On March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born green card holder and Columbia University graduate student, was arrested at his New York apartment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

The arrest was linked to Khalil’s involvement in pro-Palestinian student protests at Columbia University last spring. Now facing deportation, the Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent is being held in a detention center in Louisiana. Both President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have indicated that more arrests are forthcoming.

This latest attack on free speech by the Trump administration violates a bedrock principle of this republic, namely that the government cannot display favoritism in regulating expression. It should also spur universities to reconsider their recent clampdown on students’ ability to demonstrate.

The exact charges against Khalil remain unclear. The Department of Homeland Security has stated only that he led activities “aligned” with Hamas but has not provided further details or charged him with a crime. The arrest is in support of a recent executive order aimed at combating antisemitism. In a fact sheet accompanying the order, Trump warned that “resident aliens” involved in “pro-jihadist” protests and “Hamas sympathizers” would face visa cancellation and deportation.

Senior State Department officials told Axios that the agency is using artificial intelligence tools to scrutinize the social media accounts of student visa holders to see if they expressed sympathy with Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. Keep in mind, however, that “expressing sympathy” is constitutionally protected speech as long as it doesn’t cross into illegal activity or conduct. As abhorrent as it is, applauding the Oct. 7 attacks is free speech.

But all this may not matter, as the government relies on a provision in our immigration law granting the secretary of state the authority to deport immigrants whose presence is believed to present “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” Rubio therefore claims that this case is not about free speech, but rather about his authority to deny visa applicants (or kick them out once they are in) for virtually any reason. In other words, adverse policy consequences are whatever Rubio says they are. Could a visa holder refusing to refer to the Gulf of America face a similar fate as Khalil?

Ultimately, the courts will have to weigh in on the burden of proof that the government will need to meet before it can deport Khalil and if it was met in this case. For now, it is an area of law that does not seem to be completely settled.

But what is clear is that the immigration authorities’ actions are a scary example of viewpoint discrimination. While Khalil’s lawyers are fighting for his release, student visa holders who openly support Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, white supremacist violence or North Korea’s regime, have nothing to fear from the Trump administration. But if you spoke out on social media against the bombing of civilians in Gaza and did not mince your words, you had better start to delete your accounts.

And even if Rubio is correct in claiming that he can yank residency permits for any reason, he is still dead wrong in stating this is not a free speech issue. Viewpoint neutrality — the principle that the government cannot favor one viewpoint over another — is important, not only to protect the speaker from censorship but also to safeguard the rights of the listeners. We all stand to lose if the unique dissenting perspectives from noncitizens are purged from public discourse, as the Trump administration attempts to do here. Our free speech tradition is based on a firm belief that those in power do not get to be the gatekeeper of the marketplace of ideas. Whether these ideas come from visa holders or citizens should not matter.

This attempt to intimidate nonresidents into silence is the latest step in a long process of vilifying the pro-Palestinian student movement. For example, in response to the protests, universities across the country tightened their demonstration policies. At my institution, Loyola University, students must now register protests three days in advance, demonstrate only within a designated free speech zone and adhere to strict time restrictions — 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.— and cannot do so if another group has booked the space or during certain university events. In doing so, the university more or less reinstated a policy it had withdrawn in 2016 following student and faculty objections.

There certainly have been troubling instances of pro-Palestinian activists engaging in harassment of or violence against Jewish students. This behavior is not protected, but existing policies allow universities to discipline such actions without infringing on the speech rights of peaceful protesters. By tightening demonstration policies, university administrators contributed to a discourse that has framed the pro-Palestinian protest as an existential threat to the well-being and safety of society at large and have, in effect, played into the hands of the current administration.

In light of recent events, it’s time for universities to rethink their approach and to allow students to protest against these injustices in a free and unfettered way. Students on visas are already under threat from the State Department for exercising their free speech rights. They shouldn’t have to worry about university administrators doing the same.

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Bastiaan Vanacker is an associate professor at the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches media law and ethics. A native of Belgium and a former student visa and green card holder, he became a U.S. citizen in 2017. Opinions expressed here are his own.

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