Mahmoud Khalil: Trump’s Perfect Distraction

Over the past week, left-leaning America has collectively lost its mind over the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student and activist at Columbia University who was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for his alleged support of Hamas in violation of his Green Card. Left aligned groups, from the Democratic Party down, have called for his immediate release.

As a part of left-leaning America and a Jewish Zionist college student, I was disappointed but not surprised. Disappointed not just because of the normalization of pro-terrorist sentiment and antisemitism among the left, but also because it was such an unforced error. Though Democrats and other left-wingers seem to think that they are dominating the narrative around Khalil, the reality is the exact opposite. 

The threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil was a trap for the Democrats by the Trump Administration. His cause, and the future causes of whoever Trump uses after him, are designed to distract Trump’s opposition and force them into extremist positions. Rather than recognize this, the Democrats played right into Trump’s hands.

One of Trump’s primary issues on the campaign trail was his promise of “mass deportations”. He variously claimed that these deportations were for criminals, illegal aliens, and even non-Americans who are here legally (including visa holders). This extreme plan, which Trump claims would involve deporting millions of people, was and is incredibly controversial. Countless American citizens, Trump-voters and non-Trump-voters alike, have close and loving relationships with non-citizens living in this country. 

Polling shows that a good number of Americans, even those who didn’t vote for Trump, support the idea of “mass deportations”. At the same time, how many of them would be willing to deport their neighbors? Their friends? Their in-laws? Their local dry cleaner or shopkeeper or crossing guard? If you asked the American public if they wanted to throw these people out, you’d get stiff resistance.

Mahmoud Khalil, on the other hand, makes a perfect face for mass deportations. He came into this country to get an education at one of our finest institutions, but instead of showing gratitude, he helped radicalize American students. He led a group that dispensed pro-terrorist propaganda, took over buildings, sent a worker to the hospital, and (until now) experienced no lasting consequences. To your average American, Khalil is the exact type of ‘ungrateful, un-American criminal’ that they don’t want here.

The Trump Administration knew this. That’s why they chose him. Their talk about fighting antisemitism on campus has always been about getting buy-in for mass deportations. Khalil, an antisemitic campus protest leader at the archetypal “radical liberal” campus, was nothing more than a piece of bait to get Democrats to support the worst excesses of their radical flank. By making Khalil into a national issue, the Trump administration could ensure that the Democrats talked about how much they loved the divisive anti-Israel protests and not about the immorality of mass deportations.

And it worked perfectly. For the last week, Khalil’s arrest has caused a firestorm. The media is covering it wall-to-wall, the Senate Judiciary Democrats called for his release, and Republicans manufactured a new stage on which they can (rightfully) criticize the anti-Israel protest movement. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and tens of thousands of Ukrainians lost their temporary protected status. Just today, the administration turned the CBP One app—designed to help asylum-seekers enter the country legally—into a self-deportation software. Instead of shouting from the rooftops about the plight of these law-abiding refugees, the Democrats are defending a Hamas supporter. 

This is the exact same tactic that the Republicans successfully used in the Congressional hearings with university presidents. To avoid having a broad and nuanced conversation about where speech crosses the line into hate and harassment, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik gave them a narrow and obvious question: is calling for the genocide of Jews allowed on your campus? All she had to do was sit back and watch them fail. By getting the presidents of elite universities to waffle on an obvious wrong, Stefanik legitimized the Republican attack on higher education. After over a year, the Democrats still haven’t learned. 

Some Democrats believe that raising Khalil’s profile will raise awareness of Trump’s policies and rally resistance against him. It won’t. Backing Khalil proves that Republicans have been right about Democrats: they don’t care about Jews, because they’ve allowed lawbreaking thugs to harass them for 18 months. They don’t care about the working class, like the person who was injured by Khalil’s gang of educated elites. And they don’t care about America, which Khalil’s group hates. 

This complete tactical failure by the Democrats is inexcusable. It harms Jews, who now cannot ignore that fighting antisemitism is a partisan issue. It makes Democrats less popular with regular Americans, who see how the law has been selectively under-enforced for Ivy-Leaguers. And worse, it distracts from the real victims of Trump’s deportation plan. 

In four years, when we look back on how America allowed for the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of refugees, I hope we remember that instead of sounding the alarm, the American left cried over Mahmoud Khalil.