In 1936, when Langston Hughes published the poem “Let America be America Again”, he was living on East 127th Street in Harlem. About 89 years later and 25 blocks to the southwest, on Saturday night (March 8), plainclothes agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), staked out an apartment building owned by Columbia University. They were waiting for Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate, to return home from an Iftar dinner he had attended with his eight-months pregnant wife.
When Mahmoud arrived, the agents took him into custody and threatened his wife, claiming that the Department of Homeland Security had revoked Mahmoud’s student visa. Reached by telephone, Mahmoud’s lawyer, Amy Greer, informed the ICE agents that he no longer had a student visa, but was a permanent US resident, holding what is commonly called a “green card.” The agents then changed their story, saying the State Department had revoked – or was revoking – Mahmoud’s legal residency; when Greer asked if they had a warrant, they hung up. On Monday (March 10), in a post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump called Mahmoud a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.”
Mahmoud had been a lead negotiator for the 2024 Columbia student encampment demanding divestment from Israeli apartheid and genocide. The agents were under orders to spearhead President Trump’s policy of deporting non-citizens defending Palestinian rights (“Hamas supporters”). His current whereabouts are unknown: DHS has informed neither his lawyer nor his family of his place of detention.
Columbia University, the largest private landholder in New York City, manages investments worth nearly $15 billion, which yielded an 11.5% return in FY2024. Some of Columbia’s real estate holdings provide subsidised residences for Columbia faculty and students, like the ones where Mahmoud was arrested and where I lived from 1990 to 1996, when I taught at the School of International and Political Affairs (SIPA), from which Mahmoud graduated in 2024. Langston Hughes’ litany of “profit, power, gain, of grab the land!” reverberates: the University’s expanding investments in both academic and commercial properties in neighboring Harlem have met resistance from the community. Columbia, like other American universities observes Columbia’s professor emeritus of history, Rashid Khalidi, “Has become a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education,” that is quickly caving in to the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom to salvage its bottom line.
Khalil has lived — is still living — the inner conflict of America that Hughes wrote about. Born a Palestinian refugee in Syria in 1995, from the age of five he witnessed the bloodshed of the Second Intifada, in which about 3,000 Palestinian non-combatants were killed, including over 1300 children. Through his adolescence, he watched Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza, as described by Khalidi, who was Mahmoud’s teacher at Columbia:
Three savage air and ground assaults on the [Gaza] strip . . . began in 2008 and continued in 2012 and 2014, leaving large swaths of its cities and refugee camps in rubble and struggling with rolling blackouts and contaminated water. . . . In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors. A total of 87 Israelis were killed, the majority of them military personnel engaged in these offensive operations.¹
As it was in 2024, the U.S. was fully complicit in these operations. Khalidi recounts:
Over a period of fifty-one days in July and August of 2014, Israel’s air force launched more than 6,000 air attacks, while its army and navy fired about 50,000 artillery and tank shells. Together, they utilised what has been estimated as a total of 21 kilotons (21,000 tons, or 42 million pounds) of high explosives. The air assault involved weapons ranging from armed drones and American Apache helicopters firing US-made Hellfire missiles to American F-16 and F-15 fighter-bombers carrying 2,000-pound bombs.²
For all that, Khalil enrolled in the Lebanese American University in Beirut. Upon graduation he obtained a student visa on the Algerian passport he had acquired along the way to move to the New York and study at Columbia. Whatever Mahmoud had seen of US hostility to Palestinian rights, America still called to him as the land where, in Hughes’ words, “opportunity is real, and life is free.” He married an American citizen, and he obtained permanent residency, a step toward citizenship.
After the Hamas massacres of 10/7, when the Biden administration provided political and material assistance to Israel’s genocidal assault on the people of Gaza, Khalil responded just as I and my fellow university students responded to the war in Vietnam nearly sixty years ago. We were more naïve about the risks than he could possibly be, but like us, he organised demonstrations, strikes, and even building occupations. He may have trusted in America’s rule of law even less than we did, but each of us equally failed to grasp that “America was never America to me.”
As America ever more openly adopts the doctrine of “owning everything for one’s own greed!”; as the white supremacist plan to “Make America Great Again” merges with the Jewish supremacist plan to establish Greater Israel from the River to the Sea; as generous visions of “Promised Lands” degenerate into genocidal conquests of “Manifest Destinies”: the target of the repression of Palestinian solidarity is not just Palestinians; the antisemites’ fake opposition to “antisemitism” is aimed, as Steve Bannon has said, at “progressive Jews”; and the fake slogan of anti-terrorism targets all that strikes terror into the heart of the rulers — opposition, equality, and, eventually, thought and truth themselves. In the face of an assault such as I, at least, have never seen in this country, remember the call of Langston Hughes:
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack account. It has been lightly edited for style.
