The move by Washington to deport Mahmoud Khalil is based on witch-hunt laws put on the books to target communists and other opponents of capitalism’s exploitation, oppression and wars. It should be opposed by working people. Khalil, a former student at Columbia University in New York, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents March 8 and is being held in a detention facility in Louisiana.
Since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Jews in Israel, Khalil has organized actions that call for the destruction of Israel and threaten Jewish students. Workers and our unions have a big stake in fighting Jew-hatred, which the capitalist rulers have used to divide workers and crush workers’ organizations as crises deepen in the imperialist epoch.
At issue here is not Khalil’s pro-Hamas politics — abhorrent to millions — but the U.S. government’s use of the infamous Immigration and Nationality Act, adopted in 1952, to target communists and other opponents of government policies based on their political views. The thought-control statute allows the expulsion of anyone the government claims “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for Washington.
Adopted during the McCarthyite witch hunt, the law was used to deport immigrants on the basis of their membership, past membership or association with the Communist Party or any organization deemed “totalitarian” by the U.S. rulers.
It’s part of the arsenal of witch-hunt statutes the capitalist class can use to attack working people at home and to advance their predatory military interventions abroad. It goes side by side with the use of the FBI and other political police agencies, as well as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which criminalizes people whose political views align with governments Washington opposes. Last year leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party were framed up as “foreign agents.”
Two years after it was adopted, the Immigration and Nationality Act was used to try to deport Carl Skoglund, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. The 1954 deportation order cited the fact Skoglund had been a member of the Communist Party up to 1928. He was won to support Leon Trotsky’s efforts to defend the legacy of V.I. Lenin against a counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin. Skoglund left the CP to help found the SWP.
Protests against Skoglund’s deportation won his release from the ship he was on in New York harbor, 10 minutes before it was set to sail.
William Worthy, a Black U.S. citizen who traveled to Cuba in 1961, was charged under the act on his return. “No other U.S. citizens have ever been indicted,” the Militant reported, “for having returned ‘illegally’ to their native country.” Since then, the Immigration and Nationality Act has been used to delay or deny visas to Cubans invited to speak in the U.S.
As Leon Trotsky explained in 1939, “Under conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppression of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history.”
The use of the act against Khalil today sets a dangerous precedent for its use against workers, our unions, political organizations like the SWP and others in the years ahead as the class struggle heats up. It should be condemned by all defenders of constitutional protections, regardless of his Jew-hating views and anti-working-class actions.