By Ellen Isaacs
Thousands are protesting the detention and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student and green card holder who began life as a Palestinian refugee in Syria and led demonstrations at Columbia against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. He committed no crime, but is being called a security threat, a supporter of terrorism, in words that have reverberated many times in US history. The Trump regime threatens that his will be the first of many deportations to come.
However, we must remember that US capitalism has been deporting and forcefully moving workers since its inception, in order to lower wages, increase profits, build racism and nationalism and quell dissent (for a full discussion of this question, see https://multiracialunity.org/2016/05/07/migration-a-reflection-of-capitalism/#more-172). Below we will discuss some of the history of US deportations, current events at Columbia, the limitations of a nationalist outlook, and what kind of movement we must build. In future articles we will delve deeper into the history of fighting fascism around the world.
Deportations – An Established US Practice
Since 1882, the US has forced the removal of nearly 57 million people, more than any other country in the world. Although only one seventh of these were formal deportations, the rest were via “voluntary” departures, which only occur when ordered by federal authorities. In the last 100 years, more people have been expelled than have been allowed to stay in the US permanently.1
The modern deportation mechanism got rolling with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. By 1870, 20% of California’s workforce was Chinese, but they were soon no longer needed to build the railroads or work in cities as the native-born population grew. The Act not only restricted immigration, but denied citizenship or the right to marry a non-Chinese, even to longtime residents.
Over 22,000 immigrants of many origins had their citizenship revoked from 1906-1967, at first usually based on paperwork fraud charges, but later most often on a political basis. Terrified by the success of the Soviet Revolution in 1917, US leaders targeted left wing leaders. Perhaps the most famous case is that of anarchist Emma Goldman, who immigrated at 17 and married a citizen, but was deported in 1919 under the Anarchist Exclusion Act that banned foreign activists, who were said to have lied when taking an oath to defend the Constution.2 Nearly 250 leftists were deported to the USSR in that same year.3
The US passed the Nationality Act in 1940, which could revoke citizenship from anyone who obtained a foreign passport, voted in another country, served in their military, or even just took up residence abroad. Under its auspices, 8350 citizens were expatriated in 1953. In 1952 during McCarthyism, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, that required citizenship applicants to prove their Constitutional loyalty. One of the best known victims, the Trinidad-born activist Claudia Jones, was expelled in 1955. Since 1979, the Supreme Court has said citizenship can only be revoked for fraud or human rights violations.2,3 We’ll see what the Court has in store for us now.
Despite the fact that undocumented immigrants are vital to the agriculture, construction and home health industries, Trump is determined to deport millions in order to to build racism and nationalism. He is harking back to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that allowed a President to remove non-citizens during a “declared war,” including those who are long term residents, without any hearing or due process. The Supreme Court has said in the past that the Act can be used only during an “invasion or predatory incursion,” but that’s exactly what Trump calls immigrants – an invasion – especially those who cross the Southern border.4 As of today, a judge has rejected the use of this Act, but we shall see what happens next.
The administration is clearly planning to deport and terrify as many anti-genocide students as possible through direct intimidation and inducing universities to attack them on their own or face dire reprisals. To quote Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “We will be revoking the Visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”5 This attack is necessitated by the absolute need the US has for its ties with Israel as its lone strong and dependable ally in the fossil fuel rich Middle East (see https://multiracialunity.org/2024/11/21/geopololitics-glues-us-to-gaza-genocide/ ). The government fears a reprise of the effect of the student movement against the war in Vietnam that played a role in winning soldiers to rebel on the battlefield and end the war. Universities, largely run by boards of bankers and business owners and dependent on federal grants, are being easily intimidated from allowing dissent on their campuses.
Mahmoud Khalil and Columbia
So, to get back to the case at hand. Whether a student expresses verbal sympathy for Hamas or not is currently not a legal basis for arrest, academic sanctions or deportation. Mahmoud , however, actually said in a CNN interview, “I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other.”6 Although we do not know Mahmoud personally and do not know if by this he means he supports a single binational state with equal rights or if he thinks an Islamic state under Hamas is desirable for Palestinians, he at least does not believe that a state of continual occupation and war benefits either Israelis or Palestinians.
We, in any case, think it is essential to go beyond the positions of the groups leading the Columbia protests, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition (CPSC), if a movement that truly threatens imperialism and genocide is to be built. CUAD states ” We support freedom and justice for the Palestinian people, and for all people…. We will not rest until Columbia divests from apartheid Israel, Palestinians are free, and liberation is achieved for all oppressed people worldwide,” which necessitates the end of “colonialism and imperialism.” They also vigorously oppose racism, including ant-Semitism, Islamophobia and anti-blackness.7
The problem comes with the dedication to the “right of self-determination,” which is a common position of most groups on the “left” today. This formulation has two basic flaws, both of which derive from the lack of a class analysis of society. If capitalism is a system based on exploitation of the working class (which includes the unemployed, the employed, professionals, students and soldiers) by a small group of owners, then both imperialist nations and colonized nations are so divided. The implication is that even within the oppressor nations, the vast majority of the population are exploited and repressed, the US being a prime example. To this, Columbia students can well attest. and they do not hesitate to attack US capitalism. Thus the workers in imperialist nations have much in common with workers of colonized or formerly colonized ones.
