State violence and the university
On Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia, and "ethnostate autocrats"
Over the weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, one of the lead negotiators between the university administration and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring. The Department of Homeland Security accused him, baselessly, of leading “activities aligned to Hamas.” Khalil, whose wife is eight months pregnant, has a green card and is a legal permanent resident of the United States.
Khalil’s arrest came just after Columbia published an updated protocol for cooperating with ICE, allowing for “exigent circumstances” in which agents may enter campus areas without a warrant, even as the main campus remains closed to the public. But as of this writing, the university has stayed mum on the news that its own alumnus has become one of the Trump administration’s first political prisoners. Interim Columbia President Katrina Armstrong wrote to the community on Monday that she can “understand the distress that many of you are feeling about the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.” Khalil, who is being held at an ICE facility in Louisiana, isn’t mentioned once in the statement, which is titled “Leading Through This Challenging Time.”
Also on Monday, a federal judge ordered that Khalil not be removed from the United States while his petition against the state is pending. He has not yet been charged with any crime. Meanwhile, over three million people have participated in a letter-writing campaign calling for Khalil’s immediate release, and a crowdfund for his legal fees has raised over three hundred thousand dollars.
Last summer, in his essay “The Fortress University,” Erik Baker warned that private American universities like Columbia have come to depend on state violence, policing both students and residents of neighboring communities, to maintain operating models that increasingly focus on capital accumulation. Leaders at these institutions, Baker wrote, “have found themselves acting on occasion like ethnostate autocrats, clamping down on dissent while striving to eliminate ‘security threats’ from dispossessed racialized communities over whom they exert significant power but to whom they are not in any way accountable.” It is no coincidence, then, that the new Trump administration’s “first arrest of many to come,” as the president himself called it, took place in university-owned housing. The fortress university is a microcosm of the kind of society that right-wing authoritarians the world over are striving to create.