Mahmoud Khalil is living the American dream

With Iran’s nuclear sites “obliterated” and the 12 DAY WAR in the rear-view, the Trump administration can now turn attention back to its core mission: defeating the Enemy Within.

Buried within all the war and New York election hubbub this week was the news that the US had arrested 11 Iranian nationals who were in the country illegally, including, according to the New York Post, “a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member with suspected ties to Hezbollah, an ex Iranian army sniper and a terror watchlist suspect.”

The administration, not without reason, is concerned that Iran will activate “sleeper cells” in the US. One of the suspects was carrying an Iranian military ID card, another was scheduled for deportation in 2022, and many others continue to slink around, emboldened by the previous administration’s lax immigration policies. “Over the past four years, thousands of Iranian nationals have been documented entering the United States illegally and countless more were likely in the known and unknown got-a-ways,” said Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott.

Thanks to this week’s 6-3 Supreme Court decision once again clearing the way for the Trump administration to deport illegal immigrants to the foreign country of its choosing, these men may be facing an unwanted vacation in El Salvador, or South Sudan. Maybe they should consider themselves fortunate ICE captured them before the building of a tent-based, swamp-protected Florida prisoner compound that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is ominously calling “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Recently-furloughed ICE detainee Mahmoud Khalil, on the other hand, is a more complicated case. A federal judge has freed Khalil from ICE custody, saying that what the federal government has accused him of – lying on his Green Card application about his political activities and affiliations – neither presents a material risk to the United States nor warrants his continued incarceration.

The 11 recently detained Iranians, not to mention hundreds of thousands of terrified asylum seekers in the US, wish they had Khalil’s attorneys, or his PR team. Immediately upon his release, the New York Times greeted Khalil with a warm hug of a front-page interview. “It was like being kidnapped,” Khalil said, of his three-month detention.

Yes, it was like being kidnapped, in that ICE, without warning, arrested Khalil in the lobby of his apartment building. But it was unlike being kidnapped in that every single person in the world knew where he was and why, that the ACLU began representing him immediately, that he got out for a brief supervised visit with his wife and newborn son, and that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was there to greet him at the prison gates with a smile immediately upon his release. AOC didn’t afford this courtesy to any of the actual US citizens who Hamas actually kidnapped on October 7 and returned only under extreme duress. But those people don’t really fit the narrative like Khalil does.

The judge has restricted Khalil’s movements to New York, New Jersey, Washington, DC and Louisiana, which seems like a lot, and didn’t put any restrictions on what Khalil can do while the Trump administration makes every effort to send him back to his native Syria. So Sunday treated us to the ludicrous, insulting spectacle of a keffiyeh-wrapped Khalil marching alongside, and addressing, a rapt crowd of Free Palestine marchers the morning after the US bombed Iran, using his immigration reprieve to chant “globalize the intifada.”

Now, if Khalil were an American citizen, this activity would be annoying but also explicitly protected under the Constitution. But he’s not. He’s a Syrian national, no longer enrolled in graduate school, who potentially represents the interests of a foreign terrorist organization in the United States. That said, he’s also handsome, calmly well-spoken and about as well-connected on the political left as a person could possibly be.

There may not be a place for Mahmoud Khalil in Donald Trump’s USA, but he’ll fit right into Zohran Mamdani’s New York. He’ll never see Alligator Alcatraz, but, one day soon, might find himself in a guest chair on The View. He may be a villain, but he’s almost certainly going to be a villain with a book deal. The American dream takes all kinds of forms, and one suspects that Mahmoud Khalil’s is just beginning.