Stop the attacks on Palestinian Rights Activists

3/17/2025

Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian born Palestinian and former graduate student at Columbia University, has been detained in a prison in Louisiana and threatened with deportation for his association with pro-Palestine protests at Columbia, where he was a negotiator between the University and the student activists.   He is not the only foreign student to be threatened with deportation over his participation in these actions. At Cornell University, Momodou Taal, a Gambian-born UK citizen has been fighting expulsion and deportation for his participation in pro-Palestine protests, and at Yale, Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi, an Associate Research Scholar from Iran has been suspended for an alleged connection with Samidoun, an organization that supports Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. There are tens of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, many of them incarcerated without charge.

The detention and threat of deportation against Mahmoud Khalil and the punitive actions against other foreign students is a continuation of state repression practiced by Donald Trump and by his predecessors. The accusations against Khalil and the others are inventions meant to make examples of them and crush opposition to United States complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

Zionist groups openly boast of giving the Trump administration names of non-citizens who they want to see deported. Yet Trump’s actions are an extension of the Patriot Act, the illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and of institutions like Columbia University working with police departments to end peaceful protests. At other institutions faculty have been fired and students have been suspended or even expelled in an effort to placate the state and their own wealthy donors.

Trump is not just claiming a right to deport non-citizens who exercise their rights to speak and assemble freely, but he is continuing the Biden administration’s commitment to ethnic cleansing in Gaza, while Israel continues bombing and cutting off water and electricity, which are war crimes by definition, and in violation of a ceasefire agreement. Like other presidents, Trump is bombing Ansar Allah and civilians in Yemen to punish their steadfast solidarity with Palestine.  The Obama/Clinton initiative to destroy the Syrian Republic has also come to fruition, with the leader of Al Qaeda in Syria now ruling the country. At the same time, his multinational force of Takfiri-Wahhabi-Salifist extremists slaughters Alawite, Shia and Christian Syrians in the thousands.

Palestine is not the only point of contention that drives the state to repress speech. The Uhuru 3 were indicted by the Biden Department of Justice, accused of being Russian agents when they spoke against the proxy war in Ukraine. They were ultimately acquitted, but their case exemplified the commitment to silence individuals and movements who speak out against U.S. imperialism. The most common form of repression in the U.S. is the police state, as in Chicago, where the local police department ran a black site prison, Homan Square, with the help of the Justice Department under the Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies.

Trump’s deportations in violation of court orders are a new threat to human rights. But Guantanamo Bay still holds prisoners, and the Patriot Act has been renewed several times since it was first passed in 2001.

UNAC demands freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and others repressed for exercising their rights to speak and assemble freely, an end to genocide and wars of aggression, and the end of university complicity in the suppression of political speech.

Free Palestine!

Stop Deportations! 

Free all Political Prisoners!

Defend the Human Rights of Free Speech and Assembly!

Stop Imperialist Aggression!