leadership as “compliance with lawful requests.” But compliance is a choice, just as resistance is. Columbia chose submission.

And yet, it is not just Columbia. It is every institution that claims to cherish knowledge, claims to nurture minds, yet buckles when knowledge is wielded as a weapon against power. It is every university that polices protest, that warns its students in hushed emails to “be mindful of external scrutiny,” that pretends academia is a world apart from politics, as if the two have not been forever intertwined.

History will not remember Columbia for its principles. It will remember it for its cowardice. For choosing the favor of the powerful over the protection of the powerless. For proving, once again, that when confronted with the demands of empire, even the most hallowed halls of learning can be reduced to mere extensions of the state.

But this is how fascism has always worked. It is no accident that Mahmoud Khalil’s name is the one on the government’s lips. The enemy of empire has always been the one who refuses to be erased, the one who dares to declare their existence in the face of those who would see them disappear. Khalil is not the first. He will not be the last.

Because fascism is never content with one target. The machine must continue to consume. It must expand its reach, tighten its grip. Today it is Mahmoud Khalil. Tomorrow, it is the journalists who report his story. The professors who teach histories inconvenient to the state. The students who refuse to be silent. The workers who strike. The artists who refuse to make propaganda. The institutions that once believed themselves safe.

FASCISM IS HERE!

Mahmoud Khalil center.

Mahmoud's ordeal is a stark reminder that the machinery of oppression spares none; today, it is him, but tomorrow it could be any of us. It could be you for speaking out, for writing, for gathering in the streets, for daring to believe that the world can be made more just. They want us to believe that we are separate, that what is happening to him will never happen to us, that the knock on his door will not come to ours. But we know better. We know that injustice left unchecked swells and swallows everything in its path.

So, I write today not only in grief, but in refusal. Refusal to let Mahmoud’s name be forgotten, refusal to accept that this is the world we must inherit. We must resist in whatever ways we can, by bearing witness, by demanding, by refusing to look away. And in these heavy days, when the weight of history feels unbearable, I turn, as I often do, to the act of creation.

for mahmoud, for us all

who will gather the names of the stolen?
who will press them into the earth,
whisper them into the wind’s ear,
etch them in the sky’s soft underbelly
before the rain washes them away?

Mahmoud, your name is a mountain on my chest,
a river that will not stop running.
you stand at the crossroads of history,
of country, of exile, of fists raised
toward a sky that forgot to shine.

they came for you in the hush of midnight,
came like thieves with keys to your home,
came with papers, with cages, with lies
with a map of your vanishing
folded neatly in their pockets.

we have seen this before—
this swallowing of bodies,
this hunger for breath,
this grinding of names into dust.
they did it to the ones who marched before us,
who sang before us,
who dared to cup light in their hands
and show the country its own face.

they did it in birmingham, in memphis,
in soweto, in gaza, in harlem, in kabul.
they did it under the burning cross,
under the drone’s shadow,
under the white house’s watchful eye.
always the same hands,
always the same hunger for bones.

but we will not curl like paper
in the mouth of the storm.
we will not kneel and call it survival.
we will not pretend
this is not our fight too.

Mahmoud, your name is a drumbeat,
a bullet that refuses to land.
we will write it in the streets,
in lullabies to our children,
in the clatter of train wheels
heading nowhere but forward.

fascism is here,
but so are we.

---

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