ICE Yanking Green Card Holders Out Of Their Houses For Wrongthink Now
Yeah, this ain't right.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is not actually about how you feel about the Israel vs. Palestine war. Comments that try to turn it into that will be deleted.
What stage of fascism is “yanking citizens off the street and shoving them into detention facilities a thousand miles away because the government does not like their political views”? Because whatever stage that is, America has reached it.
Over the weekend, the Gestapo Ministry of State Secrets Intelligence Secretariat Political-Social Brigade Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (there, we knew we’d get to the right one eventually) arrested an American resident for the crime of holding political views at odds with the ruling regime. And contra what every wingnut on social media might be screaming, this is an actual violation of civil rights in a way that banning your Twitter account because you wrote that transgender people should be hunted to extinction or something very much is not.
Mahmoud Khalil was an organizer of the demonstrations at Columbia University against Israel over its war in Gaza last year. Khalil, a grad student at Columbia, is a green card holder, which makes him a lawful permanent resident of our rapidly crumbling dystopia.
Not that the brownshirts of ICE were going to let a minor point like a person’s legal status stop them. On Saturday night, agents arrested Khalil at his apartment and told him that his student visa had been revoked. When Khalil told them that he actually has a green card and therefore holds the same rights as every other citizen, the agents allegedly told him that that had also been revoked. Then they took him away and reportedly sent him to a detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but his wife was told he wasn’t there when she tried to visit Sunday. According to Southpaw on Bluesky, the ICE detainee locator now has him in Jena in Louisiana, extremely far away.
Speaking of, and for good measure, the agents threatened to arrest Khalil’s eight-months-pregnant wife, who is an American citizen, when they picked him up. We suppose they would like to be congratulated on their restraint.
Needless to say, no criminal charges have been announced. The government is making some noises with its yap hole about Khalil “leading activities aligned to Hamas,” a designated terrorist organization, and we’re sure the Trump administration wouldn’t fib about a thing like that. Khalil exercising his First Amendment right to protest government policy is not illegal, no matter what other foreign organization might also hate the policy.
Naturally, the worst this country has to offer is all in on this horseshit. People such as Marco Rubio, the styrofoam cup full of wheat germ currently serving as secretary of State:
We are not lawyers, but we do know that the United States government cannot revoke green cards by fiat. If the government would like to file criminal charges that could eventually lead to revoking Khalil’s green card, hey, go for it. But that requires all sorts of legal steps such as investigating, gathering evidence, getting a warrant from a judge, and so on. Rubio is endorsing just skipping all that. Apparently he would like us to function more like the police states of places like Cuba that he has made a career out of criticizing.
Then there is the Anti-Defamation League, the biggest shanda fur di goyim to theoretically stand up for Jewish people and civil liberties since ... actually, we’re blanking here:
The ADL could not be bothered to condemn Elon Musk for throwing a couple of Nazi salutes at a rally on the day of Trump’s inauguration. Hell, they defended Musk, saying he was so caught up with the Holy Trump Spirit that he had just been making a particularly enthusiastic gesture. (He wasn’t. It was a sieg heil. We all saw it.)
But here the ADL says it’s fine when a president unilaterally decides on a person’s immigration status contrary to all established laws and procedures. Throwing in some crap about “due process protections” doesn’t save you, guys. Upholding due process protections should have been the first (and only) graf you wrote here. But you know damn well you do not detain a citizen before you think of something to charge him with.
What is particularly galling about this ADL response is that the organization is hiding behind the shield of battling antisemitism and making college campuses safe for Jewish students and faculty. We can promise the ADL there is no world whatsoever in which empowering the government to disappear people who disagree with it makes Jews safer. Historically, in fact, exercising such power has never worked out well for Jewish people.
This is especially true since a significant majority of Jews in America disagrees with the government’s stance on Israel and Gaza. Is the ADL going to applaud if, say, the government whisks a Jewish green card holder from Israel or Poland or Venezuela who organizes protests against government policies off to a Louisiana detention camp?
We would be remiss if we did not also throw a special shout-out to the administration of Columbia University, which released a statement reading in part:
Consistent with our long-standing practice and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter nonpublic University areas, including University buildings. Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community.
