At the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, U.S. Vice President JD Vance warned Europe not to back away from one of the West’s most basic democratic values: free speech.
“In Washington there is a new sheriff in town," he said, "and under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”
Vance continued, “Dismissing people, dismissing their concerns… shutting down media, shutting down elections… protects nothing. It is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”
He added, “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.”
Vance had just joined Donald Trump in running a successful 2024 presidential campaign that championed free speech and condemned the Biden administration for its censorship efforts.
On March 8, barely three weeks after Vance’s Munich speech, Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and sent to a detention center in Louisiana to be deported. He is a legal resident married to an American woman who is pregnant.
Khalil was not charged with a crime. President Trump praised the arrest, saying that Khalil had engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity” that his administration would not tolerate.
“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country,” Trump added.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said his department has revoked more than 300 student visas. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas," he said.
When Turkish Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested this week, a video showed “masked, plain-clothes officers handcuffing and leading her to an unmarked car.”
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin posted on X that Ozturk "engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
"A visa is a privilege not a right," she added.
Yet, like the case of Khalil, no one knows what, if any charges she is facing. A judge ruled that she could not be removed from Massachusetts but the feds took her to the same Louisiana detention center anyway. Reports presume that it was an op-ed that Oztruk wrote last year with two other students criticizing the Israel war in Gaza that brought on the heat.
When asked about Oztruk, however, Rubio said no one should get a visa if they come to the United States to join protest movements that result in vandalism and “raising a ruckus” on campus. He would not say if Ozturk was being singled out for those activities.
The administration argues that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 gives the government the right to revoke the green card of “[a]n alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Without issuing evidence that Khalil and Ozturk’s presence here in the U.S. would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” (the statute says the administration has to notify Congress with their justifications, have they?) we can assume that they are being used as examples in order to chill speech more broadly.
The administration appears to be hiding behind this rarely used statute, but what the rest of us are taking away from all this is that the administration believes our First Amendment protections end at criticizing Israel’s government.
“One reason the actions against Khalil should give MAGA pause is that the administration seems to be acting on behalf of Israel, not the American people,” wrote Andrew Day for the American Conservative, who warned Trump supporters that “the precedent could enable a future Democratic president to target conservatives.”
Categorizing pro-Palestinian protesters as “pro-terrorist,” “pro-Hamas,” or “anti-Semitic” could feasibly be true in some of these cases, and yet, if these people are not actually committing crimes, their speech should be Constitutionally protected.
The Nazi marchers that the Americans Civil Liberties Union so famously defended in Skokie, Illinois, in 1978 were definitely anti-Semitic.
And the courts determined they had a right to speak.
It might be cliché to say that the entire point of free speech is to protect the speech we hate, but apparently it's a trope the Trump administration hasn’t heard enough.
Those cheering Trump’s rounding up of pro-Palestinian protesters might argue that supporting Israel and opposing Hamas has greater value than free speech, or even that those targeted are actual terrorists, putting them in a separate category.
But we can rationalize similar free speech exceptions about all sorts of positions.
In his Munich speech, Vance cited the prosecution of Briton Adam Smith-Connor, a physiotherapist and army veteran who Vance said had been charged with the “heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.”
Heidi Stewart, chief executive of Bpas, the UK’s leading abortion provider, said of Vance’s comments, “Bpas ... will always remain proud to stand against misogynistic and anti-democratic interference with British women’s reproductive rights by foreign extremists, whether they are the vice-president of the US or not.”
Someday, “foreign extremist” JD Vance could be considered a “threat” to U.S. foreign policy by another administration. Then what happens?
Vance’s broader point was that people of different views should be able to express them in Western democracies.
And he was right. The first time.
He told European countries last month that their greatest threats weren’t from Russia or China, but their retreat from some of their “most fundamental values,” that the United States has historically shared with them, with freedom of expression seeming to top his list.
“What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance warned.
Americans should worry too.
