Milwaukee Protesters Call for Release of Mahmoud Khalil

Demonstrators gathered in downtown Milwaukee shortly after the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, and called for his release from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

A key figure in the pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia last spring, which sparked similar campus demonstrations across the nation, Khalil is now being processed in Louisiana for potential deportation, NBC reported.

Before his detention, Khalil had been living permanently in the US with his wife via green card. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the State Department detained him because of his alleged support of Hamas during the encampment last spring. The US has designated Hamas as a terrorist organization since 1997.

“The secretary of state has the right to revoke a green card or a visa for individuals who are adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America,” Leavitt said.

With their voices carried by booming speakers and echoing against the sheer faces of Wisconsin Avenue highrises, the speakers at the rally were certainly clear about one thing: they saw Khalil’s detention a lot differently.

“This case around Mahmoud Khalil is an attack on Palestine,” said Alan Chavoya, the rally’s opening speaker. “It is an attack on those who stand with Palestine. It is an attack on workers. It is an attack on immigrants.”

The Trump administration said shortly after the detention of Khalil that it would be “the first of many to come,” the Associated Press reported. 

“I’ll say I’m anticipating something,” said Kayla Patterson, one of the speakers at the rally and an activist at UW-Milwaukee. “I don’t know about fear because I know that these things can be fought and won against. With the encampment movement starting at Columbia and spreading throughout the country, we can expect the same thing for attacks to happen against our students.”

Those in support of Khalil and calling for his release argue his detention violates free speech and his First Amendment rights. The Trump administration argued that Khalil’s activism was supportive of Hamas and, as a result, a threat to national security.

“Protesting is not a crime,” Chavoya said. “He should not be detained, and he sure as hell should not be deported.”

Patterson added that she thinks Khalil and other activists in the US with a green card are especially vulnerable. She said the Trump administration and State Department are targeting people like him because they are at the heart of the pro-Palestine movement. 

“It’s another plot to stop the movement from growing for Palestine right now,” Patterson added. “It’s a blatant attempt to censor what is happening.”

When it was Patterson’s turn to speak before the crowd of demonstrators, she focused her attention on the student movement for Palestine on the UWM campus. 

“Student power is growing, and it is found on every campus all the way to the White House,” Patterson said. “So try as Donald Trump and his reactionaries might, but you cannot deport a movement. The billionaire class cannot and will not stomp out the spirit of resistance.”

From late April to mid-May of 2024, students at UWM, many of whom were at the emergency rally downtown, established their own encampment on the lawn outside Mitchell Hall, which echoed the one Khalil took part in at Columbia.

Shortly after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, he signed Executive Order 13899, which aimed to “combat the explosion of anti-semitism on our campuses and in our streets since October 7, 2023.”

“We’ve been organizing long enough to know what this is,” said Sana Abubaker, who spoke on behalf of the Popular University for Palestine Coalition at UWM. “This is about fear. Fear of the power of student movements.”

Rachel Ida Buff, co-chair of the Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine and a representative from Jewish Voices for Peace-Milwaukee, addressed this claim directly. She described herself as a “proud, Jewish leftist.”

“Fabricated claims about campus anti-semitism distort threats to Jewish communities today,” Buff said. “The clear and present danger to Jews and to all of us is the return of McCarthyist repression under the most anti-semitic administration in American history.”

Chavoya concluded the rally by announcing several other upcoming demonstrations and leaving the crowd with one more message about Khalil.

“All of us are under attack,” Chavoya said. “But just like all of us are under attack, all of us should be continuing to come together like today to fight back.”