Well, good news: The ICE agents who detained the green card holder did not apparently have a judicial warrant. (They very often don’t.) So you should be extra-pissed that they entered university housing to arrest the guy!
As we noted the other day, no college in the country did more to suck up to right-wing condemnation of the protests. Columbia allowed cops on campus to harass protesters, it expelled and banned from its campus students who were simply protesting, it has thumped its chest about being the great fighter against antisemitism.
And the Trump administration still cancelled $400 million in federal contracts and grants to punish the (private!) school for not “fighting antisemitism” hard enough to satisfy Donald Trump. Because there is no level of “fighting antisemitism” that is going to satisfy him. Bullies are not satisfied; they just press their foot down harder on your neck.
Finally, let us say that as a Jew, we are not real thrilled with the idea of a government populated by Christian nationalists such as Russ Vought and Pete (hic) Hegseth asserting the authority to determine who in America gets to exercise their rights and who doesn’t. Again, historically, this has not worked out well for Jewish people or anyone else who is not a Christian nationalist.
We don’t necessarily agree with every position taken by the pro-Palestinian movement — which itself is not monolithic! We also, as someone who once had a swastika drawn on the door of our freshman dorm room, don’t necessarily disagree with cracking down on antisemitism on college campuses. It is there and like any other bigotry, it’s pernicious.
But if you are going to arrest and deport a movement’s leaders or members, you should have a much better reason than because we wanna. Because the First Amendment still, for the moment, exists. As do the Sixth, the Fourteenth, and any others that are relevant to this fuckup.
We apologize once more for our lack of humor and promise to start being funny again in 2029 or whenever everyone in the Trump administration trips and falls headfirst into a bucket that gets stuck on their heads like a cartoon character, whichever comes first.
You wouldn’t want to be the one person responsible for Wonkette collapsing for lack of funding, would you?
Well, here we are. It’s 2025, and ICE is playing fascist Mad Libs with civil rights, yanking green card holders out of their homes like we’re running some kind of dystopian-themed escape room—but with no exits.
Let’s get something straight: a green card is not a “we let you stay as long as we feel like it” card. It’s a legal right to reside in this country. It can be revoked, sure, but not because some ghoul in a tactical vest decided they didn’t like your politics. That requires—gasp—due process. But due process is so pre-2016, isn’t it? Now, it’s just “we’re the government, and we said so.”
And of course, the Trump administration (god help us all) and its enablers are cheering this on. Marco Rubio, the human embodiment of a soggy saltine, is out here saying they’ll revoke green cards “of Hamas supporters.” Except… there’s a thing called evidence, and a thing called courts, and none of those things seem to be involved here. That’s the whole problem. If someone is materially supporting terrorism, charge them. If they aren’t, then what you’ve got is state-sponsored kidnapping.
And the ADL, an organization that should know better than anyone what happens when the government starts picking and choosing which people get to have rights? They’re out here trying to do both-sides gymnastics so hard, they’re going to tear a hamstring. You don’t get to say, “We support due process, but we also like what ICE is doing.” No. Pick a lane.
Let’s not forget Columbia University, which did everything the far-right demanded—cracked down on protesters, expelled students, let cops run wild on campus—and they still lost their federal funding. That’s what happens when you try to appease fascists. They don’t stop at what you’re willing to give; they take everything.
And don’t think for a second that this ends with pro-Palestinian activists. That’s just the test case. Give them an inch, and next, they’ll be disappearing labor organizers, climate activists, and anyone else who dares to think outside the approved ideological lines. Today it’s Khalil; tomorrow it’s whoever annoyed Trump’s favorite podcaster.
This is not about whether you personally agree with Khalil or the protests at Columbia. This is about whether you want to live in a country where the government can strip people of their legal status and throw them in a detention center with no charges, no hearing, and no recourse—because that’s where we are.
And if you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention.
https://bsky.app/profile/amyspitalnick.bsky.social/post/3ljzlj67gcc2d
"Any Jew who thinks this is going to start and stop with a few Palestinian activists is fooling themselves. Our community should not be used as an excuse to upend democracy & the rule of law."
I don't want the government saying they did this to protect me.