There was no emergency. No crisis. No legal framework invoked, no exception declared. There was just a decision, somewhere, that Mahmoud Khalil should be removed. And so he was.
The Palestinian graduate student and activist at Columbia University was taken from his campus residence in the early hours of March 8, 2025, by ICE agents operating with the kind of unchecked authority that requires neither legal justification nor explanation. The official line from the Trump administration is vague: “ties” to Hamas, unspecified. A national security threat, unproven. Khalil’s case will now move through a process where the outcome has already been decided. Because the point was never due process; the point was to demonstrate that the government can do this, that it can make up crimes when it needs to, and apply punishment first, legitimacy later.
There’s no great legal mechanism at play here, no emergency powers lurking in the background. The state is not stretching the law, it is fabricating it on the spot. And the speed with which Khalil was transformed from student to suspect, from protester to security threat, is a reminder that the legal basis for repression no longer needs to be coherent. It only needs to be asserted.
From Exception to Improvisation
For years, those tracking the erosion of rights in the U.S. have pointed to the gradual expansion of the “state of exception,” borrowing from Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of how legal norms are suspended in times of crisis. But Khalil’s arrest isn’t a case of exception, it’s a case of improvisation.
In Agamben’s framework, the state justifies extraordinary measures by invoking emergency conditions, creating zones of legal ambiguity where normal protections no longer apply. But what we are seeing now is something else entirely. There is no ambiguity, no pretense of a framework. The state does not need to suspend existing law when it can invent new ones at will.
Walter Benjamin described this as law-making violence, not the enforcement of pre-existing rules, but the creation of new categories of criminality through the very act of repression. In Khalil’s case, his guilt was not established but declared. His alleged “ties” to Hamas do not need to be proven, because their function is not evidentiary but disciplinary.
The University as a Mechanism of Control
The fact that Khalil was removed from a university setting is important. Columbia University has long cultivated its image as a space of open inquiry, a site where intellectual dissent is not only tolerated but celebrated. But like all elite institutions, its commitment to free thought is contingent, radical politics are allowed only to the extent that they remain theoretical exercises. The moment they become a material challenge to state power, the university transforms from a refuge into an enforcer of ideological limits.
Michel Foucault wrote that “discipline ‘makes’ individuals”—not just through overt repression, but through the internalisation of control. Universities train students not just in knowledge but in the boundaries of acceptable discourse. And when those boundaries are tested, as Khalil did through his activism, the university’s response is revealing. Has Columbia defended its student? Or has it retreated into bureaucratic neutrality, quietly accepting the removal of an inconvenient presence?
Repression as Performance
Edward Said understood this well. In Orientalism, he traced how Palestinian identity is consistently framed in Western discourse as something suspect, something unstable, something always on the verge of violence. Khalil is not simply being punished for his activism; he is being preemptively criminalised for being the wrong kind of political subject.
If the state does not need legal justification, then what is the function of Khalil’s arrest? The answer lies in performance.
Guy Debord argued in Society of the Spectacle that modern power does not merely suppress opposition, it stages its own authority. Khalil’s arrest is not just about him; it is a spectacle, designed to remind everyone watching that the government can do this. That it will do this.
The message is not subtle: dissent is punishable, and Palestinian advocacy is particularly dangerous. There is no need for formal censorship when repression operates as a warning, a lesson, a precedent. The charge does not need to hold up in court. The justification does not need to withstand scrutiny. It only needs to exist long enough to serve its purpose.
This is why the case matters. If the state can decide, without process, that Khalil’s activism makes him a security threat, then it has established the right to construct enemies in real time. And once that right is normalised, it does not remain confined to one case.
The Politics of Lists
There is nothing new about the idea that certain people should be made to disappear. The state has always relied on lists, of dissidents, enemies, undesirables, to justify repression. What changes is who gets to write them.
In Nazi Germany, the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B., or “Black Book,” catalogued intellectuals, communists, trade unionists, and Jewish figures targeted for arrest should the Nazis successfully invade Britain. In occupied Europe, the Gestapo maintained lists of Jews, political dissidents, and resistance members to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps. These lists were not just administrative tools; they functioned as declarations of exclusion, transforming those named into legal non-entities, people who no longer had the right to exist within the political order.
It is against this historical backdrop that the emergence of right-wing Zionist groups compiling names of pro-Palestinian activists for arrest and deportation must be understood. Betar US, the American wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement, has taken on the role of informer, drawing up lists of students and activists to be handed over to the Trump administration. The logic is chillingly familiar: identify those who must be removed from the political landscape, designate them as security threats, and let the state carry out the necessary expulsions.
The irony is hard to miss. The very tactics once used against Jews—compiling lists of those who should be exiled, imprisoned, or worse—are now being wielded by a Zionist organisation against those it deems enemies of Israel. This is not about law, nor about security; it is about the power to decide who gets to stay and who must be erased. Lists like these do not simply name people; they strip them of their political legitimacy, transforming them into targets. And in a political climate where the state is already eager to criminalise Palestinian activism, all it takes is the right list in the right hands to turn a student protester into a deportable threat.
These lists have always served the same function: to preemptively criminalise, to isolate, to create categories of people who can be rounded up without due process. In Mahmoud Khalil’s case, the list came first, the justification followed. This is how repression operates now. not through the slow expansion of state power, but through the outsourcing of persecution, the delegation of enemy-making to private actors who are more than willing to do the state’s work for it.
Media as an Instrument of Legitimacy
There is another element in the spectacle of Khalil’s arrest: the press. Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent, detailed how the media creates the illusion of free debate while ultimately reinforcing state narratives.
In Khalil’s case, we see this in real time. This story should be huge, instead some outlets amplify the administration’s claims without question, repeating allegations that have not been proven. Others focus on the procedural elements of the case, discussing legal strategies without addressing the deeper issue: this is not a legal case at all. It is the state exercising its ability to create criminals on demand.
Chomsky described this tactic well: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” The debate over Khalil’s case will play out in familiar ways, was the process fair? Are his rights being respected? But the question that actually matters, can the state just invent guilt out of nothing? will be carefully avoided.
This man should be freed immediately and allowed to go home to his pregnant wife. Every moment he remains detained is a political act, not a legal one. And every moment the public tolerates it, we move one step further into a world where repression is not just accepted but expected.
Repression Always Produces Resistance
The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is not an isolated case. It is a shift, a test of how far the state can go in criminalising dissent without resistance. But repression does not always succeed in its aims. Often, it backfires.
Angela Davis, herself a former political prisoner, wrote: “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.” Khalil’s arrest is meant to disappear not just him, but the entire movement he represents. Yet, instead of silencing activists, it has radicalised a new generation.
The real danger for the government is not Khalil himself, but the possibility that his case does not fade quietly. That the legal incoherence of his arrest is recognised for what it is. That instead of demonstrating the state’s power, it exposes its growing desperation.
Because repression is not a sign of strength. It is, in the end, a sign of fear.
And right now, the state is very afraid.
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