The Abduction of Mahmoud Khalil

Defending our rights means fighting for a democratic constitution. By Luke Pickrell

Mahmoud Khalil. Credit Redacción 24 horas / AFP

Over the weekend, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, was abducted by the Department of Homeland Security after months of targeted harassment. Plainclothes agents forced their way into Khalil’s home, refused to identify themselves, detained him without explanation, and threatened his pregnant wife. When his lawyer attempted to intervene, the agents abruptly hung up.

Khalil was then forcibly disappeared for over 24 hours. His wife attempted to contact him at the New Jersey facility where he was allegedly detained but was told he wasn’t there. On Sunday, SJP reported that Khalil was being held in New York City. The next day, ICE’s detainee locator system said he was in Louisiana.

On Sunday, ICE confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a post on X, writing: “In support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio added, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” President Trump has called Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and “paid agitator” whose arrest was “the first… of many to come.”

As a green card holder, Khalil is a lawful permanent resident entitled to the rights granted under federal, state, and local laws. His abduction constitutes a clear violation of those rights, including his rights to free speech and due process. As reported late Monday, a federal judge has stopped Khalil's deportation pending a hearing on Wednesday. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries released a statement calling Khalil’s arrest and detention “wildly inconsistent with the United States Constitution.”

Jeffries makes a valid point: Khalil’s rights have been violated, and his arrest must be condemned in the strongest terms. But Jeffries errs in tying the fight for Khalil’s rights to a defense of the undemocratic Constitution, which, through a system of unaccountable checks and balances — including the bicameral legislature, malapportioned Senate, imperial presidency, and unelected federal judiciary — denies universal and equal suffrage and thereby places all other rights in constant jeopardy.

While the political rights and freedoms in the Constitution are a necessary part of a democratic system, their mere existence does not make a political system democratic. As Tom Paine, Martin Luther King Jr., and V.I. Lenin understood, universal and equal suffrage is the fundamental democratic right that undergirds all other civil rights and freedoms.

In the case of Khalil’s abduction — a blatant violation of hard-won civil rights, trapped within the overarching structure of an undemocratic political system that denies universal and equal suffrage — we should remember Jean Jaurès’s argument when defending Alfred Dreyfus in 1898:

There are two parts to capitalist and bourgeois legality: There are a whole mass of laws aimed at protecting the fundamental iniquity of our society… that consecrate the privileges of capitalist property, the exploitation of the wage earner by the owner. We want to smash these laws, and even by revolution if necessary abolish capitalist legality in order to bring forth a new order. But alongside these laws of privilege and rapine, made by a class and for it, there are others that sum up the pitiful progress of humanity, the modest guarantees that it has little by little conquered through centuries-long effort and a long series of revolutions

The violation of Khalil's rights must be condemned in the strongest terms — without ceding an inch of ground to the undemocratic Constitution. We can and must preserve the “pitiful progress of humanity” while struggling to create a truly democratic structure through which the “fundamental iniquity of our society” can be overturned.

Defending our inalienable rights requires a relentless struggle for a truly democratic political system — one in which political power is vested in the democratic majority.