The Trump administration is sending a message to everyone in America: If you dare to disagree with the president, you will be punished.

That was clear when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents illegally arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalila lawful permanent resident and recent graduate student at New York’s Columbia Universityin retaliation for his advocacy for Palestinian human rights. The federal government separated Khalil from his wife, an American citizen, who is nine months pregnant, and shipped him from New York to New Jersey and then Louisiana. A judge recently ruledhis case should be heard in New Jersey.

The Constitution’s right to free speech covers everyone in the U.S., regardless of their citizenship status.

Mr. Khalil has never been accused, charged or convicted of any crime. He was ripped from his home, detained and threatened with deportation in retaliation for his political beliefs. His case represents a clear attempt by the Trump administration to silence dissent, intimidate our universities and attack our freedom.

Khalil is not the only target of this crackdown. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimshe’s revoked hundreds of visas of studentsand visitors for similar reasons.

If this administration is not reined in, the paper-thin legal theory it is using to justify detaining and deporting Mr. Khalil could be wielded to deport anyone who opposes Trump on any issue. That would embolden a president who is already laying siege to academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas and open debate. It would put everyone — citizen and noncitizen alike — in danger.

That’s why the New York Civil Liberties Union is representing Mr. Khalil in court, alongside our colleagues at the ACLU of New Jersey and the national ACLU (Mr. Khalil is also being represented by City University of New York’s CLEAR clinic, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Alina Das of Washington Square Legal Services, Van Der Hout LLP and Amy Greer of Dratel + Lewis).

Central to our case is the fact that the Constitution’s right to free speech covers everyone in the U.S., regardless of their citizenship status. The administration is trying to get around these protections by abusing a rarely used aspect of U.S. immigration law to punish protected speech.

Trump is relying on an obscure provision in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Actthat says the government may deport people if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe their presence in the country “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

The actions of the president and his team won’t curtail antisemitism, and doing so isn’t their real goal.

The provision was tested once before 30 years ago, when the U.S. government tried to deport a former assistant attorney general of Mexico, Mario Ruiz Massieu, who faced criminal charges in his home country. In that case, the late federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry — Trump’s older sister — ruled the law was unconstitutional.

But unlike Massieu, Mr. Khalil is not accused of any crime. Instead, the government claims that all advocacy on behalf of Palestine and Palestinian people would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences. This is untrue and unconstitutional.

The Trump administration claims falsely that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Antisemitism is a very real and serious problem — and some in Trump’s orbit, including billionaire Elon Muskhave trafficked in it. What the president and his team are doing won’t curtail antisemitism, and doing so isn’t their real goal.

Instead, the federal government is attempting to weaponize false charges of antisemitism to vastly expand presidential power and launch the most extreme threat to free speech since the Red Scare nearly 80 years ago. During the Cold War, lawmakers and government officials stoked fearof Russia and the “Red Menace” to justify a witch hunt and purge the federal government, and every aspect of American life, of so-called communists. They abused their power to paint anyone who disagreed with them as a communist or communist sympathizer. U.S. officials revoked passportsof prominent activists, denied dissidents’ visas and deported noncitizens whose ideas they didn’t like.

Sound familiar? In fact, the Immigration and Naturalization Act the administration is using to try to deport our clients is a relic of the Red Scare, and was used to deny entry to many European Jews. No matter what your views on Israel and Palestine are, none of us should be eager to return to that dark period in our nation’s history.

This Red Scare redux is playing out not just with individuals, but with universities across the country. Columbia University, where Mr. Khalil studied, recently capitulated to a slew of government demands including implementing a mask ban, giving dozens of campus officers new arrest powers and placing two departments under “academic receivership.” In exchange for its surrender of academic freedom, all Columbia got was the mere possibility that the Trump administration would restore $400 million in federal funding.

Columbia was just the first target. Harvardand Princetonare now in danger of similar treatment. This is a full-scale attack on the system of free inquiry, discussion and debate that is at the core of higher education, which is so crucial to the strength of our democracy.

None of us should want our country to be a place where our government deports people for their beliefs, whether on foreign policy or anything else. No one, not even the president, has the power to deport someone for saying something the government doesn’t like.

The Trump administration has put Mr. Khalil and the people he loves through immense pain, and he should be freed as soon as possible. Everyone who believes in democracy should stand up and speak out against this power grab and demand freedom for Mr. Khalil and too many others wrongfully abducted and detained in Trump’s deportation machine.

Donna Lieberman

Donna Lieberman is executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

When it comes to commerce secretaries, it seems fair to say that “no news is good news.” By which I mean: If a president’s commerce secretary is constantly named in headlines — in particular, eyebrow-raising headlines — that’s almost never positive for the administration.

President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnickis a prime example, as he seems incapable of avoiding controversy and mockery.

He was widely denounced for suggesting recently that only “fraudsters” would worry about missing a Social Security check. And on Wednesday, he gave a bizarre diatribe on Fox News that was intended to tout Trump’s tariffs on nations around the world (which have sent the stock market reeling). Lutnick decried the fact that Europe won’t take imports of certain meats from America, something he chalked up in part to jealousy:

Watch the clip here:

As writer Charlie Nash explained in an article for Mediaitethere are some pretty justifiable reasons why European countries have rejected many American meats. He noted the E.U.’s ban on meat from animals treated with hormones and added:

So Lutnick seems to think the growth hormones used by some American farmers are making our cows big, strong and desirable, which I suppose may provide a boost of confidence to any cows that happened to have caught his Fox News appearance. But even the American Cancer Society says there isn’t consensus on the human health risks posed by the hormones, noting:

As for chlorinated chicken, it’s widely opposed in the United Kingdom and has remained a worrisome issue among its residents for years, with critics claiming the use of chlorine to wash chickens allows American sellers to, as The New York Times put it“let hygiene slide during feeding, growing, and slaughtering, and then make up for lapses at the end with a good disinfectant.”

Trump, nonetheless, is trying to make the U.K. accept chlorinated chicken as a condition for tariff relief, but a spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told The Independent on Thursday that the country’s position on the matter is “unchanged.”

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”

Mother Dhillon, The Far-right Lawyer Nominated by”https://www.BLN.com/top-stories/latest/trump-smithsonian-institute-museum-library-services-rcna199331″ target=”_blank”>Donald Trump to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, was confirmed by the Senate on a 52-45 vote Thursday. The confirmation elevates a MAGA loyalist who has sought to undermine many Americans’ civil rights into the top post responsible for upholding them.

Dhillon is a key cog in conservatives’ vision for “lawfare” — that is, weaponization of the law against political opponents. She co-chaired the group Lawyers for Trump, and she and her law firm have arguably been as rabid as anyonein attacking Americans’ voting rights and pushing bogus claims that Trump was cheated out of victory in the 2020 presidential election.

In late 2022, Dhillon launched a failed insurgent bidto oust Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee — an effort that was supported by far-right activist Charlie Kirk, who has openly railed against the Civil Rights Actwhich prohibits discrimination against marginalized groups. Tellingly, Dhillon’s main argument in that race was that the GOP needed to invest in a larger army of lawyers to help conservatives carry out their lawfare dreams and restrict Americans’ access to the ballot. And Dhillon is also known to peddle the conservative movement’s “anti-woke” propagandawhich seeks to marginalize racial and ethnic minorities and demonize LGBTQ people.

She is, in a variety of ways, an enemy of civil rights. And if you’ve been watching Trump’s other selections for top government postsmost of whom are antagonistic to the goals of the agencies they now lead, the reason Dhillon was chosen seems clear: to pervert the DOJ’s civil rights division and ensure it suits Trump’s illiberal ambitions.

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”