ICE Detains Permanent Resident for Protesting Israel; European Leaders Make Maniacal Rearmament Vows They Cannot Keep
ICE detains a green card holding Columbia University graduate in a major escalation of censorship against Israel's critics. DropSite journalist Meghnad Bose explains the details of Mahmoud Khalil's case. PLUS: European leaders vow to remilitarize the continent after Trump and Zelensky's explosive White House meeting, potentially gutting social safety nets and sparking more political outrage against Europe's elites.
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We really want to thank Lee Fong, who did a great job, as I knew he would, as well as our team here, who worked with him to produce what I think were five great shows.
And I want to welcome you to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube tonight.
The 2024 Trump campaign repeatedly vowed during the campaign to target and punish students on American campuses for the crime of protesting the Israeli war on Gaza.
And like so many of the campaign's promises, Trump, for better or for worse, is quickly fulfilling this one as well.
Trump first threatened any universities that allowed what he deemed to be, quote, illegal protest against Israel to suffer a loss of federal funds.
Whatever illegal protests might mean.
And then his administration just announced steps to deny Columbia University, the epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, going all the way back to Barry Weiss when Barry Weiss was there and tried to get Arab and anti-Israel professors fired, trying to deny them hundreds of millions of dollars for allegedly acting with insufficient aggression against their students who were protesting the war, even though they repeatedly called the NYPD on those students.
But that state-driven attack on free speech rights saw a really major and genuinely disturbing escalation today as the Trump administration dispatched ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to arrest a grad student at Columbia University who is not in the U.S. illegally.
Not in the U.S. illegally.
Remember, the whole Trump campaign was we're going to deport the illegals.
This is not a person in the U.S. illegally.
He's not even in the U.S. on a work visa or a student visa.
He instead is a permanent resident of the United States, a holder of a green card.
In part because his wife is an American citizen who just, by the way, is eight months pregnant with their baby.
And yet with no warning, ICE agents stormed the home of Mahmoud Khalil, detained him, and took him to unknown prisons.
All without so much as being charged with a single crime, let alone convicted of one.
What is the allegation against him?
That he participated in and helped lead many of the protests that erupted on various college campuses throughout 2024, including in his case at Columbia, a protest which were in opposition to the U.S. funding of Israel's destruction of Gaza.
Now, note that there is no allegation that Khalil physically assaulted anyone.
Nor that he plotted any terrorist attacks.
His only offense is that he participated in these protests, often playing the lead role in helping facilitate communications between the more radical protesters and school administrators in order to resolve some kind of a dispute.
Now, it is really hard to put into words how serious it is to start summarily deporting green-called cardholders.
And other legal residents of the United States due to their political views and activities.
Remember, if you're an American citizen, you marry a foreign national.
Before they get citizenship, they get a green card for several years.
That's the transition to citizenship.
Imagine if they express a political view the government dislikes and starts deporting your spouse and your only choice is to leave your own country to be with them or...
Try and fight it here at home or watch them to go to prison.
Now, we'll take a look at all of the baseless but very predictable defenses offered by Israel supporters all day who endorsed the draconian act, including their blatantly false belief that the U.S. Constitution only applies to U.S. citizens, something we've heard before, we've debunked before.
And we'll also talk to the freelance journalist Magnat Bozay, who has been covering this case for Dropside News, including a court injunction that issued just before we went on air that bars the Trump administration from deporting this grad student, at least until a hearing on the merits can be held.
And then, ever since Donald Trump's confrontation with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in the Oval Office two weeks ago, European leaders have become increasingly strident.
I'd even say unhinged.
About their need for them to rearm, even to nuclearize.
That's what Germany is saying.
We may need to nuclearize in order to provide for their own defense.
Now, it's always somewhat adorable to hear a European, they get together in Brussels and they talk all tough about how it's no longer going to be dependent on the United States, but instead...
They're going to start being all feisty and they're going to increase their budgets and cut social programs and start becoming a real military power of their own.
Ooh, scary Europe, led by the British and the French and the Germans.
But much of what they are saying, despite being very genuine, because they're very alarmed by what they saw from Donald Trump talking about NATO, talking about abandoning Ukraine, much of what they say, though, clearly coming from a real place.
In a lot of ways, while it's deranged, it's obviously unrealistic, but we will examine what I think are some of the serious implications of this European mania over their own role in the world now that they perceive for the first time that American workers will no longer be able to subsidize or be forced to pay for both their social state and their defenses.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update right after this message from our sponsor.
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Go to fieldofgreens.com and use my promo code GLEN. That's fieldofgreens.com, promo code GLEN. Free speech is something I've been defending for many decades.
It's something that I first really became engaged with when I was a philosophy major and began studying the Enlightenment and all of the great philosophical works that emerged from it and understood how it became a major factor in the American founding.
And this document that I do still today consider to be genius in terms of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights as well as the system of checks and balances.
Obviously lots of changes you can make, but by and large To sort of create, out of nowhere, within this Enlightenment context, a document that guarantees all these rights but understands the rotted and malignant parts of human nature and has decided to guard against them is something that I began being interested in even before law school.
While I went to law school, it was a motive for my doing so.
I studied it a lot there.
I took it very seriously when I was a lawyer.
And, of course, when I'm a journalist, I've been...
Having it be a major focal point as well.
And there are definitely times when I consider free speech to be under attack.
I think it's been more under attack over the past several years, primarily because of the internet and the history I've told many times that after 2016 with Brexit and the loss of Hillary, Western elites concluded they could no longer permit a free internet because they could no longer control what the masses think.
And that's when this censorship industrial complex emerged to control.
The flow of information online, we've gotten a lot of revelations about how that has happened.
So I certainly have had times in the past where I thought free speech was under severe attack.
Obviously after 9-11, it absolutely was, and there have been other times as well.
But I don't want to be hyperbolic about this, so I want to be a little bit restrained in what I'm saying, but what I can say for certain is that the last year and a half in the United States, since October 7, 2023, It has been one of the darkest and most alarming times for censorship in any period that I can remember, certainly going back to 9-11, and I might even count 9-11 as being less threatening than the current moment.
And there are two reasons for that.
