Top Democratic officials spent the better part of the last decade warning that Donald Trump must not become president, because he would become a dictator, act like a dangerous authoritarian, and be Adolf Hitler reincarnate. Now, as outrage builds over Trump’s attempt to strip a permanent resident of his green card and unlawfully deport of him over his antiwar activism, many Democratic leaders have either been silent or offered only the weakest of objections.

It’s fair to say that the overall Democratic response so far to what has roundly and correctly been called the most serious assault on the First Amendment in years has been a mixed bag. The case is the exact kind of authoritarian overreach that high-ranking Democratic officials have claimed to be fighting the last eight years.

On Saturday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the Columbia University student protests against the war in Gaza who is a permanent resident and whose US citizen wife is eight months pregnant. They then spirited him a thousand miles away to a scandal-ridden detention facility in Louisiana, while Trump officials announced they had summarily revoked his green card — something government officials can’t actually do — and were getting ready to deport him. The administration has not only not shown evidence he’s committed any crime to justify this, they are being quite explicit that he hasn’t committed one, but that he has simply been targeted because of his political views.

It’s not that all Democrats have been MIA on the matter. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s official Twitter/X account tweeted out “Free Mahmoud Khalil” on Monday, the same day that New York attorney general Letitia James said she was “extremely concerned” about his arrest and was keeping an eye on it. Just yesterday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) put out a statement straightforwardly defending Khalil’s rights, hitting Trump on his hypocrisy here, and explaining why his targeting of Khalil is a threat to all Americans’ basic civil liberties.

“Once a citizen or a resident of America can be locked away with no charges against them simply because they protested, there is no going back for America,” Murphy said. “Even if you disagree with Khalil’s views, this practice should cross the line for you.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, condemned it in similarly stark terms. “We cannot allow this nation to slide into a system of presidential authoritarianism, where people are seized at their homes, arrested, and detained simply for expressing disfavored political viewpoints,” he said. “The detention of Mahmoud Khalil is ripped straight from the authoritarian playbook.”

But most high-ranking Democrats couldn’t muster anything like this. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Democratic leader in the Senate and one of two senators from New York, put out a mealymouthed statement condemning Khalil and justifying some kind of punishment against him, stating that he “abhor[s] many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports,” and that he had “encouraged [Columbia] to be much more robust” in cracking down on protests. The statement of Hakeem Jeffries, another New York Democrat and the party’s leader in the House, similarly opened by advising that “to the extent his actions . . . created an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students and others, there is a serious university disciplinary process that can handle the matter.”

In fact, New York, a solid blue state and Khalil’s home, has generally been a bleak landscape for Democratic officials willing to robustly defend free speech. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, whose district Khalil lives in, didn’t say anything for days, eventually only commenting that he “expect[s] the Department of Justice to work within the confines of the law and that due process is guaranteed.”

“Did he break the law? Not break the law? Or is it just political punishment? I don’t know that answer right now,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said.

“If he has a gun, he needs to go,” said New York City mayor Eric Adams. (It was unclear what he was referring to.) Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who is currently the front-runner for Adams’s position, simply dodged the question.

In equivocating themselves to death, these Democrats have somehow ended up with less political clarity than, of all people, Ann Coulter, who reacted to Khalil’s detention by writing simply: “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?”

While thirty New York elected officials signed on to a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding Khalil’s release, they were made up largely of progressives. Likewise, only fourteen House members signed on to a similar congressional letter, again, most of them members of the Squad and other progressives.

It is encouraging that there are Democratic officials with prominent voices and in positions of power who are speaking out on Khalil’s behalf and calling this what it is: a chilling and dangerous attack on free speech that threatens everyone’s rights, not just those of immigrants. But the overall Democratic response to something that is so clearly an overstep is still lacking — and may be another sign of the growing misalignment between rank-and-file Democrats and their political leadership.