Sometimes things are straightforward: the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate who was involved in the pro-Palestine protests on the school’s campus, is an affront to freedom of speech. Regardless of what you think about Israel, Palestine, or the protests at Columbia, if you regard the First Amendment of the United States Constitution as worth protecting, you must oppose the Trump Administration’s attempt to silence speech through repressive government action. This is obvious enough that observers galaxies apart from one another have questioned how Khalil’s arrest could possibly align with the First Amendment. Khalil was not in the United States on a student visa but, rather, was a green-card holder, married to an American citizen, and a lawful resident. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Bill of Rights extends to all lawful residents of the United States.

On Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s personal X account, he wrote, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” (The post contained a link to an Associated Press article about Khalil’s arrest.) Rubio did not say that Khalil had been detained for planning or carrying out violent acts or materially assisting terrorist organizations; as of this writing, Khalil has not been charged with a crime. And Rubio did not specify what being a “Hamas supporter” entailed. Does it simply mean helping to organize a group of pro-Palestine students at Columbia, as Khalil is known to have done? Or does it require what is sometimes called material support—i.e., sending money or providing services to Hamas itself—which no official, to date, has accused Khalil of? Meanwhile, the White House X account indulged in some glib trolling, posting the words “SHALOM, MAHMOUD” along with a photograph of Khalil above a caption that claimed he was leading “activities aligned to Hamas.” This was, if anything, even vaguer than Rubio’s assertion. What does “activities aligned to Hamas” actually mean?

Trump likes to pay lip service to free expression, but the case of Mahmoud Khalil is yet another example of his Administration’s repressive and casually dismissive attitude toward free speech. Through only fifty-two days in office, the President has already threatened protesters, barred news outlets from covering White House events, and gone after law firms that he believes have attacked him unfairly in the past. In a post on Truth Social, he wrote, “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.” On Tuesday, Trump, standing in front of a Cybertruck with Elon Musk, said of Khalil and other protesters who might be deported in the future, “I think we ought to get them all out of the country. They’re troublemakers, they’re agitators, they don’t love our country.” He then said, “I heard his statements, too—they were plenty bad.” Trump, like Rubio, did not detail any crime that had been committed but, rather, focussed on “statements.” For decades, the bedrock of First Amendment discourse in this country was the belief that we should especially protect speech that we do not like. Civil-liberties organizations have defended neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan on the basis that, unless there is free speech for the most contemptible members of society, there cannot be free speech for all. In fact, much of the reputation of organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union rests on their willingness to defend offensive speech on First Amendment grounds. Even speech allegedly supporting terrorism should be allowed not only under the First Amendment but as part of the more general—and arguably more important—ethos that this is a free country, where you can say what you want.

In the past decade, some liberals and progressives have ignored or even worked to subvert free-speech norms, a matter that has been extensively covered in the press. The A.C.L.U. itself went through a painful period of well-publicized internal debates about whether the organization would continue to defend people who had engaged in hate speech. I have been extremely critical of the censorious streak that sometimes emerges among the left, especially within élite spaces, such as Ivy League colleges. The suppression of information and dissenting opinions during the pandemic, and the Biden Administration’s alleged collusion with social-media companies to take down “misinformation,” was a dark moment in this country, one that quietly fuelled the anti-establishment backlash that helped put Trump back in the White House. I am a free-speech absolutist, and I offered those criticisms on principle, not because, down the line, the logic of cancel culture could be flipped back on the left. But we have clearly slid past that imagined backlash to an even more dangerous place for civil liberties. Anyone who was hoping that the Trump Administration would loosen the strictures of “wokeness” and bring us into a relatively freer speech era can officially chalk themselves up as a fool.

The State Department, equipped with A.I. tools that scan the social-media posts of foreign students, has begun a deportation program for anyone flagged by those tools for posts that equate, in the Administration’s view, with supporting Hamas. The surveillance state that we have all helped build with our thousands of social-media posts during the past fifteen years is now an ostensibly efficient but highly fallible machine, one that seems unlikely to be held accountable for its mistakes. On Monday, the “Free Press” quoted a White House official who said that Khalil’s case would be used as a “blueprint” to investigate other students. The same official said that the allegation against Khalil did not involve the breaking of any laws; rather, it was the threat that he posed to the “foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.” Under a seldom-used provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act, “an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”

That clause, which dates to 1952, originally targeted Jewish immigrants suspected of being Soviet spies. This week, Rubio explained that green-card holders like Khalil should be subject to deportation because they had once been student-visa holders, and, if they were now expressing views that would’ve prompted the revocation of those visas, then their green cards should be revoked. This baffling rationalization ignores the entire point of the process by which visa holders become permanent residents and, often, citizens (not to mention the existence of time). Using Rubio’s logic, if a woman came to the United States in 1955 on a student visa, then had a child on American soil whom she raised to revere, say, the Symbionese Liberation Army, would the child then be deportable, because the original thought crime took place when his mother was on a student visa?

As a rule, I am skeptical of claims that the Trump Administration is playing 4-D chess, but the use of this provision to label student protesters a threat to “foreign policy and national security interests” is such an egregious affront to the First Amendment that it feels almost intentionally unconstitutional. And it is worth remembering that Trump’s record when it comes to flagrant constitutional violations is hardly stellar. The Muslim ban he passed on his eighth day in office in 2021 was immediately challenged and galvanized the legal resistance to his Administration, while simultaneously spurring millions of dollars in donations to the A.C.L.U. His recent executive order banning birthright citizenship has also been challenged in the courts, where it is expected to die.

The good news, amid all the bad, is that many Americans, when asked to define the country’s values, will start with the First Amendment. The right to say what you want, regardless of how popular or unpopular it might be, has been so deeply drilled into the country’s political consciousness that even a pro-Palestinian student protester at an Ivy League school in New York City can capture the sympathies of people who might not agree with anything he says and might prefer that he leave the country, albeit on different terms. On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted a statement about the Khalil case that started with a reprimand: “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports, and have made my criticism of the antisemitic actions at Columbia loudly known.” But, despite this almost perfunctory dressing down, Schumer still concluded that if the Trump Administration “cannot prove he has violated any criminal law to justify taking this severe action and is doing it for the opinions he has expressed, then that is wrong, they are violating the First Amendment protections we all enjoy and should drop their wrongheaded action.”