Source: In These Times
by Alberto Toscano
“‘Who has the right to have rights?’ This is the urgent question asked by Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate seized from his home on March 8, in the stirring open letter he dictated 10 days later from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement lock-up in Louisiana. In the letter, Khalil affirmed his identity as a Palestinian ’political prisoner’ as well as his solidarity with everyone who has been thrown into the punitive limbo of the Trump administration’s detention and deportation machine. Since the college encampments began, it’s been clear that people like Khalil — international students engaged in campus activism for Palestine — were to have no right to freedom of speech, assembly or movement that the U.S. government must respect and that they would become the target of increased state repression.” (04/03/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/mahmoud-khalil-repression-detention-democracy-gaza-encampments