One of the reasons is that, unlike, say, in the War on Terror, where there was at least some Democratic opposition, there wasn't much.
It was often impotent and symbolic, but at least it was there.
When it comes to the type of targeting of political speech we're now discussing, which is speech that is critical of Israel or activism in defense of the Palestinian cause, there is very little dissent because obviously everybody knows that if you stick your head up on any TV show or anywhere else and you dissent and you say, no, I think the Palestinians have a point here.
We have to question why it is we're so tied at the hip to Israel, why we give them billions.
You know what's going to happen.
Your career can be over.
You're going to be fired.
You're going to be called an anti-Semite.
We've gone over on this show how many people, dozens and dozens of media and politics and Hollywood and Wall Street.
And Silicon Valley have been fired for their views, but it's also been a whole variety of state actions as well designed to quote-unquote render anti-Semitism illegal.
I'm not going to go into and repeat all those.
I assume viewers of the show have heard me talk about that before.
But even given that history where I have been genuinely concerned sometimes, what is happening now, and I don't want to be neurotic about it or leap to big conclusions.
We're talking about one case.
The case is already in court.
There's already a preliminary injunction that was issued just before we came on air.
So I'm not here to say American systems aren't working.
There are no checks on this.
But clearly this is an intention of the Trump government to create a system of powers where they can punish and prohibit and make examples of people on college campuses who are protesting Israel.
And then put more than enough pressure on administrators and colleges in order to prevent them from doing so in the future to express anti-Israel sentiment.
You have to understand, Israel for Washington has been such a bipartisan, sacred cow for so long.
And there was just a poll from Gallup earlier this week.
That showed that support for Israel in the United States is at an all-time low and support for Palestinians is at an all-time high.
More Americans still support Israel, but the margin has decreased from 44 to 36%.
It's unheard of in the United States.
It used to be 80-20.
And all of this is a reaction to say, look, we've got to stop, especially in college campuses, the ability to be critical of Israel.
And that was one of the major reasons why this whole anti-woke movement, the Barry Weiss's and that whole crowd that used to be vaguely associated with American liberalism and then rebranded as anti-woke, what their real motive was, was not trans debates in bathrooms or gender ideology or abort.
They don't care about any of that.
The real goal was to target American universities, knowing that it was one of the very few places left where anti-Israel sentiment can actually thrive.
And what they were particularly petrified of was the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, which calls for major institutions like universities to divest from Israeli funds and other Israeli assets, which is the exact tactic, the exact movement that brought down The apartheid regime in 1985 where we see very similar protest movements, occupation of government buildings and the like, and Israel has been petrified that that might happen on college campuses.
That's why you see these pundits who are loyal to Israel constantly writing about what's happening on college campuses because they know that's a major battle for whether in the future Israel will maintain this bipartisan hold.
On the United States and ensure that the most powerful, the richest, most powerful country continues to support it and finance their wars and the like.
But at the same time, there's now polling data showing that support for Israel has dropped precipitously, primarily, though not entirely among Democrats, but also independents and Republicans as well.
And I believe a major reason for that is this obsessive attempt to silence and censor Anything that's critical of Israel.
Remember, the TikTok ban was around since 2020 when Trump first introduced it.
And the reason for it was very monomaniacal, very focused on China.
But it lingered in Washington for years because China wasn't enough of a threat to make people want to ban TikTok.
What finally changed the minds of the Congress.
And they will tell you this themselves and have many times, we've cited it many times.
Is they started to become convinced that the real danger of TikTok was allowing too much anti-Israel speech and that that was what was turning America's precious youth into the arms of the pro-Palestinian movement and against Israel.
And few things petrify Washington elites more than that.
And that was why they decided to ban TikTok.
Now, in case you're wondering, they passed a bill requiring TikTok banned.
January 20th of this year, right after the election, so they could do it and get away with it with no political consequences.
The most Washington move ever.
And so far, Trump has just refused to implement it.
He keeps saying he needs more time.
But that was the reason.
All of this is about trying to suppress criticism of Israel because they see this criticism rising.
As people all over the world, not just the United States, have watched one absolutely disgusting, despicable war crime and video of children being blowed up after the next.
We watched IDF prisoners raping, gang raping, helpless Palestinian detainees on video they got caught.
And Israelis went to that prison, members of the Knesset included, and protested, not against the rapists, but in favor of the rapists, demanding they be let out of prison, that they have a right to rape under Judea law because these were not Jews.
That these were enemies.
They deserve it.
This is the kind of study we're talking about and people are seeing it.
And of course it's affecting public opinion.
And a lot of the people who were ushered into power with Donald Trump are focused and obsessive on Israel and they want to use the power of the government to try and stem the tide of rising anti-Israel sentiment because the key to Israeli power has always been ensuring that it's a bipartisan policy in the United States and yet there's no denying huge numbers of young people Are disgusted with what Israel is doing and have far more sympathy to the Palestinians.
And you can make the argument that it was a major cause of Kamala Harris's difficulty in winning.
So here we have this major escalation in an attempt to just bully and deter and silence anybody who might engage in protest against Israel by taking this person and singling him out.
In a case that is very difficult for the government, this is not an easy set of hack founders.
This is a sympathetic target they've chosen.
I think they've done so on purpose to send the signal that if we can do this to him, we can do it to anybody.
Here you see the article from AP News earlier today.
Columbia student risk deportation for anti-Israel activities.
Actually, the headline is, leader of student protest at Columbia facing deportation after arrest by immigration officials.
Quote, the leader of the student protest at Columbia facing deportation after arrest by immigration officials.
Mahmoud Khali, who graduated from the university in December, was arrested Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the arrest, saying it was a result of President Donald Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.
How does a government prohibit?
Can the government prohibit racism, anti-black racism?
Can it prohibit misogyny or xenophobia or anti-LGBT? T-sentiment?
If it can, why hasn't it?
And if it can't, why can't it, quote, prohibit anti-Semitism?
The article goes on, quote, Khalil has not been formally charged with a crime.
And I just want to emphasize that here, if I could.
He, if we could put that up, has not been formally charged with a crime.
I watch Trump supporters all day.
All day.
So yeah, kick that guy out.
