“Land of the free” doesn’t just mark the highest note in the national anthem. It’s also the key to what makes America special.
Note that there’s no qualifying phrase in Francis Scott Key’s composition, no “land of the free for American citizens” to clog up the lyrics to a song that’s already difficult to sing. No, the meaning is clear: America is a country where all are free. In the United States, we don’t have to earn constitutional protections. They protect us regardless of our citizenship, gender, race, faith or age.
That’s why the Trump administration’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, for his political views is so unsettling. The government is attempting to deport Khalil, a lawful U.S. resident with a green card, for engaging in protests it regards as pro-Hamas and anti-American.
Of course, the right to protest and to say things the government may not like are at the heart of the First Amendment. The government can’t punish Americans for their free speech; it also can’t punish anyone in America for what they say.
The Trump administration, though, is claiming that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 allows Secretary of State Marco Rubio to remove non-citizens if he believes “they would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
The law was adopted during one of the darkest times for free speech in America, a period in which government employees and public figures were widely targeted for allegedly being “sympathetic” to the Soviet Union. The persecution, fueled in large part by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, trampled on First Amendment protections in the name of protecting American values.
There are clear parallels to today. Khalil is not accused of a crime; he’s being targeted for being opposed to Israel’s foreign policy and supportive of Hamas. It’s difficult to see how one man’s free expression on a New York campus would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Time and again, President Trump has echoed those who railed against “communist sympathizers” in the 1950s.
“We’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country,” Trump told a crowd in Las Vegas last October.
The potential chilling effect of the government’s actions has not gone unnoticed.
“If constitutionally protected speech may render someone deportable by the secretary of state, the administration has free rein to arrest and detain any non-citizen whose speech the government dislikes, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression cautioned yesterday. “The inherent vagueness of the ‘adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests’ standard does not provide notice as to what speech is or is not prohibited. The administration’s use of it will foster a culture of self-censorship and fear. “
Trump has promised similar deportations.
In Trump’s words, “This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
The Trump administration is not alleging crimes by these foreign students. It’s charging them with having the wrong ideas, something that is never punishable in our cherished land of the free.
Ken Paulson is the director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University.
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