In early March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil—a Palestinian Columbia University graduate student, campus organizer, and legal permanent resident—and detained him for more than three months, as the Trump administration worked to strip him of his status and deport him. (Khalil has since graduated.) For many, Khalil’s arrest marked a terrifying inflection point. Here was a legal permanent resident thrown in detention for what Secretary of State Marco Rubio plainly acknowledged were political reasons. Khalil was transparently and definitionally a political prisoner. His detention was an early marker that even the legal and political conventions that had held throughout Donald Trump’s first term were on the chopping block for an administration run by people like Stephen Miller, whose main takeaway from that first turn at the helm was they were too deferential to laws and norms.

Khalil had known that he incurred some risk from his campus advocacy, particularly given the so-called Palestine exception to liberal support for political speech, but he figured that he might, at most, suffer university harassment or discipline. Neither he nor, frankly, longtime political and immigration policy observers like myself expected that his actions would attract not........

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