Round-up: Political deportations. Tourists locked up. Shutdown averted. Gitmo latest.

Your guide to the week's events

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Political deportations

This week the Trump administration arrested, and apparently plans to deport, Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. permanent resident at Columbia University. Originally from Syria, Khalil was a key figure in campus protests against Israel in 2024, which is why he is being targeted for deportation.

People can debate when protest against Israel turns into support for Hamas, or what kind of barriers they would like to put around that conversation. I haven’t seen any evidence that Khalil was directly involved in promoting or sympathizing with terrorism. Even right-wing articles endorsing his deportation contain no real evidence, except for an as-yet unsubstantiated allegation that he once distributed some flyers bearing the Hamas insignia. It’s clear that the administration has targeted Khalil because of his high profile, not because his conduct was particularly egregious.

The last few years have been head-spinning for those following the campus free speech wars. Not long ago, the right was engaged in a frothy moral panic over “cancel culture”. Any and all limits to speech were a threat to American values and a sign of the left’s lunacy. Then, after the horrendous attacks of October 7th, the worm turned, and suddenly any criticism of Israel was a verboten threat to American values and (you guessed it) a sign of the left’s lunacy.

It’s important to realize that the contemporary right’s obsession with “free speech” is not really about free speech. In the Fox News imaginary, only right-wing speech is legitimate, and so only it can be subject to “censorship”. Suppressing left-wing speech is fine because it is axiomatically un-American and thus not legitimate. We saw a great example of this when Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would be moving Facebook’s content moderation teams from California to Texas, where the “right” kind of person would be policing speech, making the process acceptable.

But a bigger point here is that the deportation of Khalil for exercising his speech rights is unconstitutional. Permanent residents have the same First Amendment rights as citizens. It is legally possible to take away someone’s green card, but that can only be done as part of an adversarial court process in which the administration would present evidence that Khalil had supported terrorism or committed some other crime or immigration violation. Instead, they seem to be just trying to deport him right away.

This is a clear “First They Came” situation. I am pretty much a free speech absolutist; all speech should be legal, and the civil society and cultural institutions of a free people should engage in an ongoing conversation about the socially (as opposed to legally) acceptable bounds of speech. I could also live with clear legal standards against types of proscribed speech - for instance, hate speech - impartially applied. What I don’t think anyone can live with is a weaponized attack on speech the current government happens not to like. But that’s what is happening in Trump’s America.

Tourists arrested

On to another immigration item. Recently there have been a number of cases in which European and Canadian tourists and professionals have been arrested after presenting themselves at a border crossing, held in detention for weeks, and then booted out - sometimes without being told why.

It’s important to say that all we know about these cases is what we’ve read in media reports, and exactly what happened is being told through a series of Chinese whispers. First, the detained person tells their family and friends. Then, their family and friends tell the media. Finally, the media tells us. There could be more to some of these cases.

But thus far, this seems to have happened:

• A 29-year-old tattoo artist from Berlin was arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border and held in detention for six weeks, including some time in solitary confinement, before being returned to Germany. She had tattooing equipment with her and officials reportedly thought she was coming to the U.S. to work;

• A 25-year-old German was likewise arrested at the Mexico border and detained for two weeks. He was denied an interpreter during questioning and mistakenly said he “lived” in Las Vegas, when he was really just visiting there;

• A British tourist on a backpacking trip across North America was detained at the Canadian border, and is still incarcerated. She told border officials that she would be living at a homestay in return for doing some chores, which they interpreted as a form of illegal work;

• A Canadian actress who starred in an American Pie movie has been detained for nearly two weeks after trying to get a new visa at a border point, which officials interpreted as her trying to enter illegally.

There may be other cases.

A fairly clear pattern seems to be emerging, and it’s a pattern that we know from Trump’s first administration, when it was called “zero tolerance”. It means trying to make life as uncomfortable as possible for anyone thinking about crossing the border illegally in order to deter others from doing so. It’s the line of thinking that eventually led to family separation.

And if this is how they’re treating white Europeans and Canadians, how do you think they’re treating everyone else?

Shutdown averted

“Hurray, a government shutdown has been averted!”

“Boo, the Democrats caved and handed Trump a victory!”

Those are the two narratives that we have to choose between today. With government funding due to expire today and Senate Democrats needing to decide whether to let it or not, many progressives were hoping that they would cause a shutdown. The idea was that this would be a protest against Elon Musk and DOGE, would hand Trump a political problem, and would signal the seriousness with which Congress views Trump’s abuses of power.

I tend myself towards the alternative view. I’d like to see Congress do a lot more to challenge Trump, but this specific idea is a bad one. Elon Musk and DOGE are currently trying to destroy large portions of the government, and a formal shutdown would create much easier conditions for them to do that.

As I’ve written before, most of the power that individuals and the courts have to fight back against DOGE stems from the fact that it is trying to stop government spending which was explicitly authorized by Congress. When no spending is authorized, that all changes, because agencies switch to only continuing “essential” functions. Musk and Trump could lay off workers, declare programmes they don’t like non-essential, and heighten the pressure on federal employees to just quit.

There are better ways to fight back.