I appeared on Fox Business Evening Edit with Liz MacDonald to talk about the immigration case of Mahmoud Khalil, one of the masterminds of the campaign of terror on the campus of Columbia University.
Khalil currently is in DHS custody in Louisiana, on a Notice to Appear. There is a court battle in Manhattan, were the government has moved to dismiss the federal court case based on improper venue.
I talked about the Khalil case on The Tony Katz Show, and a clip from that segment formed the context of the Fox Business appearance.
Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)
MacDonald (01:02):…. And joining now is at Cornell University Professor, professor William Jacobson. Sir, thank you so much. A pleasure to see you. Thank you for joining us. Can you explain and break down this issue why it’s not a First Amendment rights issue?WAJ (01:33):Because when you come here on a visa, and if you eventually obtain a green card, you’re not a citizen. You don’t have the full rights that we have as citizens. And you come here on the condition that you comply with the immigration laws and the immigration laws do allow to deport people, even if they have not committed a crime. If he made some of the statements he made as a US citizen, you either prosecute him or you leave him alone. But when you come here on a visa and then a green card, there are provisions in the immigration laws that allow for your removal.So it’s not that you have no free speech rights, but you have rights that are subject to the immigration laws that do not apply to US citizens.MacDonald (02:12):Got it. So Secretary of State Marco Rubio, professor said this is about people that don’t have a right to be in the US to begin with. That no one has a right to a visa. No one has a right to a green card. The US has a right to deny that for virtually any reason. Notably, a supporter of Hamas, a murderous barbaric group that kidnaps children, rapes teenage girls, kidnaps and takes hostages, including Americans and let other hostages die in captivity.WAJ (02:39):Yeah, this guy ran a group that not only created a reign of terror on Columbia’s campus, his entire time in the US has been devoted to depriving Americans of their rights on campuses, their right to free speech, their right to an education.Nonetheless, we are a country that will afford him some due process. He’s now in the immigration system. He will get a hearing before an immigration judge. So he’s not without any rights.Bbut nobody should feel sorry for him. He came here apparently for the specific purpose of tearing down our country. And we have immigration rules that allow us to remove such a person from the country.MacDonald (03:19):Remove them. And, you know, didn’t he block help block students from going to class at Columbia depriving those students of their own rights, their education, their right to free speech?WAJ (03:29):Sure. The group he ran, which has said that it is devoted to tearing down Western civilization, had building takeovers at Columbia, blockades at Columbia, harassment of people at Columbia. So this is somebody who is manipulating our system. Nonetheless, our system will give him some due process, but nobody should cry a tear for him because he came here and he did things to destroy our society, and now he’s invoking the First Amendment to try to justify what he did.Again, we are better than that in the sense that he will get some due process, but nobody should feel sorry for him.MacDonald (04:05):Professor Jacobson, a pleasure to have you on.
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