It should go without saying, but America does not need more Hamas sympathizers.
Yet this simple truth seems to confound a wide variety of commentators across the political spectrum. This week, the White House announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be deporting an apparently green card-holding Columbia University graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil came to the United States after a stint at the Hamas front United Nations Relief and Works Agency, to study at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. There, he quickly became a leader of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group, a group that repeatedly and openly sympathized with Hamas after the Oct. 7 massacres in Israel. He acted as a spokesman for the takeover of Hamilton Hall on the Columbia campus.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, "This is not about free speech. This is about people that don't have a right to be in the United States to begin with." He added, "No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card."
This should be perfectly obvious under the law. U.S. Code 1227 includes among the classes of deportable aliens "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." Obviously, having Hamas sympathizers who help lead groups that openly advocate for terrorist violence would be within this category. Furthermore, as lawyer Andrew McCarthy writes, "If reports are correct, Khalil was active as an agent of agitators who carried out lawless activities. That is not mere speech and association, and it would be unlawful if engaged in by Americans -- indeed, that is why dozens of Americans were arrested in connection with the campus unrest."
Nonetheless, Democrats came rushing to Khalil's aid. The Senate Judiciary Committee tweeted out a picture of Khalil with the caption, "Free Mahmoud Khalil." They have issued no such tweet in support of actual American citizens being held hostage by Hamas in terror tunnels. Their purported argument is that Khalil's speech is being violated -- even though his activities clearly fall within a category of behavior that is not protected by law, as deemed by the Secretary of State. In fact, as law professor Eugene Kontorovich points out, the Biden administration announced that it would ban travel visas to Israelis who "disrupt or prevent efforts to achieve a two-state solution." None of the Democrats at that time fulminated about free speech rights. There is a reason why. And that reason is simple: The Democratic Party, writ large, sympathizes with those who sympathize with Hamas.
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A fringe on the Republican side of the aisle feels similarly. There is great inconsistency in the fact that many on the right who object to Khalil's deportation are the strongest advocates of immigration restrictionism; apparently they are deeply perturbed with Indian engineers working at Google on H-1B visas but are all in on behalf of terror supporters who hate Jews.
Then again, most Americans look at this case and innately understand President Donald Trump's simple take: "I think we ought to get them all out of the country. They're troublemakers. They're agitators. They don't love our country. ... You can have them." If Trump's opponents keep taking the side of people like Mahmoud Khalil, they will keep ending up on the wrong side of the American people.
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