Following Trump’s inauguration, Republicans immediately revered his commitment to what he claimed to be a resurgence of free speech. “And I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back,” Trump said in an address to Congress on March 4th. However, in contrast to his claims, his administration has seemingly cracked down on how political dissidents utilize their 1st Amendment right.
Palestine Protests on College Campuses
Alongside a divisive conflict, protests against the war in Gaza are now under more scrutiny than ever. Students on college campuses, especially international students, have received the brunt of the Trump administration’s influence. Under the guise of protecting national security, officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio have called for the removal of those they consider to be threats to the safety of the U.S.
“Every one of them I find, we’re going to kick them out,” Rubio said on March 27 in regards to what he deemed “…going beyond demonstration. They are going and they are creating a ruckus. They are creating riots, basically, on campus.” True to his statements, Rubio has revoked upwards of 300 visas since January, many of these visas being held by students. Since then, he has expanded his search to include the social media of prospecting students, ordering diplomats to review posts of individuals who, as reported by the New York Times, “…[are] suspected of having terrorist ties or sympathies; who [have] a student or exchange visa between Oct. 7, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024; or who [have] had a visa terminated since that October date.” These parameters suggest a desire to reject applicants who align themselves against Israel’s actions in the Middle East conflict.
According to surveys by Intelligent.com, Generation Lab/Axios, and Newsweek/College Pulse, support for pro-Palestine protests on college campuses is as high as 65% among students. Taking into account the U.S.’s longstanding support for Israel, it is no surprise that conservative politicians are concerned with growing dissent on college campuses. Actions against these protestors, however, have also garnered concern over the validity of deporting and revoking the visas of those who stand in ideological opposition to the Trump administration. In late March, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish international student, was taken into custody after being targeted by a right-wing group due to her opinion essay criticizing the university’s response to pro-Palestinian demands; then, in a more recent instance, Mohsen Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, was detained by ICE after turning up to what he was told would be an interview related to his naturalization. Receiving the most national coverage, though, is Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident who was arrested after helping lead protests for Gaza on the campus of Columbia University.
After moving to the U.S. in 2022, Khalil earned a master’s degree at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and has since then married Noor Abdalla, an American citizen. Following his involvement in the protests — often acting as a mediator between the heads of the university and students who attended the protests — he has been placed under the public eye, facing judgment from both the Trump administration and pro-Israel activists. Some Jewish students, as a result of the protests’ increasing intensity, reported feeling unsafe and uncomfortable around the anti-Zionist sentiment. These complaints did not fall upon deaf ears; Republican officials were quick to deride the protests as anti-Semitic and Columbia University as “out of control”. Khalil, in specificity, had been called out for stating that “Israel and their propaganda always find something to attack,” adding, “They — we — have tried armed resistance, which is, again, legitimate under international law, but Israel calls it terrorism.” Despite this, however, his arrest cited no specific cause as to why he was being detained; Secretary Rubio has instead justified his detention by referring to a rarely used statute from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, allowing the Secretary of State to deport anyone who “…would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” In a two-page memo, Rubio also accused Khalil of participating in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities.”
The debate comes with the shaky legality under which Khalil is facing deportation. The law mentioned above, used as rationale by Marco Rubio, has, succeeding the Cold War, been altered to protect “beliefs, statements, or associations” that are “lawful within the United States.” What constitutes Khalil’s speech and activities as “compromis[ing to] a compelling United States foreign policy interest” — the revised requirements for deportation proceedings under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952? Within the memo, Rubio argues that “These determinations are based on information provided by the DHS/ICE/HSI regarding the participation and roles of Khalil in antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.” Presumably, because the U.S. has maintained close ties with Israel, Rubio likely views Khalil as a danger to this alliance. Others, however, see his detention as unjust and a breach of his First Amendment rights. “This has the appearance of a retaliatory action against someone who expressed an opinion the Trump administration didn’t like,” stated Camille Mackler, the founder of a New York coalition for legal service providers for immigrants. Consequently, Khalil’s detention remains controversial — his pending “deportable” status only adding to uncertainty regarding not only his future, but the future of every immigrant’s right to free speech.
Securitization Theory
Imagine a closed box. The box, in and of itself, is likely not dangerous. But imagine there is someone in your ear, telling you that there is something threatening inside. Their warnings increase in urgency as they begin to relay to you further information: that the box will open and whatever is in the box will be released in the next few minutes. They insist that you give them the box to keep you out of harm’s way, and panicked, you do so. That unknown person has made a securitizing move, you, as the audience, have agreed to it, and the box has now been securitized. Under the premise of the security threat that someone has constructed, they have convinced you to give up the box. This is the basis of what is called securitization theory.
Challenging traditional approaches to security, securitization theory asserts that issues are not threatening by nature, but are constructed as security issues. This is achieved through the rhetoric surrounding the problem; for instance, labelling an item as “menacing” and “alarming.” Using the example of the box, the box itself was not a threat—only after it was described as an imminent danger did it become one. The securitization of an issue or item legitimizes drastic action to address it. The box is confiscated to neutralize a threat, a government declares martial law to defend from terrorists, hundreds are imprisoned with no due process to curb the threat of an “enemy within quickly.” Securitization creates a “politics of fear,” in which actors—often, the government—incite mass fear among the general population against a certain someone or something.
