So, You Think “Terrorist Sympathizers” Should Be Deported?

You're not going to like how this ends.

Immigration authorities have unlawfully detained Columbia University student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, whose detention Trump vows will be “the first arrest of many to come.” The arrest is a transparent violation of the First Amendment that sets a chilling precedent for reprisals against protected speech by lawful permanent residents of the United States. Khalil has not been charged with a crime — in fact, a White House official told The Free Press that “the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law” — but the Department of Homeland Security accuses him of leading “activities aligned to Hamas,” a vague descriptor that could include anything from mild criticism of Israel to providing material support for a foreign terrorist organization.

Of course, Republicans aren’t concerned. When President Obama signed legislation authorizing the U.S. military to detain noncitizen terror suspects indefinitely without charge, the Tea Party went apoplectic. Everybody within six degrees of separation from Alex Jones was counting down the days to dictatorship. But now that Trump is using dirty war tactics on American soil, they cheer him on. It’s almost like they didn’t care about the Constitution in the first place and just want to screw over people that they don’t like!

Oh, well — I’m sure the Democrats must be doing something about this, right? By the way, I just heard about a great deal on a bridge for sale.

Trump released the following statement justifying Khalil’s detention:

Maybe your eyes just glazed over, but I’ll translate for you. It’s mostly warmed-over nationalist authoritarianism as per usual. But then there’s a curious statement at the end: “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.”

If you’re surprised that Trump knows the word “contrary,” you might want to assume it was fed to him by a lawyer. The idea that Khalil’s presence in the United States undermines U.S. foreign policy is the entire legal rationale behind the regime’s detention of him. According to the New York Times:

[T]wo people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.

The provision says that any “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.”

So the regime wants to deport student activists because it thinks they’re undermining U.S. foreign policy by engaging in speech and activities “aligned to” a foreign terrorist organization, including “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American” activity.

Is that true? Of course not!

How do I know? Because if they meant it, Trump and Rubio would be deporting themselves.

When Rubio was born in Miami in 1971, his parents weren’t U.S. citizens. If you go back far enough, at some point nobody in Trump’s lineage was a citizen either. Ipso facto, since we believe in protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship (which apparently means no citizenship by birthright), Trump and Rubio must not be citizens, or at least not “Real Americans.” If we’re feeling generous, we can say they’re as much Real Americans as the three American-born Congresswomen Trump told to go back to their home countries after they criticized him in 2019.

So as long as we’re making things up as we go along — and what else is this presidency supposed to be about? — Trump and Rubio are not subject to the protection of the Constitution.¹ Therefore, if there is reasonable ground to believe that Trump and Rubio undermine U.S. foreign policy interests by doing or having done anything aligned with a foreign terrorist organization, they ought to be deported on the same basis as the student activists.

Now, maybe you think that’s ridiculous. Do we have any reason to believe Trump and Rubio are engaged in activities aligned to foreign terrorists? Why yes, actually, we do. In fact, we have far more evidence that Trump and Rubio support terrorism than we do for the protesters. Three examples should suffice.

I.

In 2011, Trump and Rubio advocated the use of military force to overthrow the Libyan government and support the opposition in Libya. At the time, it was well known that some elements of the opposition were linked to al-Qaeda, including a former commander of the State Department designated foreign terrorist organization Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. In September 2011, Rubio visited Libya to meet with rebel leaders and declared them an inspiration to democratic reformers around the world. Weeks later, the rebels summarily executed dozens of political opponents and unleashed a reign of terror against Libya’s more than one million African guest workers. They also pilfered weapons from the former Gaddafi regime and trafficked them to war zones across the region, including the insurgency in Mali.

II.

As far back as 2011, Rubio supported arming the rebels in Syria, many of whom were aligned with al-Qaeda. Under the CIA’s Timber Sycamore program from 2012 to 2017, many of the weapons and cash funneled to the Syrian opposition first passed through Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, which directed aid to radical Islamist groups that U.S. officials believed had connections to international terrorism. According to American intelligence officials who spoke to the New York Times in 2017, many weapons furnished through Timber Sycamore ended up in the hands of the designated foreign terrorist organization and Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front, while many CIA-trained rebels joined al-Nusra. One group that received anti-tank missiles from the United States and Saudi Arabia, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, was caught on video beheading a 12-year-old child.

III.

From 2017 to 2021, during his first stint in the White House, Trump extended over $110 billion in arms sales offers to Saudi Arabia and $23 billion to the United Arab Emirates, some of them against the express will of Congress, which any reasonable observer could have predicted would bolster al-Qaeda. The Saudi-UAE coalition in Yemen, which Trump backed to the hilt, routinely fought alongside the designated foreign terrorist organization al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and allowed AQAP fighters to loot weapons and cash from Yemeni cities. A 2019 investigation found that under Trump, the Saudis and Emiratis even transferred some American-made weapons to AQAP and other Salafi jihadist militias.

Given this damning body of evidence, it is essential that we face the clear and present truth: Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are terrorist-sympathizing alien radicals who must be arrested and removed from the country lest they be allowed to cause more damage to American national security and foreign policy interests.

Not only that, but Trump and Rubio ought to be the first arrests of many to come. Italian national Rudy Giuliani is a known associate and unregistered foreign agent of the former designated foreign terrorist organization Mojahedin-e-Khalq, as is the swarthy German Newt Gingrich. The Crown Prince of the terrorist-supporting Kingdom of Saudi Arabia once boasted that the president’s son-in-law, Belarusian Jared Kushner, is in his pocket. Trump’s former national security advisor, Irishman Michael Flynn, received more than $500,000 from the government of Turkey, which has been among the foremost supporters of Hamas and the former al-Nusra.

Even if you think the birthright citizenship thing is a stretch, how about the former president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who fled to the United States in 2003 after ordering his security forces to murder more than 60 peasants who protested his regime’s privatization of Bolivia’s natural gas reserves? The United States has refused to extradite Sánchez de Lozada even though he’s been charged with genocide in Bolivia and sentenced to six years in prison for corruption.

It should be apparent that the Trump regime does not want to deport student activists because it believes they’re promoting terrorism and undermining U.S. foreign policy interests. On an objective basis, the regime and its allies have done far more to promote terrorism and undermine American interests than any student movement could ever hope to do, even if that was what they wanted.

The Trump regime wants to deport activists because it wants to silence dissent. This has always been among Trump’s overriding priorities — the Palestinian cause is just unpopular enough that disappearing its leaders doesn’t rankle as many sensible Americans as shutting down critical news media outlets, or suing them into oblivion, or shooting protesters in the legs. That’s probably what you should expect in a country that’s spent nearly a quarter-century ripping away the legal rights of anybody who’s accused of supporting terrorism.

But of course, we know who the real terrorists are.

1. There, I’m finally blogging about the state of exception. Are you happy now?