Hundreds of students walked out at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in protest of ICE’S detainment of Mahmoud Khalil on March 11.
Protesters gathered in front of the Memorial Library, 728 State St., to call on UW-Madison to protect students’ rights to protest. Students find themselves concerned with their safety after the detainment of Khalil made waves around the country for his prompt detainment over protests at New York’s Columbia University.
Khalil, a Palestinian international graduate student at Columbia, was accused of leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization” by the Department of Homeland Security for his protest organization efforts, the AP reported. Upon his detainment, he was threatened to have his student visa revoked — which Khalil did not have as a green card holder.
His arrest marks the first attempt to deport students who have joined protests against the continued war in Gaza.
Students at UW-Madison came out to ring the alarm on the potential implications for continued crackdowns on participants of political protests.
“The laws are words on a piece of paper if we don’t fight for them,” organizers said. “This is a brazen escalation. This is a brazen escalation to abduct a student protestor simply for the fact that he protested in solidarity with Palestine. The point of this is to scare us into submission.”
Students also find concerns for their own safety as they continue to protest the war and university investment in Israel — which was the center of last spring’s encampment.
In solidarity, organizers shot a question to university admin on if it will take action to protect them. They asked UW-Madison the same question Khalil asked Columbia prior to his detainment.
“With the stakes being so high, I ask you, as representatives of UW-Madison’s administration, how will you protect international students from doxing and from deportation? How will you protect these students’ rights to free speech, expression and association, rights provided for in the US Constitution, and stop the suppression and not potential criminalization of that speech and expression?”
The university does not have a direct position or comment on the current situation at Columbia, said John Lucas, assistant vice chancellor for UW-Madison public affairs. Instead, it provided its expressive activity policy and guides for if approached by law enforcement or a government agent.
An additional layer of worry from protesting students follows after the Department of Education sent a letter to UW-Madison, one of 60 universities named, for Title VI complaints. The letter alleges UW-Madison did not fulfill its obligation to protect Jewish students on campus from “antisemitic harassment and discrimination.”
Protest organizers on campus find the letter to not “be in good faith.”
“They are already threatening universities. There is no amount of brutality against students that these universities can commit that will satisfy the Trump Administration,” said Dahlia Saba, organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine. “Federal funding is probably going to be cut anyway. So is [UW-Madison] going to crack down on students and collaborate with a fascist regime or are they going to fight for their students?”