For instance, America’s response to the September 11th attacks is demonstrative of securitization. Following 9/11, the Bush administration declared the U.S. “a nation at war,” framing terrorism as not a crime, but an existential threat to civilization. Bush himself declared, “We cannot wait for the final proof … in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Under this framing, terrorism became an all-encompassing, imminent threat that rose above and suspended normal politics. Relying on the widespread hysteria that overtook the nation and legitimizing their actions by asserting the exceptionality of the threat, the U.S. government pushed out the PATRIOT Act, which greatly expanded surveillance of American citizens. The securitization of 9/11 and terrorism also justified the War on Terror and conflated immigration with terrorism, with long-lasting consequences. Today, the precedent of global military intervention for the sake of safety established by the War on Terror has left lasting scars on human rights, allowing “arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances” around the world. For instance, in exchange for counterterrorism cooperation, the U.S. allowed human rights violations by countries such as Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan under a state of emergency. In Egypt, over ten thousand people were held without a fair trial. Under the pretense of counterterrorism, China and Russia both legitimize their actions against political opposition, activists, and minorities, policies unrelated to the terrorist attack witnessed by Americans on September 11th. Domestically, anti-Muslim sentiment and disproven claims by politicians that terrorists simply “slipped across the border” contributed to the growing public push for harsh migration control to counter the threat of Islamist terrorist groups entering the country. Overall, terrorism, Dr. James Walsh explains, acts as a moral panic because it is an invisible enemy that can never be defeated. By exploiting public anxiety of future devastation and referring to “shadowy threats and worst-case scenarios,” public concern is manipulated for political purposes, and the law is circumvented. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes this as the “state of exception.” Because terrorism is such a paramount danger, the state must make exceptions. Drastic measures ensure that certain groups are scapegoated, and attention is directed away from other pressing issues, as terrorism becomes the only thing in people’s minds. For instance, between 1969 and 2013, 5755 Americans died in terrorist attacks, a figure that accounts for domestic and international casualties. But in just 2013 alone, 33636 Americans died from domestic gun violence. The framing of terrorism as an existential threat, and the trillions of dollars spent on homeland security, are quite disproportionate given the death toll of terrorism compared to other, “less pressing” issues. Still, its framing is what makes the difference and pushes terrorism to priority #1.
Some argue that securitization is a necessary response to threats. While it is not harmful to recognize threats and emphasize their importance, one of the main drawbacks of securitization lies in its solvency. The rhetoric surrounding terrorism and border security during the 2024 election cycle, for instance, emphasized the imminent threat of terrorist groups, such as ISIS, entering the U.S. through a poorly enforced southern border, with some government officials warning, following the apprehension of ISIS members, that an attack would occur in the next few months. In response, politicians like Donald Trump made border security the centerpiece of their campaigns to protect U.S. citizens from the shadowy threat of another terror attack. This security approach, fueled by the securitization of migration and the southern border, then failed to effectively address terrorism. Twice as long as the southern border, a “safer, easier path” into the country, and a point of entry that has fallen off the radar of politicians, the CBP reports that the northern border between the U.S. and Canada was responsible for 86% of terrorist encounters in 2023. Securitization may have directed public attention to the threat of terrorists and lackluster border enforcement, but the framing of the southern border as the entry point for terrorists may have actually contributed to a focus tradeoff and therefore, weak enforcement in the north.
With this new understanding of securitization theory, we can apply it to the Trump administration’s crackdown on free speech across college campuses. In response to the widespread pro-Palestine protests, President Trump announced on Truth Social that, “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,” saying that Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is “the first arrest of many to come.” In the same manner, Marco Rubio posted on Twitter that he would be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” rhetoric that securitizes pro-Palestine protests and framed the wider support for Palestine as support for terrorism. The legislation that followed built upon this framing to justify the suppression of these protests. However, it’s essential to realize that opposition to the protests was not partisan. President Biden also heavily criticized the protests, and although he promised to uphold the tradition of peaceful protest, oversaw policies cracking down on pro-Palestine demonstrators, including the reauthorization of Section 702, an infamous mass surveillance law from the post 9/11 era that justified the Bush administration’s mass surveillance program that gathered intelligence on Americans abroad but ultimately swept into all Americans’ private communications. In the following years, the government also attempted to use Section 702 intelligence against journalists and Black Lives Matter protestors. Primarily due to the narrative that it was necessary to surveil pro-Palestine protests, Section 702 was reauthorized in April of 2024, with Congress failing to add a warrant requirement and greatly expanding the scope of surveillance. This change details that any “service provider with access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications” must assist with Section 702 surveillance. This amendment could cover universities and potentially any U.S. business providing WiFi to their customers. The Biden administration’s action on this issue, therefore, may have been a significant factor in why many supporters of Palestine were so unenthused about the presidential campaign of his Vice President Kamala Harris—after all, in terms of cracking down on protestors, Republicans and Democrats seemed aligned for once, in the worst way.
One must recognize that no matter how imminent a security threat may seem, it should not justify the erosion of basic civil liberties. It should not legitimize government overreach, because as the War on Terror has shown us, the backslide does not end. The politics of fear that securitization creates imposes a long-lasting sense of anxiety on the public and sets off a feedback loop of a threat, a policy to address it, and a new threat. In the case of free speech, where can the line be drawn? If “terrorism” is a valid justification for rolling back civil liberties, where do things end? What speech constitutes terrorism? If due process and civil liberties are only guaranteed to citizens, how do we prove that someone is a citizen, and is therefore entitled to civil liberties, without due process?
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