Sanders Meets Freed Trump Political Prisoner Khalil as Columbia Punishes Gaza Protesters

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday met with Mahmoud Khalil—the former Columbia University Palestine defender recently imprisoned by the Trump administration—on the same day that the school expelled or suspended more than 70 students who protested Israel's genocidal obliteration of Gaza.

Sanders (I-Vt.) posted a photo of himself with his arm around a beaming Khalil, with the caption: "I met with Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, who was imprisoned for 104 days by the Trump administration for opposing [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's illegal and horrific war in Gaza. Outrageous. We must not allow [U.S. President Donald] Trump to destroy the First Amendment and freedom to dissent."

Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent married to a U.S. citizen, last year finished his graduate studies at Columbia. He was arrested at his New York home by plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers on March 8 before being transferred to New Jersey and then Louisiana, where he missed the birth of his first child.

Accused of no criminal offense and widely considered a political prisoner, Khalil was arrested following Trump's issuance of an executive order authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who take part in pro-Palestine demonstrations. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also invoked the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952—which allows for the deportation of noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to foreign policy interests—to target peaceful Palestine protesters who have committed no crimes.

Khalil was released last month upon a federal judge's order. He is far from the only student jailed for opposing the Gaza genocide; others include Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung—both permanent U.S. residents—as well as Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, and others.

On Tuesday, Columbia announced disciplinary action against more than 70 students who took part in last year's protests for Gaza at the New York City school's Butler Library. Around 80 Columbia students were arrested amid the violent police crackdown on campus encampments and occupations.

"While the university does not release individual disciplinary results of any student, the sanctions from Butler Library include probation, suspensions (ranging from one year to three years), degree revocations, and expulsions," Columbia's Office of Public Affairs said in a statement.

The school's announcement came days after Columbia and Trump administration officials met in Washington, D.C. to negotiate an agreement to restore most of the nearly $400 million in federal contracts for the university that were canceled in March over an alleged failure to tackle antisemitism.

As part of the deal, Columbia agreed to adopt the dubious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, which critics say conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and a war that experts increasingly agree is genocidal.

The school also said it would partner with the Anti-Defamation League on antisemitism training. Last year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the ADL for what it called a "pattern of enabling anti-Palestinian hate."

Columbia University interim president Claire Shipman has already been working with white nationalist Stephen Miller—Trump's White House deputy chief of staff and a primary architect of the president's first-term migrant family separation and Muslim travel ban policies—to restore lost contracts.

Columbia's acquiescence to the Trump administration comes as Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 215,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, including at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Most of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are starving amid an increasingly fatal famine fueled by Israel's siege of the enclave, which is partly the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.

Israel has also been accused of committing scholasticide in Gaza, where every university has been destroyed or damaged.

"Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry," said one student quoted in a recent Columbia University Apartheid Divest blog post. "This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure."