The Law Is Not Always to Be Trusted

Columbia professor Bruce Robbins wonders what the Trump administration is so afraid of, as it deploys ICE agents to campus to detain student protesters.

By Bruce RobbinsMarch 13, 2025

• Politics

• Education

THE JEWISH STUDENTS WHO rallied for Mahmoud Khalil on the steps of Low Library yesterday were pretty raucous, but they had a lot to make noise about. They were allowed to have a microphone—that’s not a given—but they were also penned in by police barricades so that no one could join them. I tried to, egged on by a bolder fellow Jewish faculty member (we recognized each other from previous demonstrations). We told the security guys (well, she did) that we were being denied access to a part of the campus on the basis of our Jewish identity. This didn’t work, but it may be useful later if we are called before one of the Columbia tribunals that have been systematically cracking down for months on pro-Palestine protesters, especially students.

The Trump administration’s frontal assault on Columbia began on Friday, March 7, with the announcement of a blockage of $400 million in government funding, and it continued the next day with the arrest of Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and a legal resident of the United States. By his and other accounts, Khalil had served as a spokesperson and mediator for the Gaza encampment. There is no evidence that he expressed support for Hamas or for terrorism. There is no evidence that he committed any illegal act at all. He has a green card and is entitled to the same right to free speech as a citizen. Sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to arrest him and threaten him with deportation constitutes serious overreach on the part of the Trump administration, and it’s to be hoped that the courts—Khalil was due in court yesterday—will say so.

The faculty gathering organized by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) on Sunday, the day after Khalil’s arrest, was a quieter affair—more a press conference than a rally. It took place on what looks like public ground—no security to get through—in front of the expensive, intrusive new buildings in Harlem that the university spent so much of its endowment on. This meeting, too, made a theatrical show of how much the charges of antisemitism on Columbia’s campus are, so to speak, trumped up. Two different rabbis spoke (both very well), as did a child of Holocaust survivors and a fiery defender of civil liberties. But this event was about freedom of speech, the rule of law, and the mission of the university, not about Palestine.

Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School who was harassed into retirement last year for her pro-Palestinian efforts, especially her efforts to protect at-risk students, hovered in the background of the press conference, unwilling to call any attention to herself. She was a reminder to us all that the law is not always to be trusted. The leverage the Columbia administration held over her was her mention, in a Democracy Now! interview, of the perilous presence on Columbia’s campus of many recent veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces, fresh off the battlefield, full of self-righteous anger. As Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is currently being interpreted, criticism of the IDF is criticism of Israelis (since most Israelis are conscripted to serve), and criticism of Israelis counts as racism.

The Jewish students who were sitting on the Low steps were protesting the presence of ICE on campus (one poster: “pigs aren’t kosher”) and the government’s anti-immigrant policy in general (one chant: “Hey hey, ho ho, deportation’s got to go”). They seemed well aware that exposing the falsehoods of the Trump administration can’t be the primary task. Every word out of the Trump administration is a falsehood; there are just too many. It’s more useful to focus on people and institutions that ought to know better. It’s the craven appeasement of the Columbia administration, the fact that it could stand up to Trump’s falsehoods but chooses not to, that had the students calling for the ouster of interim president Katrina Armstrong. After Khalil’s arrest, Armstrong put out a statement that pledged to cooperate with the federal government against antisemitism on campus. Like her predecessor Minouche Shafik, who called the cops on the protesters and decided to resign after a 2–3 vote of no confidence by faculty in Arts & Sciences, Armstrong did not dispute in the slightest detail the over-the-top account of antisemitism on campus that has been the government’s excuse for its aggression.

There are a lot of opinions concerning antisemitism on Columbia’s campus based on very few objective facts. That is certainly the case for the Task Force on Antisemitism, led by three public Zionists and formed around the time Columbia suspended its Jewish Voice for Peace chapter for staging a die-in without paying proper heed to (newly instated) rules for the time, place, and manner of protests. Here is Len Gutkin of The Chronicle of Higher Education, describing the task force’s second report:

It recounts a handful of instances of abusive language on a Columbia-only social-media site, which provide evidence, however limited, of genuinely hateful attitudes among some of its students. But most of the other incidents the report includes are uncorroborated, and there’s no reason to think that the most alarming—necklaces ripped off of Jewish students while they walk back to campus, for instance—were perpetrated by Columbia students. As a piece of investigatory reportage, the document is a mess. It strains to make the most of very little; it was going to conclude that antisemitism was rife on campus no matter what it uncovered.

In her recent statement, Armstrong did not mention Khalil at all. She did not mention the fact that Jewish faculty members, alumni, and at least one trustee had called on the government to arrest Khalil. She did mention the fact that, one day before his arrest, Khalil had written to the administration to ask for its protection. Protection is what the students were calling for. It doesn’t look like they are going to get it.

One bit of local history to which the Columbia administration never seems to have paid much heed: in 1968, it was the presence of the police on campus that galvanized large-scale support for the student protesters. Foreign policy issues like the war in Vietnam might eventually have done it, but we’ll never know. Today, it’s the lockdown of the campus and the pervasive presence of security, which the administration has maintained for over a year, that alienates the majority of faculty members—that and the desire to keep Columbia’s students, many of whom, like Khalil, are international, out of the clutches of Trump’s deportation program. When I tried to enter campus yesterday at the main gate on 116th Street, there was a line of 150–200 people waiting to have their IDs checked. What is the administration so frightened of? It couldn’t have been what is actually happening on campus, where the Jewish students who were demonstrating for Mahmoud Khalil said prayers and sang songs in Hebrew.

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Featured image: Bruce Robbins at the recent Columbia protests, by Nina Berman.