He doesn't belong here.
He broke our laws.
He's never even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one.
Then if we can go on, it says...
His lawyer, Amy Greer, said the agents who took him into custody at his university-owned home near Columbia initially claimed to be acting on a State Department order to revoke his student visa, but when Greer informed them that Khalil was a permanent residence with a green card, they said they would revoke that documentation instead.
Federal immigration authorities also visited a second international student at Columbia over the weekend and attempted to take her into custody but were prevented from entering the apartment, according to a union representing this student.
The woman has not been identified and it's not clear what grounds ICE had for the arrest for the visit.
Now, if you are, you know, the Trump campaign ran on a platform.
We all remember what it was.
Illegal immigration is killing our country.
They're sending the worst to the worst.
These people are murderers and rapists.
They're raping our poor little innocent six-year-old girls.
They're...
Burglarizing.
They're taking over apartment buildings.
They're eating your cats and dogs.
And as a result, we're going to engage in mass deportation of all the people who are in this country illegally.
And polls show that that's what people, including Trump supporters, want.
Not to deport legal immigrants, but to deport illegal ones.
The problem is they made a big showing.
Dramatic, theatrical.
In the start, the Trump administration did.
They sent military planes.
Oh, it seemed like they were really...
If you look at the data...
Trump and Biden have basically deported exactly the same number of people in the first year of their presidency.
2021 for Biden, 2025 for Trump, up until this point.
He's on pace to match Joe Biden's deportation record after promising millions of mass deportations to his followers.
And so what do you do when you haven't fulfilled one of your major promises?
Get rid of this person who's critical of Israel.
Don't worry.
He's Muslim.
He's Arab.
He'll feel vaguely foreign like he doesn't belong here.
And then you can cheer.
And that's exactly what they've done.
Here was the White House today.
In its own official announcement, there you see the picture of this academic.
And it says, Shalom Mahmood.
And this is the same language, by the way, that Trump used for Hamas when threatening Hamas.
This is Trump on True Social.
Earlier today, quote, This is the first arrest of many to come.
We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, and anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.
Many are not students.
They are paid agitators.
We will find apprehend and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country, never to return again.
All right, let me just say here that this language here where Trump says, we know there are more students at Columbia, and as I said, that's the point of this order is to scare people out of exercising their constitutional right to protest.
who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, and other anti-American activity, and we will not tolerate it.
Now, let's say it's true, just for the sake of argument, that this particular Grad student at Columbia has, in fact, expressed pro-Hamas views in the past.
I don't think he has.
I haven't seen evidence of that, but let's assume that he has.
I think it's so important to remember that we have a First Amendment to the Constitution, which is very absolute, and it's been interpreted absolutely.
Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of the press.
Not Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of the press as long as it's not about Israel.
There's no Israel exception in the First Amendment.
And so if you are not just an American citizen, but a green card holder in the United States legally, you are actually allowed to have pro-terrorist views.
You're allowed to have an anti-Semitic view.
You're allowed to have anti-American views and activities.
Trump encouraged all of his supporters to go protest Joe Biden and the Biden administration.
Was that anti-American on Trump's part?
To go tell people to protest the American government?
Of course not.
That's an exercise of his constitutional right.
But even if I do have anti-Semitic views or racist views or transphobic views or xenophobic views or whatever, the government can't criminalize those.
I have the right to express those.
I can say whatever I want.
I also have the right under the First Amendment to praise and defend terrorism and terrorist organizations.
I have every right to say, I think Hamas is a noble institution, a noble group, because whenever anybody has blockaded and occupied for decades, they have the right at armed resistance.
I have the right to say, I think the Israelis are justified in eradicating all of Gaza.
I think they should kill every last man, woman, and children.
Even though it's genocide, I'm in favor of that.
I can say bomb Iran.
You can have whatever opinion you want in the United States, and you cannot be punished by the Trump administration.
Doing so, and yet that's exactly what they're doing here.
This statement goes on, and he says, if you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, which is of course exactly what's happening in Gaza at the hands of Israel, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are therefore not welcome here.
We expect every one of American colleges and universities to comply.
Thank you.
There is no evidence that this particular grad student has been engaged in any sort of criminal activity, hasn't been charged with a crime.
He hasn't blown anybody up.
He hasn't worn a suicide vest.
He hasn't physically attacked anybody.
He's been giving interviews.
He's been giving speeches.
He's been doing this sort of thing that activists do and have done it a long time.
Now, one of the things that's really alarming about what happened here is that when he was Detained by ICE. Nobody knew where he was taken.
ICE had not told anybody and would not tell anybody.
And I want to just stress one more time that this is somebody on American soil legally, not on a work visa, not on a student visa, as a permanent residence.
That's my status in Brazil.
I'm not a Brazilian citizen, but I have a permanent residence card, the equivalent of a green card.
And when you have that, it's an invitation by the government to...
Live your whole life, if you want, inside of that country.
And once you have that right, you have a lot of rights that go with it.
And I want to talk about that in one second, but there's a lot of people who absolutely mistakenly think, and we did a whole show on this once, I'm not going to repeat it, about the jurisprudence, but a lot of people who think that, oh, if you're not a U.S. citizen, you have no constitutional rights.
This is completely false.
The Bill of Rights is a document that restricts what the American government can do to anybody legally in the United States on American soil.
Otherwise, just think about what that would mean.
Imagine if you were right, if somebody thought that were right, that only U.S. citizens have constitutional rights.
What that would mean is that tomorrow, the FBI could go out and arrest every tourist inside the United States, every foreign tourist who has come to our country just for tourism.
And throw them into a dungeon for the next 20 years with no trial just on suspicion that they have harmful political views.
Suppose the U.S. government tomorrow imprisoned tens of thousands of tourists inside the United States and they said, oh, we think they have bad political views.
We don't think they're plotting any crime.
We don't think they're engaged in terrorism.
We just don't like their political views.
We think it's dangerous.
It would be best if they stay in prison for 20 years and we're not going to give them any trial.
Everybody would understand that that's unconstitutional, right?
But they're not citizens.
So we all understand instinctively why that's wrong.
The idea of the Bill of Rights is it restricts the actions of the U.S. government on U.S. soil.