The second fallacy, however, is that these same class divisions do not exist within colonized or oppressed nations, like Palestine or Sudan or Haiti or all of the others the CUAD pamphlet mentions. In fact, the institutions and representatives of the imperialists are always deeply implanted in the political and financial institutions of these nations, whether before or after battles for liberation. If an anti-capitalist, like Lumumba in the Congo or Allende in Chile, comes into leadership, the US takes him out. In virtually every state where national liberation struggles have been victorious, from South Africa to Algeria to El Salvador and many, many more, workers do not hold power or enjoy equality. The local economic structure remains tied to international imperialist institutions like the IMF, and the economies remain limited to supplying resources rather than production. The only real victory has been in installing a ruling class of the same ethnicity as the workers and obliterating some racial segregation, but not inequality.
In Palestine, Fatah, the ruling party of the West Bank, is openly corrupt and in league with Israeli rulers, even going so far as helping to arrest anti-occupation fighters. Hamas, the Islamic group that rules in Gaza, has accepted millions of dollars from Israel both at its entry into Gaza in 1987 and in recent years, so Israel could promote intra-Palestinian divisions. Hamas has ruled Gaza in a repressive fashion, taxing the general population at exorbitant rates and suppressing its opposition in order to favor its own members. Many of the leaders lived in wealth while most of the population was food insecure.8 Despite Fatah’s corruption, a 2023 poll of Gazans found that 70% would prefer Fatah rule.9 Even the incursion of October 7, although a military operation that surprised Israel, predictably resulted in mass murder and infrastructure destruction in Gaza. Although many Gazans may admire the courage of Hamas fighters, there is very widespread dislike of the consequences, according to Aljazeera.10
Nonetheless, the pro-Palestine movement outside of the occupied territories expresses unmitigated support of Hamas, mostly on the basis that they are the leaders of an oppressed society and thus cannot be criticized. The CPSC goes even farther down the nationalist path by disaffiliating from CUAD because it is a “nebulous organization that is not led by the affinity group of Palestinian student organizers,”11 They want only Palestinians to lead any collective opposing Israeli policy.
The Movement We Need
Our response is that workers in both imperialist and oppressed nations are victimized by capitalism and that we must unite as class brothers and sisters to analyze how to change this system. It is too simple and very misleading to declare that all rulers who oppose the US have the interests of workers at heart, even their own. None of us would be pleased to live or have lived under the Ayatollahs of Iran, Assad of Syria, or Saddam Hussein of Iraq, yet all of these have been supported by “leftists” on the grounds that they oppose the US.
In order to fight for freedom from capitalism, from racism, sexism, and imperialist wars for all workers, from Israel to Palestine, from the US to Russia and around the world, we must support each other, analyze each other’s situations, struggle with each other, and unite with each other. We must recognize that all ruling classes have an underlying strategy of maintaining their own power and use a variety of tactics to quell unrest – criminalizing dissent, deporting masses of workers, disrupting the workers’ lives with mass firings, cutting benefits and services and promoting police terror. Racism, nationalism and anti-communism are the main ideological tools of all these attacks.
As the US loses ground to China in productivity and influence in much of the world and as inter-imperialist war grows closer, fascist repression will be needed no matter which politicians are in power. We should recall that the current repression began well before Trump as Biden financed genocide and endorsed the firings and intimidation of many workers and student supporters of Palestine and supported cruel immigration policies.
We are glad to see an upsurge of demonstrations, of rapid response efforts to thwart deportations, know your rights campaigns and campus protests. However, it is problematic that the movements against cuts and layoffs and against campus repression remain separate to date. During the last week in New York City, there were mass marches of union workers and community groups against service and job cuts and, on the same day, marches to support Mahmoud Khalil that never intersected. We will not have the power to defeat fascism unless we unite, unless we recognize that fascism is the end result of failing capitalism that only an international rank-and-file led mass worker/student/soldier movement can overturn it and fight for a better world, one that we run ourselves.
Ellen Isaacs is a retired physician, anti-racist and anti-capitalist activist and co-editor of multiracialunity.org. She can be reached at eisaacs66@gmail.com.
1. Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine:America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, 2020, Princeton University Press, p. 3
2. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/citizens-denaturalization-and-assassination/
3. https://jacobin.com/2018/02/deportation-united-states-immigrants-activists
6. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/11/us/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-ice-green-card-hnk/index.html
8. https://thearabweekly.com/hamas-leaders-seen-living-luxury-while-gazans-suffer
17 March 2025
Source: countercurrents.org