The

The Across the 2024 election, Donald Trump and the people behind him said again and again that they were here to restore

free speech to this country. Then they got power, and this administration came after speech in a way

the left never dared to do, never wanted to do. You saw it with the hunt to cancel any grant that had the word diversity

anywhere near it. You saw it as countless organizations that depended on the government,

or that feared the government, began reworking their mission statements or censoring their

websites to avoid any words it might offend anyone in this administration. You saw it as border agents

looked through travelers' phones to see if they had said anything that the administration wouldn't

like. And you saw it as immigration agents began yanking people off the streets for the crime

of nothing more than speech. Among the first of these was Mahmoud Khalil, who'd been a Palestinian graduate

student at Columbia, a leader in the school's anti-Israel protests, Cleal's a green cardholder. He's

married to a U.S. citizen. His sole offense had been to speak out against Israel in a way this

administration did not like. He was detained under authority the U.S.

Secretary of State has to cancel the residency of non-citizens who threaten U.S. foreign policy.

Did this grad student at Columbia actually threatened U.S. foreign policy? Is that how fragile

our foreign policy is? No one really believed that. Kalil was not followed into his building

by playing closed officers and taken to an ICE detention center in Louisiana for more than a

hundred days, imprisoned there while his wife gave birth, because the U.S. government feared him.

He was in prison there because U.S. government wanted others like him to fear

them. It wanted non-citizens and immigrants to stop speaking out. It wanted everyone to ask,

if they could do this to Khalil, could they do it to me? If they could detain him on such

flimsy grounds, could they not come up with a reason to detain me?

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