And there's decades of jurisprudence over this, so there's no question that people who are in the United States legally, especially with green cards, have full constitutional protections not to be in prison without due process, not to have their property stolen without just compensation, not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment.
All of those things.
And there's no question that this guest in particular has those rights as well.
And yet I've heard so many people trying to support his deportation of trying to claim that the reason why it's justified is because of that.
Now, before I bring on our guest who has been covering this...
He's been doing a great job for Dropside News, which is the news site founded by my former colleagues and my friends, Ryan Graham and Jeremy Scahill and others.
It's been doing a great job covering this conflict.
I just want to show you a supporter of Israel put together what I think they consider to be kind of like a sinister dossier, trying to show that Mohammed Khalid is not just someone who speaks out, but as someone who actually engages in disruptive, terroristic acts.
That justify his deportation.
It was posted by somebody named Ethan Fishberger.
And Ethan Fishberger wrote, when you see people gnashing their teeth and reading their garments over the arrest and potential deportation of Mahmoud Khalid, one of the lead Hamas acolytes at Columbia University, show them this threat of his greatest hits.
And here was one of the videos that I guess they think makes him look...
Malignant and dangerous and like he's deserving of deportation summarily with no due process.
And honestly, before I watched it, I thought, oh, they must have him here like punching somebody or threatening to blow somebody up.
And instead, it's just a series of him engaged in very civil and tranquil, calm.
Dignified interviews and that's why he became a facilitator between the protesters and the administrators because of his diplomatic posture.
Just get a look, just similar, since we're talking about him, just take a little bit of a look at how he speaks, how he has been comporting himself and what his role has been.
Are you guys going to listen to the university and leave the encampment here?
Of course not.
The university is the one who should listen to us.
They should listen to their student body who are demanding to end their investment in the war that's happening in Palestine.
Our demands are clear.
Our demands are regarding the investment from the Israeli occupation, the companies that are profiting and contributing to the genocide of our people.
Again, the university, once again...
They are so stubborn in listening to their students.
They're treating this matter as a disciplinary matter.
They're not treating this as an anti-war movement, an anti-war movement that actually gathered thousands of students here, that actually sparked thousands of students across the United States.
How far are you all willing to go here on campus?
We're going to go as far as we need to, to pressure the university from...
This is up to the group, to the leadership of the group, to decide how far they will go.
But now it's clear that the students will remain here.
they will stay here until they achieve their demands.
Oh my god, frightening isn't it?
He saw them there planting bombs and actually he wasn't doing any of that.
He was exercising exactly the First Amendment rights that the Constitution was constructed to guarantee, and yet he has become the target of a really unprecedented and extremely dangerous Trump administration effort to deport him that is clearly, beyond this case, designed to send a signal to any would-be critic of Israel, to any would-be Person in the United States planning on exercising their rights to protest the U.S.-funded Israeli war in Gaza that if they do so they will be subject to having their lives destroyed.
Magnod Bozzi is an award-winning journalist who is based in New York, and he has a lot of experience.
As a reporter and an editor, he has been doing a great job covering the story for a variety of publications, including DropSite News, which, as I mentioned earlier, is something I hope you're following.
It was founded by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grimm and several other of my former colleagues and close friends.
They've been doing an outstanding job, and we are delighted to have them here.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Thank you so much for having me.
Sure.
So this is one of those stories that, I don't know, for me at least, would take a few days normally to process just because it's, on the one hand, kind of so shocking, even though it's not surprising and predictable.
But on the other hand, there's so many different implications to it.
But it just happened today, and I thought it was necessary to try and cover it in as much detail as we can.
Before we get into the substance, just right before we went on air, there was a...
Order issued by a federal court in New York by Judge Berman essentially enjoining any deportation.
Can you tell us what you know about that?
Yeah, so basically a New York judge has said that pending a ruling on the petition, the petitioner, which is Mahmoud Khalil, shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the court orders otherwise.
And just a few minutes ago before joining this call, I was talking to Amy Greer, Mahmoud Khalil's lawyer, and she told me, and I quote, this is the right decision and we are grateful the court has taken immediate action to protect Mahmoud's rights.
Unquote.
It's a step that his lawyer believes is in the right direction.
Now, of course, remember, so far, neither the Department of Homeland Security, nor ICE, nor the White House has provided any sort of evidence, even while posting online against him.
We've seen Donald Trump put up an Instagram post that But so
far, and...
I say this because I've been asking the DHS for comments.
I've been asking the ICE for comments.
So far, all that they've said is the sort of broad brush strokes that Mahmoud Khalil was...
ICE, for example, DHS, for example, alleged that Mahmoud Khalil led activities aligned with Hamas.
Now, they haven't specified what they mean by that.
And we know for a fact...
That there was a very interesting trend preceding Khalil's arrest by DHS officials.
For two days, for a 48-hour period, roughly 48-hour period prior to Khalil's arrest, there were pro-Israel groups and individuals, including...
Affiliates of Columbia University, including Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who were tweeting aggressively against Khalil, tagging the President of the United States, tagging Secretary of State Marco Rubio, tagging Attorney General Pam Bondi, and saying that Khalil should be deported, should be arrested and deported.
So there was a two-day campaign doing this.
on the third day, apologies for the balloons, it's just a video called "Suffered." - Go ahead, that was very joyous.
I thought it was on the screen, but you must be surrounded by balloons, but go ahead. - There was a two-day campaign smearing Mahmood Khalil Organized by pro-Israel protesters, including Colombia affiliates.
And on the third day, DHS kicked in and arrested Khalil.
So the question has to be asked, was DHS conducting an investigation of its own into Khalil, or were they just acting on the queue of these pro-Israel groups?
So just on the issue of the judicial order and where we are in things, just kind of putting on my lawyer hat, which is very old and musty and I try and leave in the closet and never put on, but I will just briefly.
Often what happens in a case like this is if the Trump administration is on the verge of deporting him, once he's deported, there's no more opportunity for the court to hear.
What might be valid arguments because now he's outside of the country and so oftentimes the court will say let's just preserve the status quo in order to have a hearing on it and so that kind of makes sense.
