Over the weekend, federal immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who reportedly played a prominent part in protests against Israel at the university.
Khalil, in the U.S. as a permanent resident with a green card, was a graduate student until this past December. ICE agents acted on orders from the State Department to revoke his student visa.
Immigration experts say detaining a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime marks an extraordinary move with an uncertain legal foundation, but Campus Reform's Zachary Marschall thinks this arrest will be the first of many as the Trump administration follows through on its promises.
"Columbia University is a house of cards, and it's about to fall," he says. "It deserves to … because Colombia is where the encampment protests started last year, and it is a hotbed of radical terrorism that has yet to be quelled."
This is the first known deportation as part of President Trump's promised action against students who took part in the antisemitic protests that picked up following the October 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel.
"I think we're going to see more arrests and more exposure of what the faculty has been complicit in, too," Marschall tells AFN.
That includes faculty support for anti-Israel and anti-American protests and problematic Gender Studies Departments.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a weekend post on X that the Trump administration "will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported."
Deportation proceedings can be brought against green card holders who participate in illegal activity, including supporting a terrorist group.
