By Karissa Korman
APRIL 06, 2025
On March 8, plainclothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security pushed their way into the apartment that Palestinian activist and permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil shared with his wife in New York City. The agents detained Khalil and claimed the State Department had revoked his student visa.
“Oh, he has a green card,” one of the agents said into their phone, according to Khalil’s wife Noor Abdalla.
Then, after a moment, the agent reported that the State Department had “revoked that too.”
Last spring as a graduate student, Khalil had helped lead protests at Columbia University over Israel’s war on Gaza, urging the university to sever its financial ties to Israel. Upon his detainment this spring, Donald Trump referred to Khalil as a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.” A Department of Homeland Security representative alleged that Khalil had “led activities aligned to Hamas.” He was renditioned to an ICE facility in Louisiana, where neither his wife nor his lawyer can reach him.
Salaried journalists at major publications began ringing the alarm bells March 9: a permanent resident was successfully disappeared by the state, a case slathered in just enough rhetorical grease to slip through the cracks of what’s perfectly legal and what ought not to be. Revoking the status of permanent residence requires evidence of wrongdoing, they’ve been insisting over and over since.
One newspaper ran an editorial: “Khalil’s detention is a threat to us all.” If the government has a case, it reads, let it go to court; in the meantime, officials should mind the Constitution and the law.
The trouble with deferring to a version of the United States that follows the law is that the law, the goal, and the global business of the United States has always been to cull populations both within and outside of its borders as it sees fit. America is like a trouble-making, narcissistic boyfriend the earth can’t shake—poking its fingers into problems and refusing to let them heal unless it’ll like the look of the scab. Destabilizing foreign nations, creating refugee classes, then turning them down at the door.
Programs like DACA and precedents like birthright citizenship hardly feel like paths to sanctuary when they’re the exact paper trails that any given administration can soak in gasoline to ensure the expunging of the people it’s always considered foreign. Non-white people are here on historical technicalities, and we will be removed en masse according to—not in spite of—the law. A fascist doesn’t need a lawyer with a generous interpretation of the documents at hand to light that match.
Manufactured moral panic over “anchor babies,” expired visas, impossible-to-get REAL IDs, passport renewals, I-9 forms, voter registration—the bureaucratic manhandling of cases like Khalil’s isn’t just technically legal. It’s not the unintended product of uncrossed t’s and undotted i’s in the Constitution, and it’s not a gross perversion of the founding fathers’ intent. If white nationalism is the law of the land, then immigration bans, border control, and deportations in service of that goal are the business of the United States.
A “terrorist sympathizer” allegation is sensational, and easily levied by an ostentatious figure like Trump. But the technical minutiae behind the papers and legal pathways it will take for the president to back that claim up—and keep Mahmoud Khalil disappeared—are the same for every minority population in the US and are encoded in this country on purpose. The violence of the US empire’s deportation business has two faces and two hands, but they strike the same brutal blow.
The freedom to move between where we come from and where we live is reserved for a certain class of down-the-line perpetual foreigners, with certain jobs that offer certain benefit packages. I know that’s true for myself, and it was true of the privileges afforded to my American parents to get me here in the first place. The language of geography and belonging that diasporic Americans are equipped with fails us if our nation has decided to accelerate toward its final destination: deportations, a dam on immigration, a tightening of our hug on white nationalism, and a rise of Uncle Sam fascism that feels slow and creeping to those of us in the pot—the way a lobster realizes it’s dinner.
Karissa Korman is the digital editor of Illume Magazine.
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