It's not necessarily a victory.
For him in terms of the merits but certainly it's much better than the alternative and it does probably seem to indicate on the part of the judge some view at least there's a valid basis for contesting this deportation because it's not usual for federal court to intervene this way.
Can you just tell me a little bit about The immigration history or background of Khalil, if you know, because getting a green card in the United States is extremely difficult.
You know, there's been a lot of focus on student visas and work visas.
A green card is in a whole different universe in terms of the difficulty and the importance of what it means in terms of your investment in the United States.
Credentials, academic credentials that are very strong.
He was a student, a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs at Columbia University.
He's got a wife, Noor, who is pregnant, eight months pregnant.
And he has been a green card holder for a while.
And his wife is an American citizen.
Now, an important part, because you mentioned his immigration history, When DHS officials came in on Saturday night, by the way, to a Columbia University residential building, and Columbia University so far still hasn't told us whether an arrest warrant was provided to the university.
Did the university know that DHS would be coming in if they didn't?
How did DHS access the inside of a Columbia University residential building?
And why has the university really not said anything specifically to Khalil's case?
When the DHS officials came in on Saturday night, they said, your student visa has been revoked.
Now, this is interesting because Khalil doesn't currently have a student visa since he's a lawful permanent resident.
He doesn't need one.
He doesn't need one.
Exactly.
So again, it raises questions of just how prepared these officials were in their paperwork, in their homework, into this investigation.
Was there even an investigation that took place before Khalil was seemingly summarily picked up?
And it raises questions as to on whose cue these officials are acting.
Now, the day after the arrest took place, I wrote to the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Homeland Security's response to me was very striking.
Please direct questions to the White House.
Now, DHS officials were the ones who carried out the arrest, right?
So why should the DHS ask us to refer questions to the White House?
Was the White House directly involved in supervising or directing this arrest?
Funnily enough, a few hours later, an official of the DHS, a DHS spokesperson, replied to the DHS's own comment.
On Twitter, I mean, our post about the DHS's comment saying that, no, you can reach out to me.
And then they gave us that statement that alleged that Khalil-led activities aligned with Hamas, again, without providing any corroborating or supplementing evidence beyond just that one broad claim.
Well, this is what I think is so disturbing, is this language.
Aligned with Hamas and this is something that has been plaguing American discourse especially on war and foreign policy for many decades now and it's such a transparent ploy yet it always kind of gets renewed efficacy in every new conflict.
People who were opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq technically were aligned with the interests of Saddam Hussein because Saddam Hussein didn't want his country Invaded, or those who said Sodom didn't have WMDs were aligned with the interests of Saddam Hussein.
People who opposed the war in the regime-change wars in Libya and Syria were aligned with Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.
This kind of language is essentially designed to say, and it very much reminds me of George Bush's post-911 notorious formulation, or we're with the terrorists, which is, look, Either you get on board and do your duty and support the Israeli war in Gaza and you cheer for it and you support it, or automatically you will be deemed to be on the side of Hamas because, of course, a ceasefire is in the interest of Hamas.
And therefore, if you're for a ceasefire or an end to the war, you're, quote-unquote, aligned with the interest of Hamas.
In this case, where they are alleging that they want to do something as draconian as deport him because he's, quote-unquote, aligned with the interest of Hamas or his protesters, Is there anything he did or said, according to the government, that goes beyond what I just described?
Look, I mean, the government has said absolutely nothing in terms of concrete evidence, right?
So let's take a look at the online campaign that was constructed against him and see if we get any clues there.
Now, you showed a clip a few minutes ago on your program.
That showed perfectly normal language by Mahmoud Khalil, speaking about the Gaza solidarity encampment on Colombia's campus last April, which inspired similar encampments in solidarity with Gaza across the world, not just across the United States.
Now, what was Khalil's role during that encampment?
Khalil was one of two student negotiators who were negotiating With the university administration on behalf of the protesters.
What was his role?
His role was to speak to the higher-ups in Colombia's administration.
Right at the top, there was President Minoush Shafiq.
There were others on the negotiating team.
And his role was to try and get some sort of consensus so that the protesters' demands may be met.
Of course, he was representing the protesters.
Now, that is where Mahmoud Khalil became a high-profile protester of sorts at Colombia.
It was him sort of taking the charge, fulfilling a responsibility to negotiate with the university.
The people who were negotiating with him Can speak to Khalil's conduct during those negotiations.
There are professors.
There is at least one dean at Columbia who is part of the negotiations.
There are others who are part of the negotiations.
Have they come out and spoken about Khalil's conduct?
Have they given any sort of statements?
There are some professors who've been speaking about it.
In fact, just a while ago, there were a bunch of professors of Columbia University, members of the faculty who held a press conference outside one of Columbia's buildings in defense and support of Khalil and demanding that he be released.
But what has Columbia University said about one of their own affiliates living in their And Colombia is only giving these sort of generic statements not even being able to manage to say the name Mahmood Khalil.
Yeah, I mean, I think that goes to the most important point here, which is obviously you have this impact, which is very significant, on this individual and his life and his family and his wife, who's eight months pregnant.
But to me, clearly the intention is to create a climate of fear for people who might in the future want to speak up against Israel or protest Israel, but also create a legal framework where they can just take people and throw them out of the country.
The minute they decide to speak against Israel.
By the way, you can speak against the United States all you want.
You just can't protest Israel.
Let me just ask on a personal note.
There was a time in the United States and much of the Western world, in fact, not all that long ago, when we had laws like the Defense of Marriage Act, where if you were in a same-sex relationship and you wanted to get married, Most countries had these laws that said, we won't recognize your marriage, and so a lot of times people would fall in love, gay couples, and they would be faced with the horror of having to live very far apart even though they were in love and wanted to share their lives because they couldn't live legally in the same country.
In this case, you have a person who's here on a green card, which you often get when you marry a U.S. citizen.
And an American citizen whose husband we're talking about here.
So if he were to be deported, this couple is basically facing the possibility with the wife eight months pregnant and her husband being deported without having been charged with any crime.
Is that essentially the situation that they're facing?
Yeah, I mean, I would say it's even worse than that because, I mean, look, we know...
