On March 8, the Department of Homeland Security forcefully disappeared Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student who was a prominent figure in Columbia’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment and their movement for divestment from Zionist apartheid.
DHS came to Khalil’s apartment building, which is owned by Columbia University, and forced themselves into his home. They arrested Khalil and threatened to arrest his wife when she asked who they were. DHS arrested Khalil by claiming his “student visa” had been “revoked.” When Khalil stated that he was not in the U.S. on a student visa but was in fact a permanent legal resident, DHS officers said they had “revoked that too.”
Khalil was taken by DHS and for over a day his whereabouts were unknown. We now know Khalil had been taken across the country to a detention facility in Louisiana.
Much has happened in the weeks since Khalil was detained. Tens of thousands across the country are protesting in support of Khalil, demanding his immediate release. Lawsuits have been filed against Columbia University, alleging that it illegally provided the government with students' personal records. Activists supporting Palestine nationwide have been targeted by their affiliated universities: Yale suspended Helyeh Doutaghi for pro-Palestine activism, and Georgetown researcher Badar Khan Suri — whose wife is a Palestinian activist — has been detained by DHS without charges. Both Doutaghi and Suri were subjected to Zionist smear campaigns before their suspension and detention.
It would be easy to place the blame for this dramatic escalation of suppression of rights only on the fascist Trump administration, but that would be a mistake. In reality, it was liberal university administrators that made the fascist actions being carried out by the Trump administration possible in the first place. When students across the country demanded their universities divest from Zionist apartheid and genocide — a fight that has been gaining momentum for over a year now — the response from universities was to scapegoat and brutalize their own students.
This was on full display in December of 2023, when university presidents like Claudine Gay and Minouche Shafik spinelessly presented themselves in front of Congress, giving long obtuse answers to simple questions at best, or at worst, actively promising to suppress student activism. All done in a desperate appeal to keep megadonors and protect their endowments. A few months later, when students at over 100 universities proudly established Palestine Solidarity Encampments, liberal university administrators responded by calling police officers to beat, brutalize and arrest us.
The world watched the brutality with which students were met — whether at Hind’s Hall where the NYPD terrorized students for hours, at the UCLA encampment where Zionists and police simultaneously attacked students, or here at UNM where the brutality of New Mexico State Police left students with broken ribs, concussions and slit wrists.
As student repression continues to escalate — reaching the point of forced disappearances — university administrators reveal themselves as enthusiastic collaborators with the fascist administration’s state violence and suppression of students rights. Just as UNMSJP writes this letter, Columbia University has announced an agreement with the Trump administration to restore its $400 million in federal funding. In return, Columbia has agreed to ban masks at protests, hire dozens of new campus police officers authorized to arrest students, hire a new Vice Provost to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies, and change its admission procedures to ensure “institutional neutrality” as the Trump administration has defined it.
If the actions of these liberal university administrators have not already made their collaboration with fascism clear, recent developments at UNM leave no doubt. On March 3, the Interim Dean of the Honors College, Leslie Donovan, sent an email to Honors College students and faculty that conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism, accusing students of writing “antisemitic messages” around the Honors College. In truth, students were exercising their right to free speech by criticizing the university’s support for apartheid Israel and genocidal Zionism.
Most disturbingly, Donovan’s email encourages students to turn on one another, to report one another, and turn each other into the university administration. This is a shameful attempt to manipulate students into policing each other, outsourcing the labor of enforcing authoritarian, anti-free speech policies onto students. Donovan’s email essentially deputizes students, attempting to turn us into an internal surveillance force and sowing fear and paranoia to fracture student solidarity.
Students must resist these attempts to divide and conquer us, and we must continue to be the vanguard for radical politics, refusing to capitulate fascism, spineless liberalism, and genocidal Zionism.
“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”
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- Comandante Che Guevara
UNM Students for Justice in Palestine
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