The Media Should Be All Over These Unlawful Deportations

On March 8, immigration officers went to the home of a young Palestinian-American man legally residing in this country. They pulled him from his university residence, separated him from his wife, who is eight months pregnant, and threw him in jail. They did so, explicitly, because he led protests at Columbia University against the U.S. government’s support of Israel.

Mahmoud Khalil, who has a green card and is married to a U.S. citizen, has not been charged with a crime.

The U.S. government has said he has not committed a crime. They claim that because he spoke out against the actions of the United States—speech that is constitutionally protected—they intended to revoke his green card and deport him.

President Trump declared Khalil “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and threatened other demonstrators.

This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Khalil’s arrest would be the first of many, based solely on the government’s assertions of terrorist sympathies. “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

This should be the easiest of cases for a media establishment that loves to cast itself as the defender of civil liberties, the bastion of free and diverse speech in America. Every reporter, editor, producer, and on-air personality should be writing and speaking with outrage over someone being illegally detained merely for what he believes.

They should be howling for his release with the fury of the righteous, challenging the Trump administration’s talking points and rationale for deporting a legal immigrant to this country. There should be an urgency to this coverage appropriate to a national crisis.

So why isn’t there one? Why is this case being covered primarily by court reporters and local journalists, instead of being the subject of every single New York Times op-ed column? Why aren’t TV panels talking about this and only this? Why isn’t every radio show guest a civil liberties expert explaining why this is an outrage and what can be done about it?

For the past 40 years the Republican Party demonized any reporter or news organization covering it with a critical eye. “The liberal media” was as much an opposition party as the Democrats, and any wrongdoing by any Republican that came to light could be excused by accusing the ones who reported it as biased.

Fox News built its massive audience in large part as a response to an idea they promoted: Every other news organization is lying to you. We’re the only ones who are telling you the truth.

This anti-press sentiment ramped up in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when reporters covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were accused by GOP reps of insufficient patriotism, hatred for the military, and in some cases outright treason.

Right-wing pundits fantasized about murdering reporters in their newsrooms. Conservative organizations sold—and still sell—T-shirts that read: Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required. The George W. Bush administration even allowed a fake reporter in press conferences to ask favorable questions of GOP politicians.

Reporters who are women and/or people of color are even likelier than other reporters to be targets of Republican ire. In 2012, Republican delegates threw peanuts at a Black journalist and called her an animal who belonged in a zoo.

When Trump began his first campaign in 2015, he turned up the volume on those attacks, making them from the stage and then, after the election, as the sitting president. He threw reporters who challenged him out of routine briefings on live feeds, and called them out by name on social media so his followers would harass and dox them. He made it clear he saw them as enemies, no matter how earnestly they courted his favor.

Speakers, including Trump, regularly encouraged the mobs at his rallies to turn and shout insults at reporters who were penned up by metal barriers during the events. During his second campaign, Trump himself made vile comments about how he wouldn’t “mind so much” if reporters were shot, and that he could use them as human shields against an assassination.

So it’s no surprise that shortly before Trump’s second inauguration media companies went out of their way to curry his favor. But no matter how much money news organizations and their ownership poured into his campaign, or how overtly they signaled their obedience to him, Trump kept on the attack against their employees.

The response to Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest says clearly that this reign of terror served its intended purpose. News stories repeated Trump administration talking points, alluded to a “new turn” in an ongoing “immigration crackdown” and conflated Khalil’s legal immigration status with border security.

Trump has promised more arrests, however illegal, for anyone accused of any speech they deem inappropriate. Last weekend the administration kidnapped hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants and, defying a court order not to remove them from the United States, flew them to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned.

A Rhode Island doctor with a valid visa was similarly expelled without a hearing, her permission to enter the U.S. revoked, also in defiance of a court order.

Reporters and editors clearly see their own futures predicted in these crimes. The mere existence of subversive speech is cause for swift, violent retribution. They are doing what they’re doing in order to terrorize people into compliance and collaboration and silence, and it’s working.

The danger journalists face for reporting critically on the Trump administration, on ICE and law enforcement in general, is real. But journalism’s mission in times like these outweighs all risk, or should. It should overcome all reservations and stand against unchecked government power.

As a journalism student 30 years ago, I was told great tales of Edward R. Murrow on the rooftops of London, Martha Gellhorn among the guerillas of Spain, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pulling a thread of corruption to its inevitable end. Journalism’s mythology is based on an idea of righteous, raucous free speech, the kind that brings kings and tyrants to their knees.

Journalism is meant to amplify the voices of those who need to be heard. The Trump administration has a megaphone with which to shout its every monstrous, bigoted pronouncement. Against that, Mahmoud Khalil had only his own words, and for them he’s been silenced, thrown in jail, disappeared, and lied about.

That isn’t a complicated issue. It’s not a difficult choice. And it’s not an abstraction we can’t afford. It’s a real living breathing person shoved in a deep dark hole because the American government doesn’t like what he says.

Journalists should lead the fight to free him, whether or not they’re afraid of ending up in jail beside him.