Six weeks into the second Trump administration, and days after President Trump vowed to push back on “illegal protests” on college campuses, the State Department has pulled the first visa of a foreign student disruptor, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a legal permanent resident (green-card holder) who engaged in pro-Hamas college chaos.
That’s the right thing to do if we want to fix campus culture. And contrary to misinformed or disingenuous critics, it poses no First Amendment problems.
After ICE agents detained Mahmoud Khalil, Democrat backlash followed.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee posted “Free Mahmoud Khalil” on X. DNC vice-chair David Hogg said it was “one more step in Trump’s authoritarian march, detaining Palestinian . . . Mahmoud Khalil.”
Not only is Khalil Syrian, not “Palestinian,” the Democrats are wrong about both the principle and the application of the law in this case.
Indeed, it’s a basic application of US immigration law, which says that people here on a visa (tourist, student, employment, or otherwise) who reveal themselves to be ineligible for that visa — “inadmissible,” in the parlance of the Immigration and Nationality Act — can have their visa revoked.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Daniel Di Martino is a graduate fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Ph.D. student in economics at Columbia University, and the founder of the Dissident Project, a speakers’ bureau for young immigrants from socialist countries.
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