Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was abducted from his Columbia University-owned apartment on Saturday night by federal immigration enforcement. The Trump administration immediately made clear that Khalil, who participated in pro-Palestinian protests during his time as a Columbia graduate student, was being detained and marked for deportation exclusively for his political speech, violating protections afforded to all residing in the United States by the First Amendment.
Regardless of how politicians feel about Khalil's political positions, the right to free speech and the expression of political viewpoints are a basic principle that all our elected officials should support. The right to free speech, sacrosanct in the eyes of our courts, is the bedrock of American democracy—few other countries possess it, and it is held up as a beacon for our self-perceived virtue as compared to other nations around the world. Surely, an attack on free speech such as this, targeting an elite university in the heart of the nation's center of both media and capital, would represent a bright line crossed, an unacceptable infringement on the foundational principles of our nation that would trigger immediate and robust response from local political leadership, the people we have elected to preserve our rights and the rule of law. Right?
…Right?
Let's check in on what New York's elected officials have to say:
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