There are countless examples around the world of just how bad things can get if someone who is at a late stage of their pregnancy is under undue stress, especially sudden high levels of stress.
When, say for example, for this period of, say, around 36 hours, when no one was being able to get in touch with Khalil, when they said initially that Khalil is in New Jersey, but then his lawyer said that he's not in the New Jersey facility.
But they don't know where he is.
And then the next morning we find out that he's in a Louisiana facility and the lawyer still wasn't being able to get in touch with him.
By the way, eventually the family, his wife, was able to get in touch with him.
And they had a call this morning where Khalil was in good spirits.
But the point is that, look, Mahmoud Khalil's wife today is under an extreme amount of stress.
For what?
Has there been due process followed in this investigation?
Do the US authorities have anything to show against Mahmoud Khalil that justifies the way they're framing that he's linked to Hamas or that he's aligned with Hamas, whatever that means?
Does aligned with Hamas even mean something legally?
So there are all these questions about how due process is clearly potentially being violated.
But there is a very real impact on the health of a woman who is eight months pregnant.
And I hope, I wish her the best of health.
And I hope that she delivers this baby healthy and both the health of the mother and the child remains healthy.
But the question is that the pressure, the stress that these U.S. authorities and Columbia University, by the way, With their silence and their relative complicity in not addressing the situation head-on, not even telling its community members what they've done or what they've not done about the situation, the impact that this is causing potentially to the woman's health cannot be understated.
Now, I'm not saying that anything's happened to her.
I hope that she remains in the best of health.
But why are we subjecting Someone, a family, through this ordeal without any proven evidence that has been submitted to the American people against Mahmoud Khalil.
Yeah, I mean, there's always a human dimension to this, and it's also just a very Kafkaesque kind of proceeding.
Things in secret, no charges, nobody even knows in what prison they're being kept.
Let me ask you the last question, because I really appreciate your time.
One of the things that I've focused on a lot over the last, say, year and a half since October 7th is just the utterly nauseating spectacle of having watched large parts of the American right, often with my support and, you know, I was very much on their side with this, protest a great deal of political censorship that came from various sectors of American life, often targeting right-wing speech.
And then the minute you kind of get With President Trump in office or other types of censorship since October 7th, even under Joe Biden, targeting of Israel critics, which has become the most common form of censorship, very few of them, not none, but very few of them, have been willing to speak out.
I was surprised that I saw a tweet from the, I believe, Senate Judiciary Committee, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, speaking up in defense of Khalil.
That actually did surprise me.
Have you heard from or are you aware of any significant statements either from Democratic Party leadership or Republican Party leadership or key activist groups on this issue?
I mean, look, the usual suspects on this front have been speaking, but you'd expect them to speak.
Rashida Tlaib has put out a statement in New York, the city from which Khalil was arrested.
NYC mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani has put out a strong statement demanding Khalil be released.
So there are the usual sort of progressive or pro-Palestine members of the Democratic Party that have spoken up.
But by and large, I mean, the statements from the leadership haven't really been—I mean, it's been what?
Even the ADL, which started as, or at least branded itself throughout the 20th century as a civil liberties organization, spoke out in favor of his deportation, which I think shows you just how far our country has gone when it comes to the willingness to sacrifice Americans' constitutional rights in defense of this foreign country.
I mean, look, the ADL after...
I was there in Washington, D.C. on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration.
The ADL... Put out a clarification for Elon Musk's gesture resembling a Nazi salute before Elon Musk put out a clarification defending his gesture.
So I think the ADL's credentials as how far they are in defense or rather against anti-Semitism.
Versus how much they act as a pro-Israel group have really been called into question, especially over the past year and a half.
And so to me, it's not extremely surprising that the ADL and other such groups have been railing against Khalil.
Even after he's been arrested, there are certain alumni associations at Columbia.
There's at least one Jewish alumni association that's been railing against him even after his arrest.
But mind you, even at Columbia, there are loads and loads of Jewish students, Jewish faculty, who have been speaking in defense of Khalil as well.
And now one of the things that certain sections of the media do is that they only Showcase the statements coming in from places like the ADL or Canary Mission and not showcase the statements coming in from, for example, from the Jewish Voice for Peace or the Faculty and Students for Justice in Palestine, which has lots of pro-Palestine professors and staff members.
People who are critical of Israel's conduct over the past year and a half.
And they have all spoken in defense of Mahmoud.
And today, for example, in New York City, there was a large protest attended by dozens and dozens of people.
There were free Mahmoud posters being held up in the crowd.
And it was surreal because I saw Mahmoud Khalil on the Columbia campus just as recently as Thursday.
He had iftar with his friends on Friday evening.
I know people who had iftar who broke fast with him during the holy month of Ramadan with Mahmoud on Friday.
And it feels surreal to see this person who I just met last week go from being flesh and blood in front of me at Columbia to a poster at a protest in New York.
And I think there are lots of people Who see how due process is potentially being violated across the board in the way Donald Trump is reacting to this, in the way DHS and ICE are reacting to this.
There are lots and lots of people who are raising their voices and asking that justice be done in the case of Mahmoud Khalil.
Yeah, and the issue of Israel-Palestine obviously is very polarizing.
People aren't going to change their views in a matter of a day or two.
But the issue in this case happens to be not Israel or Palestine, but the issue of free speech and whether Americans are going to sacrifice their basic rights of free assembly and petitioning their government and especially free speech.
In defense of this foreign country whose lobby seems to be coming stronger by the day.
All right.
Well, Magnat, I really appreciate the reporting that you've been doing.
I've been following it.
It's been really helpful.
Keep up the great work, and we're going to follow the story.
We'd love to have you back on.
Thanks so much.
Thank you so much for having me.
Have a good evening.
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The Europeans seem to be going completely and utterly insane, and I don't even mean that in an exaggerated way.
I just actually spent the last week or so in Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe.
As you know, I was in Moscow as well for those interviews, and I really can't express in a way that would overstate the case just how maniacal their war rhetoric has become, especially ever since that drama with President Zelensky and Donald Trump.
In the Oval Office, European elites acted as though it was one of the most despicable and horrific events, one of the world's worst atrocities they had ever seen.
