They Came for Mahmoud Khalil in the Night, and They Will Come for Us, Too Highlight

As a Green Card holder and permanent resident, Khalil is not a typical candidate for deportation. However, the case against him has proceeded at the behest of the Secretary of State, who is invoking a rarely-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The provision reads: “An 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 is deportable.”

The INA, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, became law in 1952. As The Forward has reported, “The act’s quotas and ideological litmus test were widely understood at the time to target Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of being Soviet agents.”