Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was one of the most visible leaders of the student protests last year against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. He has a green card, and he’s married to a US citizen who’s eight months pregnant. Over the weekend, he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and spirited to a detention facility a thousand miles away in Louisiana. A judge has temporarily blocked his removal from the United States pending further legal review, but the Trump administration is adamant that he should be deported.

Amazingly, no one is even pretending that Khalil is being targeted for any reason other than the politics of the protests he participated in. A particularly revealing report on this ran in Bari Weiss’s magazine, the Free Press. Weiss has spent her adult life smearing critics of Israel as antisemites, and since October 7 the Free Press has primarily served as an outlet for pro-Israel propaganda, so perhaps it’s not surprising that they were able to snag a remarkably frank interview with an anonymous White House official. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” the official told them. Rather, it’s that he was “spreading anti-Semitism and mobilizing support for Hamas” through the political content of his protests, and that this is a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”

Let that sink in. Someone who went through proper channels to establish proper legal residency in the United States, who’s married to a citizen and will very soon be the father of another citizen, has been arrested by a federal law-enforcement agency because of his role in political protests the president dislikes.