But obviously, Donald Trump has been speaking quite substantively, and I believe this is one of the things that most quickly in the...
The earliest stages of Trump's 2016 campaign turned the establishment against him when he began questioning the viability of NATO. And specifically, why do we spend so much money to protect Western Europe when the idea originally was we would protect them from a Soviet Union that no longer exists and we spend huge amounts of money on their defense while they don't spend that much on their own defense and they enjoy all sorts of social programs that our citizens don't.
And so ever since Trump became much more aggressive, along with J.D. Vance and others, They no longer consider Europe to be the epicenter of the U.S. relationship.
And just to give you a sense for how long this has been going on, let me show you Trump in 2017 when he went as one of his first foreign trips.
This is March of May of 2017, rather.
He went to the NATO summit, and here is part of what he had to say.
I have been very, very direct.
With Secretary Stoltenberg and members of the Alliance in saying that NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations.
But 23 of the 28 member nations are still not paying what they should be paying and what they are supposed to be paying for their defense.
This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States, and many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years and not paying in those past years.
Over the last eight years, the United States spent more on defense than all other NATO countries combined.
If all NATO members had spent just 2% of their GDP on defense last year, We would have had another $119 billion for our collective defense and for the financing of additional NATO reserves.
All right.
I'm sure you've heard that before.
And the funniest part is you see there all these European leaders like Merkel back then, this was 2017, and Macron and David Cameron all standing there just kind of having to be chided.
Being uncomfortable, trying to giggle with one another.
But this has been a theme that I think Trump is absolutely right about for a long time now.
But in the first term, as we know, there were certain things that Trump wanted to do that he just didn't have the discipline for.
I don't think he had the know-how to do it.
He was surrounded by snakes who were trying to sabotage him.
Whereas this administration is a much different story.
And as a result...
There is now a really substantial movement that is picking up steam constantly.
It's a war mentality.
You see these European leaders who have been so meek and so...
Kind of irrelevant.
They've turned themselves into these lapdogs of the United States.
They like to talk tough, but they know that they can't accomplish anything on their own.
They don't intimidate anybody.
They just have the United States behind them.
And now for the first time, there's a possibility that they won't and they don't know what to do because on the one hand, they can't be left defenseless and want to build up a defense.
But on the other hand, their economics is such and their politics are such that they simply can't be doing so.
And hear from the Financial Times, which always has been a Neoliberal newspaper that encourages austerity and cuts to spending for the ordinary people.
You see the headline, EU abandons welfare for warfare.
Quote, Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state.
There is no way of defending the continent without cuts to social spending.
And this has long been part of European life.
This is part of the expectation of the European population.
30-hour work weeks, 35-hour work weeks, retirement at 62, paid family leave, all kinds of healthcare, one-month vacations, things that I'm not mocking, things that as Americans we often look at and think, oh, that's lazy, but you can really make a case that it actually is an important part of the quality of life, not to have our lives consumed with...
Running to work every single day from 8.30 in the morning until 7 o'clock at night and working on Saturday.
Having two weeks maximum per year for vacation.
No family time when your children are born.
You can see it both ways.
The American perspective is we want a strong capitalist society that produces innovation and creativity and we can't have workers constantly taking off.
And the European perspective is there's more to life than GDP. And I just want to...
Without taking a side, I recommend to you, I saw a speech once, maybe two years ago, two and a half years ago, when there were major riots in France, and I know that doesn't narrow it down since there are always street riots in France, but Macron was trying to increase the retirement age in Europe because one of the problems that European has is they've done a graphic one.
Their population is just aging.
Their fertility rates don't nearly match replacement.
They're just literally dying out.
As a population.
Their older population is getting older and dying and their younger population is not reproducing.
And like in the United States, it becomes difficult when you have fewer and fewer people paying into Social Security for huge numbers of elderly people who now need it.
This system stops working.
And it's part of why Europe has to import so many migrants into their country because their own citizens aren't having children and they need those.
People to come and be workers, but then it creates these resentments culturally that drive people into right-wing parties.
It's the cycle that's happening all throughout the democratic world.
But it's a financial issue above all else.
And when Macron wanted to increase the retirement age in France from 62 to 64, and he lacked the votes to do it because the French were rioting, there's a left-wing leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Who gave a speech, and you may not agree with it.
He was very vehemently opposed to the increase of their time and age from 62 to 64, 65. And instead of giving a kind of Bernie Sanders socialist, sluffling speech about the burdens of the worker and the laborer and how the billionaires are taking everything, there might have been a part of that too.
Instead, he made it very philosophical in a kind of French way.
And he talked about the importance in life of inaction.
Of being able to just wake up and do nothing.
Of sit around and reflect on things.
Look at nature.
Just be able to spend time with your grandchildren.
How this is a crucial, vital part of the value of life.
And when you have these people who work in blue collar jobs that are back breaking and physically demanding.
And obviously people who work in those jobs have a lower life expectancy.
And you're talking about not just now making them work until 62, but until 65. You're taking away a very important part of they've worked their entire lives and now they have these years at the end of their lives, who knows how many, maybe a decade, maybe a little bit more, of just freedom for the first time in their life.
They don't have to be enslaved to corporations working every day.
Some people want to work obviously, but a lot of people don't.
It was a very thoughtful, humanistic speech about what human life is about and the value of it.
But anyway, I digress, but I recommended that.
But this is the cultural expectation in Europe is they don't have the American system of employees being completely enslaved with very few rights to their employers.
And this takes a big social net, obviously.
It takes a lot of support from the state.
It takes redistribution through taxes.
And these European economies, by and large, are already strained for a lot of different reasons, including this demographic one.
And now European leaders are talking about somehow becoming a world superpower, military superpower, by spending the kinds of money that China or the United States is spending on their military, based on their view that with Trump they no longer can rely upon American protection.
And they're trying to beat their chest and talking about how they're going to protect Ukraine without the United States, knowing in reality they can't really do it.
How long are their citizens going to tolerate being told that they have to lose benefits that they've come to not only expect for decades, but that are a central part of the European identity in order to help Ukraine or pour money into European coffers?
