Donald Trump speaks at the South Carolina Tea Party Convention in January 2016.Willis Glassgow/AP
When Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, he made a solemn pledge.
“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” he declared. “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”
It hasn’t quite worked out that way.
In the first two months of Trump’s second term, we’ve seen the “immense power of the state” weaponized so often that it’s difficult to keep track. The president and his administration have sought to investigate and punish law firms that represent Trump’s foes, news outlets whose reporting displeases the right, and universities whose policies or curricula Republicans dislike.
In perhaps the most chilling abuse thus far, the administration arrested and is attempting to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holder and outspoken Palestinian activist who was a graduate student at Columbia University during last year’s protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Khalil has not been accused of any crime. Rather, the administration has made the constitutionally dubious argument that he was legally targeted because Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has reasonable grounds to believe that his presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
In their public comments, Trump’s aides and allies have explained what Rubio’s legalese means in practice: Khalil is being punished because he is an immigrant who participated in protests that Trump doesn’t like. “This is somebody that we’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity,” Troy Edgar, Trump’s deputy Homeland Security secretary, told NPR earlier this month.
Later in the interview, Edgar was asked whether he believes that “any criticism of the government” is “a deportable offense.”
“Let me put it this way,” Edgar responded. “Imagine if [Khalil] came in and filled out the form and said, ‘I want a student visa,’ and they asked him, ‘What are you going to do here?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to go and protest and join in antisemitic activity.’ We would have never let him into the country.”
In other words, yes, the Trump administration explicitly considers protest to be a deportable offense.
And the administration has been clear that this policy—that purportedly “anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protest will not be tolerated”—is not limited to Khalil. During a briefing on March 11, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for a “rough estimate” of how many similar arrests of non-citizens the administration planned to make.
“I don’t have an estimate,” Leavitt responded. “I do know that DHS, based on very good intel that they have gathered at the direction of the president’s executive order, which made it very clear to the Department of Homeland Security that engaging, as I said, in anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protest will not be tolerated.”
Leavitt added that the administration has been “using intelligence to identify individuals on our nation’s colleges and universities…who have engaged in such behavior and activity, and especially illegal activity.”
The key word in that sentence is “especially,” which implies that the administration is also targeting law-abiding dissidents. Protests do not become “illegal activity” simply because Trump claims to believe they are “anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas.” And, again, Khalil hasn’t been charged with any crimes.
If you are counting on the GOP-controlled Congress to push back on Trump’s efforts to trample the right to protest, you are likely to be disappointed. As Trump was promising on the campaign trail to deport pro-Palestinian protesters, Republican lawmakers, including Rubio, showed they were willing to do his bidding. And one day after Leavitt’s comments about Khalil, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.)—a close Trump ally who serves on Senate committees overseeing the military and education—went on Fox Business Network to defend the arrest.
“When it comes to protesters, we gotta make sure we treat all of them the same: Send them to jail,” Tuberville announced. “Free speech is great, but hateful, hate, free speech is not what we need in these universities.”
Tommy Tuberville: “When it comes to protesters, we gotta make sure we treat all of them the same: send them to jail.”
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 12, 2025 at 6:19 PM
