Media Round-Up: Palestine Legal on Trump's attacks on the student movement and higher education since taking office

Op-ed by Palestine Legal Client and Columbia Student Maryam Alwan for the Columbia Student Newspaper

Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has been escalating the US government’s crackdown on the student movement for Palestinian freedom. Most notably, these escalations have included threatening universities’ federal funding to pressure them to impose stricter anti-protest rules and authorizing ICE and DHS abductions of several non-citizen students who have protested or spoken out about Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza.

In an attempt to make sense of this whirlwind of attacks and understand how they are impacting students’ lives, the movement for Palestine on college campuses, and higher education at large, several media outlets have reached out to Palestine Legal attorneys, clients, and board members for comment.

Below is a media roundup of the top 7 stories featuring Palestine Legal’s commentary about the Trump administration’s recent repression from outlets including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Hill, Democracy Now!, and Columbia Spectator.

The New York Times

White House Cancels $400 Million in Grants and Contracts to Columbia | March 7

Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, which is representing Palestinian students in a civil rights case against Columbia, called the government move “a bullying attempt on a massive scale” that was meant to punish Columbia and its students for their exercise of free speech.

She said it was “really important in this moment that we’re in that Columbia University — and the many other universities that will soon be in Columbia’s boat — not bow to this McCarthyite attempt to stop any and all criticism of Israel.”

The Nation

Mahmoud Khalil’s Abduction Is a Red Alert for Universities | March 11

In her op-ed, Palestine Legal Director Dima Khalidi argues that universities’ complete surrender to Trump’s threats and ever-harsher crackdowns on the student movement “will not release them from the administration’s crosshairs. (Columbia has learned that lesson 400 million times over).” Instead, their compliance has enabled the Trump administration to turn students into prime targets for fascist government repression.

She explains how we saw a key instance of this with the illegal abduction and detention of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was on Trump’s radar and whom Columbia had already made an example of, putting him through ever-more draconian disciplinary processes long before he was abducted.

In her op-ed, Dima lays out fundamental shifts that universities must make to fight for the rights and freedoms of the students and faculty who make their campuses vibrant, diverse places to imagine and build a just and viable future.

The Hill

Trump immigration crackdown enters new waters with arrest of Mahmoud Khalil | March 11

“It’s not just the Trump administration here that’s at fault. There’s also Columbia, who hasn’t yet condemned the arrest or the arbitrary detention of Mahmoud. They have yet to call for him to be released — not that I’ve seen, publicly,” said Sabiya Ahamed, staff attorney at Palestine Legal. 

“And I think if the university is going to make it clear that it’s there to protect students against anti-Palestinian oppression,” Ahamed added, then administrators need to speak out and say they’re “not going to collaborate or cooperate with ICE in any sort of way.”

Columbia Spectator

Mahmoud Khalil is my friend. Columbia targeted him, then the U.S. government abducted him. | March 12

In her op-ed, Palestine Legal client Maryam Alwan writes, “As someone who has known Mahmoud for over a year and a half, let me tell you who he really is. He is a Palestinian, a husband, a father-to-be, a dear friend, and a man abducted by the U.S. government for opposing genocide. But Columbia, too, is complicit in what happened to him.”

“The University has yet to condemn the fact that the U.S. government is actively attempting to deprive Mahmoud’s future child from meeting their extraordinary father. But of course, this is the same institution that has yet to explicitly condemn a single act of violence or discrimination against Palestinians since October 7, 2023. With this context in mind, the sudden campaign against Mahmoud is not nearly as unprecedented as it seems.”

“Manufacturing consent to genocide has officially led to manufacturing consent to violence against dissenting students. When we normalized daily scenes of indiscriminate bombardment in Gaza, we also inherently normalized the sight of dozens of militarized riot cops in our learning environment. When we normalized daily scenes of forced displacement and administrative detention in the West Bank, we likewise normalized the indefinite abduction of legal permanent residents on the basis of Palestinian identity and political opinion.”

“As Columbia students who know and love Mahmoud, it is our duty to ensure that his suffering is not in vain. Libelous doxxing and arbitrary disciplinary targeting do not just cause psychological harm — they are physically dangerous. The engines of repression from Low Library, to Congress, to the White House, are actively attempting to manufacture consent for the detention and potential deportation of Mahmoud. It is up to the entire student body to stop them. It is up to us to humanize him again. And it is up to us to humanize the Palestinian people as a whole, the way he would want.”

Democracy Now!

Law Prof. Katherine Franke Accuses Columbia of Empowering Trump by Agreeing to $400M “Ransom Note”| March 24

In an interview with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman, Katherine Franke, former Columbia Law Professor and Palestine Legal Board Member, says, “I think it would be inaccurate to describe what Columbia and the federal government have entered into as an agreement. The federal government seized funds that they were legally obliged to deliver to Columbia researchers, and then issued a ransom note, saying, ‘We will consider negotiations further with you if you do the following things.’”

“Columbia considered it and did more than what the ransom note demanded, for which it got nothing in return. Normally, when someone is kidnapped or there’s some kind of ransom taken, you agree to the things in the ransom note, and then you get your stuff back. You get your money back. You get your person back. In this case, Columbia merely supplicated itself before the federal government, and then we hear Linda McMahon say, ‘Well, this is on the road, on track to what we’d like to see.’ So we have no idea what comes next. But groveling before a bully, we all know, just encourages the bully.”

“I can’t overemphasize how frightening it is for our students to be attending a university, hoping to get an education, when the university is actually collaborating in their very peril.”

The Cut (New York Magazine)

Will ICE Come to My Dorm Today? International students who protested Israel’s war in Gaza grapple with Trump’s crackdown. | March 26

In her article, journalist Sanya Mansoor anonymously interviews international students about how Trump’s weaponization of ICE to crack down on pro-Palestine protestors has affected their lives and their activism — and how they are fighting back. Students shared how Trump’s illegal arrests and abductions have prompted them to take more precautions while protesting, double down by engaging even more publicly, or confront the Trump administration head-on through filing lawsuits against the unconstitutional silencing of their political views.

As Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath said, Palestine Legal has received an uptick in inquiries from non-citizen students gauging the risk of travel, protesting, and posting about Palestine on social media. Sainath told The Cut that Palestine Legal has shifted its Know Your Rights training for students, given that “we have an administration in place that does not respect the law.” “There’s more of a focus on different scenarios and what people might expect given what they said, or who they are, and their citizenship status,” Sainath said.

The New York Times

Professors Pushed Harvard to Resist Trump. Now Billions Are on the Line. | April 1

Amid the speed and chaos of Mr. Trump’s assault on higher education, colleges have not figured out how to respond in a way that will satisfy their antagonists — if there is one. Some faculty members wonder whether the conciliatory approach has only emboldened critics.

Dylan Saba, a lawyer with Palestine Legal, noted that Columbia had fallen in line with many Republican demands before Mr. Trump took office and had taken an especially aggressive stance against pro-Palestinian activists, including denouncing scholars by name at a congressional hearing. It did not placate Mr. Trump and produced even more student activism, Mr. Saba said.

“In seeking a painless way out, they ended up producing a much bigger conflict,” he said.