Ninety days into the second Trump administration, a new kind of American political imprisonment had taken shape. It does not run through criminal courts, grand juries, or trials. It runs through civil immigration detention, and it is triggered by op-eds, rallies, social-media posts, and campus encampments.
The first case set the pattern. In March 2025, federal immigration officers came to the Manhattan apartment building of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student who had served as lead negotiator for the campus's spring 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment. Khalil was a lawful permanent resident, married to a U.S. citizen, expecting their first child, and charged with no crime. He was detained anyway, flown 1,400 miles to an immigration prison in Jena, Louisiana, and held under a Cold War-era provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act on the theory that his presence carried "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences." The foreign-policy consequence at issue was that he had organized against the war in Gaza on an American campus.
The playbook
What happened to Khalil has since happened, with small variations, to a growing list of people. The steps repeat often enough to be described as procedure. The government identifies a non-citizen whose politics it wants punished, usually someone organizing or writing about Palestine. It avoids criminal charges, which would bring an indictment, a public trial, appointed counsel, and a burden of proof. It routes the case through civil immigration authority instead, detains the person quickly, and transfers them to a remote facility in Louisiana or Texas, far from family, lawyers, and hometown reporters. Then it holds them while the paperwork question — a visa, a green-card application, an old overstay — winds through an administrative system with almost none of the protections a criminal court would impose. Whether the government ultimately wins hardly matters. The detention itself is the sanction, and it is delivered in full before any judge rules on anything.
The names
- Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts doctoral student from Turkey, surrounded by plainclothes officers on a Somerville sidewalk and flown to Louisiana. The only basis ever identified was a student-newspaper op-ed she co-signed about Gaza.
- Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student and lawful permanent resident, detained when he showed up for his own naturalization interview in Vermont — a routine appointment used as a trap.
- Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia undergraduate who has lived in the United States since she was seven, targeted for removal over a campus sit-in.
- Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman from New Jersey, arrested over a visa overstay that surfaced only after she appeared at pro-Palestine protests.
- Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown postdoctoral fellow from India, seized outside his Virginia home and accused of "spreading Hamas propaganda" — which, per the government's own description, meant posting about Gaza.
The administration describes all of this as routine immigration enforcement that happens to involve politically active people. The record says otherwise. Khalil and Mahdawi held green cards. Chung has been here since elementary school. Immigration status varies across the cases; the speech does not. What the cases share is the forum the government chose for them — an enforcement system with no jury, no appointed lawyer, and no presumption of liberty, aimed at people whose actual offense was expression the First Amendment protects.
The quiet that follows
Punishing one writer is not the point of arresting a green-card holder over an op-ed. Teaching every other non-citizen what writing costs is. PEN America, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, FIRE, and the Knight First Amendment Institute have each documented the result in real time: op-eds withdrawn, names pulled off open letters, international students counseled by their own professors to stay away from protests. Campus speech is measurably quieter than it was a year ago, and the quiet is the product.
The National Political Prisoner Coalition tracks each of these cases by name, case number, and detention facility, and adds them to the U.S. political-prisoner roster wherever civil immigration detention is functioning as a substitute for criminal prosecution of political activity. When detention is the punishment for speech, the people detained are political prisoners, whatever the paperwork says.
