On Democratic Dissent: Part II
March 26, 2025
By Katie Kirchner
On March 8, the Trump administration detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student activist at Columbia University. Khalil, a legal permanent US resident, was not formally charged with a crime. His detention—and the similar threats to students in the weeks since—is a five-alarm fire for our First Amendment rights in this country, as many have rightfully pointed out, including the Washington Post Editorial Board, elected officials such as Sen. Chris Murphy and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and prominent writers including Michelle Goldberg, Adam Serwer, and even Anne Coulter. But the response has been neither uniform nor sufficiently urgent—making his detention particularly dangerous for us all.
The yearlong wave of suppression that preceded Khalil’s arrest—as well as broader reactionary efforts to quell political dissent—helped set the stage for the Trump administration’s dangerous escalations. As students across the country set up tents to protest US support for Israel’s war in Gaza, many Democratic officials and liberal pundits maligned the protesters or supported escalations against them—playing directly into a broader reactionary politics that swept President Trump back into power. Universities—institutions the Right has long attacked as bastions of “wokeness” and leftist ideologies—attempted to deport their own students, enacted new rules that effectively banned encampments, and limited the bounds of what had previously been deemed appropriate speech activity.
Last spring, worried about this exact dynamic, I called on Democratic elected officials, college administrators, and liberal pundits to instead take seriously and draw inspiration from all that these young people were getting right. The Democratic Party and its allies too often think of the student Left as opposition rather than a natural constituency and source of strength and moral clarity. As Roosevelt Fellow Osita Nwanevu observed in The Guardian last year, “an ancient and immortal prejudice against youth” often prevents our nation’s leaders from recognizing the value of what student activists—who have one of the most reliable records for being on the right side of history—can teach us. So here we are nearly a year later, further down the path to authoritarianism, and I am once again, more urgently, making the same call.
At this juncture, the Trump administration is testing several ways to enact an authoritarian vision for this country, outside the contours of civil liberties and constitutional law, including draconian immigration policies and expanded executive authority. Trump himself called CNN and “MSDNC” coverage illegal for criticizing him. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil ties these threads together in a calculated way: Trump is simultaneously providing his supporters with the sort of conflict theater his campaign promised, and attempting to exploit an issue that has in the past divided his opposition. The bipartisan suppression and maligning of the campus encampments over the last year is part of how we’ve gotten here.
Activists often upset wide swaths of the public, given that they typically challenge a status quo from which many powerful people benefit. For activists on the Left, that usually means confronting powerful actors within the Democratic “big tent”—donors and corporate lobbies, for example.
Last year’s campus encampment organizing, and the harsh political response to it, emerged amid an era of reactionary backlash to political dissent: from the #MeToo feminist movement and #resistance to the first Trump administration to 2020’s protests against the murder of George Floyd. These movements changed the moral terrain of politics, but the backlash to them has been swift and fierce; there was not enough lasting political power or structural change in place to weather it all. Note the swift return to increased police budgets after George Floyd’s death and how the Right is weaponizing the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that emerged following the Black Lives Matter movement’s calls for systemic reform. As Vox put it, 2024 was the year of a tough-on-crime comeback. And that was a bipartisan project.
For the better part of the last decade, there has been a move to make protesting more dangerous and to criminalize dissent writ large: According to Teen Vogue, since 2017, 21 states have passed nearly 50 new laws that restrict protests, and introduced dozens more. Most of these laws further criminalize individual actions of protesters—such as blocking traffic—but some of them go as far as targeting the community members and organizations supporting the protests, as well. There has also been a trend toward using existing laws in more draconian ways, as we’ve seen in the criminalization of Georgia’s “Cop City” protesters and across the country in the response to the campus encampments.
The Trump administration is now taking this yearslong effort to criminalize protest and suppress dissent to its extremes, including by attacking universities themselves. Despite the violent suppression of their own students last year, Columbia was threatened with a $400 million federal funding cut unless the university agreed to a set of demands—which it did. These actions include empowering campus police to escalate against student dissent and installing new leadership to oversee the activities of the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies, which houses the school’s Center for Palestine Studies. As the New York Times put it: “Many worry that the administration’s pursuit of Columbia was a test drive—a way to gauge public reaction, assess the prospects of legal pushback and develop a precedent.” Had more university leadership approached their student activists like Michael R. Roth at Wesleyan, by listening and protecting students’ right to protest rather than deploying militarized police forces against them, we might never have reached this juncture.
Trump has been bragging about Khalil’s detention to his base, using it as proof he’s delivering on the reactionary politics promised by the campaign. His administration uses Khalil’s activism for Palestine to paint his detention as going after the “radical Left”—as they often do in the culture wars—with the hope that most people don’t investigate further to see what else is at stake. That the most vigorous defense of Khalil has come from the Left—while the rest of the “big tent” hedges their support of his civil rights—aids the administration’s cause. And in this case, where has that left us? Wondering if the First Amendment will be effectively nullified for us all.
The First Amendment and its protection of speech and protest are critical tools in our long-term fight for democracy and in immediately facing down authoritarianism. We need the student Left in that fight: We need their moral clarity and their energy. We need them to be political leaders and movement leaders for the long run. But if they have been deported, brutalized, and had their rights trampled, then—when there is nothing else left to burn down after all the “five-alarm fires”—we’ll have no scaffolding from which to build something new.
