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Since Donald Trump reclaimed office in 2024, ICE has detained a population of immigrants and Americans that shattered every record in the agency's history, with a death toll that’s nearly double the entire four year Biden term, in a fraction of the time. To say they have been cruel and reckless is an understatement.
Earlier this year, mere months after killing the poet Renee Good in a Minneapolis suburb at point blank range, ICE agents dressed in plainclothes showed up at an apartment in New York without a warrant and took the activist, Mahmoud Khalil. He had not been accused of, charged with, or convicted of any crime. When agents were informed he was a lawful permanent resident, they disregarded it—as they have done to many people over the last year who are legal citizens of the U.S.—and they instead told him his status would be revoked instead.
What followed was a masterclass in how a government dismantles a voice it finds threatening—not with a single blow, but with intimidation and bureaucracy. With process. With the slow suffocation of procedure.
Internal documents reveal the Board of Immigration Appeals rushed his case, treating it as high priority before they’d even officially received it, issuing a decision just nine days after paperwork was submitted—a timeline one former board member called “unprecedented” and “an insane turnaround.” Khalil’s lawyers say the evidence “suggests that the Trump administration secretly engineered the outcome of his immigration case to make an example of him.” In other words: An inside job.
Example. This phrase, in this context, is heavy with meaning, because making an example of someone isn’t really about that person—it’s about everyone who is watching. It’s a message to every organizer, every concerned citizen, every green card holder considering raising their voice: we can do this to you, too. We can do this to anyone.
That message hasn’t stopped landing. Almost a year and a half later, Khalil is still wrestling with the government on five separate legal fronts at once. A federal judge found his detention likely unconstitutional and ordered him released, but the government appealed and won. A Third Circuit panel ruled the district court never had the right to hear his claims in the first place, doing away with the question entirely and sending him back into the immigration system that was built to remove him. His team asked the appeals court to reconsider but they lost that request too. Meanwhile, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a final order of removal. His lawyers are appealing that to the Fifth Circuit and separately asking the BIA to reopen the case entirely, citing new evidence of government misconduct. And now the case is headed to the Supreme Court, on a stay the Third Circuit granted while his team prepares their petition. If this paragraph gave you a headache just trying to follow along, that’s because it’s supposed to. The Trump administration has purposefully made it as difficult as possible for anyone on their retribution list to fight back, tying them up in the grinding machinery of litigation sometimes for years on end.
What happened to Khalil—what is STILL happening to him—is an American nightmare. It is designed to scare any of us who dare to speak out. A person who spoke in public, who organized on a campus, who did what we tell people in a democracy they are supposed to do—is still, more than a year on, fighting for the right to stay in the only system that promised him due process to begin with. Not for a crime. For his words. And when asked by reporters why the Department of Homeland Security is still pursuing him despite offering not a single shred of evidence against him, a spokesperson for the Trump administration said it, “acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority.” That’s it. That’s their basis for all of this.
What they are counting on is that the rest of us run out of fight, that we will be exhausted by attrition and to any degree, give up, or at least, give in. But I’ve learned rage is a renewable resource.
In honor of Mahmoud and the countless people who risk their lives by speaking out, write about something you believe—something you’d say out loud, put your name on—and what it would cost you to say it. In your actual life, with your actual circumstances. Then write about saying it anyway.
The form is yours: essay, poem, letter, journal, artwork, song. The only rule is that your name goes on it.
Khalil’s name went on everything he said. That’s why they came for him. (It’s also why we know his name.)
This can be something just for you, or you can share it with all of us either in the comments below or by tagging me in Notes or on any social media platform. As always, I would love to read what you’ve created and will share it with our community.
Substack Lives coming up including Joan of Arcadia show creator Barbara Hall and more!
September 3rd @ 2pm ET: A conversation with nonfiction writer and poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz on finding humor in the gruesome, writing across genres, and her new book The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America.
September 14th @ 2pm: Joan of Arcadia, Madame Secretary, and Judging Amy fans: Brace yourselves, we have the one and only show creator-extraordinaire Barbara Hall in the house for a conversation you won’t want to miss.
October 14th @ 2pm: A conversation with one of our most gifted fiction and short story writers and educators on the craft of dark humor in storytelling, managing chronic illness as a writer, and her new murder mystery, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, Nafissa Thompson-Spires. (Live link coming soon!)
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