But the way they're talking is very dangerous as well.
It is an intoxicated war fever.
You have Germany.
Talking about the need to nuclearize in order to confront Russia.
And if you think about 20th century history, the last thing as a human being on this planet you want is the Germans getting riled up again about fighting Russia.
That's when things really go wrong historically and that happens.
A person I consider one of the most interesting European politicians, Sarah Wagen, connects on our show, a lifelong leftist.
She's left the left over issues like social issues and wokeism that she thinks alienates the working class from left-wing parties, which it does, but also the war in Ukraine.
And one of the things she talked about was how insane it is for German leaders to be talking about sending German tanks.
Eastward toward the Russian border through Ukraine, given the history of World War I and World War II and what that does to Russian leaders.
But this is the kind of...
I can't explain.
I was listening to a lot of people.
I talked to a lot of people, and they mean it.
They sound like characters out of Dr. Strangelove.
Here from CNN, March 6, European leaders agree on defense spending surge at crucial U.S. summit on Ukraine.
Quote, all 27 leaders of Europe greenlit proposals that could free up billions of euros to boost defense spending, calling on the European Commission to find new ways to, quote, facilitate significant defense spending at national levels in all member states.
Leaders noted a proposal from Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that would provide countries with loans totaling up to 150 billion dollar euros.
By the way, this Ursula von der Leyen, to me, she is the living, breathing embodiment of everything rotted about the Western establishment.
Kind of like a Hillary Clinton figure in that way.
Nobody elected her.
She just has that air of, like, unelected, elite entitlement.
She goes around constantly talking about the need to fund the war in Ukraine, never talking about the needs of ordinary Europeans.
And you see these Europeans.
Have lost exactly the kind of faith and trust in the establishment as the British did when they enacted Brexit, as the Americans did when they enacted Trump, as Brazilians did when they enacted, when they voted for Bolsonaro, as the French did when they put Marine Le Pen's party first.
And they're going to play with fire, these EU elites, these Brussels elites, if they're going to talk about pouring all these money into European defense contractors to build up in order to protect Ukraine.
It's even worse than that.
Here from the New York Times, March 5th, France opened to discussing an extension of the nuclear deterrence, Macron says.
In a televised address, President Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe needed to deal with a retreating America and a bellicose Russia.
And there are videos of Macron on Sky News, in fact, saying the same thing in a way that really is kind of unhinged.
Now you have here the new German Chancellor.
From Reuters Germany's Mertz once, European nuclear weapons to boost the U.S. shield.
Quote, sharing nuclear weapons is an issue that we need to talk about.
We have to build, we have to become stronger together in nuclear deterrence, he said.
A day after agreeing the cornerstones of a coalition deal between his Conservative Party and the Social Democratic SPD Party.
Quote, we should talk with both countries, France and Britain, always.
Also from the perspective of supplementing the American nuclear shield, which we of course want to see maintained.
And now the AFD also believes that Germany needs to have nuclear weapons, which is unsurprising given that they're a very nationalist party.
Here in the New York Times today, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tosta is also talking about the need for Poland to now start seeking Nuclear weapons.
I just want to show you this one clip.
Because so much of Europe is run by these EU-Brussel bureaucrats who haven't really been elected.
They love to use all kinds of unhinged, warmongering rhetoric.
My least favorite example are the German Greens, who constantly talk about the need to There's just everything bad about Western liberalism and interventionism.
Here is Kaja Kalash.
She was the Prime Minister of Estonia.
Her husband has made many millions of dollars in Russia, even while she was calling for sanctions while she was the Prime Minister of Estonia.
And she left that position in scandal in order to become the Foreign Affairs Minister of the EU, whatever that is.
She's unelected.
And I want you to listen to...
What she said at a Hudson Institute conference last week about the reasons why Europe has to continue to confront Russia and fight Russia over Ukraine, even if the United States decides it's not going to.
I hear the statements by some American officials saying that, you know, you can't possibly beat Russia.
I mean, Russia is so much bigger and, you know, you need to give in to Russia because it's not...
Beatable, which is not true, by the way.
But then you're trying to signal to your Asian counterparts that if China is attacking them, then you are there, but...
China is so much bigger economy than Russia is, with so much bigger military than Russia is.
So if you're saying that you're not able to beat, that we collectively are not able to really pressure Russia so much that it would have an effect, then how do you say that you're able to take on China?
I mean, what world are these people living in?
We're going to take on Russia first?
And we're going to go defeat Russia, so that way we can show China we're going to take on China as well.
I think one of the most important things Trump has done is completely re-scrambled and upended this 80-year-old ossified system of international order that a lot of them like to call very self-glorifyingly the rules-based international order, which is anything but.
And instead, Start questioning the core pieties of it that have been so destructive for the world.
And if Europe wants to go off on its own and devote all of its resources to sending to European arms manufacturers and already their stock prices have been skyrocketing, they're obviously free to do that.
I'll be interested to see whether their citizenry actually supports that or starts voting for the Anti-establishment parties even more than they already are doing so.
But this entire system where we pour huge amounts of resources into defense contractors, where we constantly pursue new wars, proxy wars, wars of all kind, while the center of the country, the vast majority of the population, the industrialized base, continues to decay is a recipe for disaster.
And the Europeans are even worse than the American elites when it comes to a dependency on and an addiction to, and especially this sanctimonious belief in, the nobility of this order.
And they're finally faced with the reality that this order is crumbling because the whole time it depended not on them but on the United States.
And Trump is essentially saying this game is over.
And like any radical changes, you never know what outcomes could be produced.
It could be Bad outcomes.
But nothing is more dangerous than this escalating war between Russia and Ukraine.
We are very lucky that it hasn't escalated so far.
I believe it's primarily due to the restraint of Moscow.
But whatever Trump can do, and I believe he's doing a lot to try and end this conflict, the better.
But to watch the Europeans just go off into this maniacal, warmongering rage.
Would be alarming if not for the fact that they're living in a fairy tale land where their countries are nowhere near equipped in order to fulfill that chess beating that they're doing.
And if they try, they're going to be faced with a civilian uprising and a kind of contempt for their establishment far, far greater than the very serious one that they're already facing.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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