RANSOM AND RETRIBUTION

Mahmoud Khalil, a participant in Columbia’s path-breaking Palestine solidarity encampment, has been abducted from his home, labeled a “national security threat,” detained and shipped to Louisiana pending deportation. This abduction and its justification distill four years of state responses to the movements to defend the Weelaunee forest and to end the genocide in Palestine. Under the new administration in particular, the Department of Justice has made terrorism charges against cartels and gangs, as well as RICO-charge recipients, their fast-tracked priority, with the stated goal of “total elimination.” Samidoun, the cartels, and the forest defenders are all grouped together as internal enemies of the Trump administration’s new American experiment.

Some may be inclined to ask: why Mahmoud? We believe the answer is self-evident. A protestor, a graduate student at an elite East Coast school, an immigrant, a Muslim with an Arab-sounding name: hurting Mahmoud Khalil is the perfect way for the new administration to appease its various component parts. He is both the spectre and its sacrifice. This is why the sympathetic media’s references to his legal status and his marriage to a pregnant citizen are so clearly toothless. They invoke the same nationalist, islamophobic common sense whose institutional backers – from racist college professors to the President – engineered Mahmoud’s detention.

The highest levels of the federal government ordered Mahmoud’s deportation at the request of far-right Zionist ‘watchdog’ organizations, and with the tacit support of Columbia’s administration. Regardless of its legality, its effects are clear: the Trump administration gets to leverage Bush-era Islamophobia without having to mention Islam outright, and invites self-styled Good American Citizens to help secure the nation against its enemies.

In the right-wing imagination, Mahmoud Khalil stands in for an urban, college-educated and tenuously-multiracial middle class, at odds with American foreign policy, loyal to foreign interests, and stubbornly opposed to the new administration’s attack on the last dregs of the Reconstruction state. This is the bizarre political moment in which the President can order a Palestinian radical’s detention one day and call Chuck Schumer a Palestinian the next. These acts seem ridiculous to us, but they’re clear to their addressees: on the one hand, vengeance for the humiliation of pulling out of Afghanistan and of watching privileged college students run around American campuses with scarves on their heads; on the other, an escalation of the attack on economically-unproductive sectors of higher education.

Meanwhile the Democrats “expect the Department of Justice to work within the confines of the law and that due process is guaranteed.” Their references to Mahmoud’s abduction employ the same racist caricatures as their Republican colleagues, while pausing to note Mahmoud as an exception: he was always well-behaved, he did everything right, he never wore a mask, his citizen wife is eight months pregnant… These appeals to right-wing common sense are a stupid compromise made under pressure, but they won’t reverse the crisis of legitimacy that lost the Democrats millions of votes in 2024.

While the Trump administration promises “many more of these arrests to come,” before we take them at their word or presume the existence of some clear-headed surgical plan, it’s worth considering whether they’ve stumbled into an extrajudicial measure they may not be ready to defend. The ICE agents who broke into Mahmoud’s apartment initially believed he had a student visa, plodding ahead and following orders regardless once they learned he had a green card. We suspect this is a blunder.

Time and time again we’ve watched attempts at repression punch above their weight and invite unforeseen, catastrophic consequences. As we write this, the District Attorney’s pursuit of RICO and domestic terror charges against Cop City protestors is languishing amidst a corruption scandal, while support for the arrestees and opposition to policing infrastructure has spread across the country. 2017’s inauguration-day mass arrests, the President’s bumbling attempt to suppress Portland’s 2020 insurgency by disappearing militants into unmarked vans, and Tom Homan’s premature efforts at made-for-TV arrests in Chicago all overextended the state’s legal apparatus. Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction could do the same.

Without our participation, the way forward is an unchecked downward spiral, as the Democrats’ retreats into the rule of law absolve them of responsibility for its suspension, and the right is emboldened to employ counterterror techniques against any political activity that challenges their aims. But these tactical blunders also provide opportunities for us to turn this administration’s mistakes into real crises, and to help a movement against this state and its rule of law emerge.

Lake Effect Collective

March 13, 2025