JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
One morning in January of 1987, Michel Shehadeh, a Palestinian man who'd lawfully emigrated to the United States as a teenager, was taking care of his toddler son at home when federal agents arrived at his door and arrested him at gunpoint. Shehadeh soon learned he was one of eight immigrants, mostly students and known as the LA Eight, arrested on charges relating to their pro-Palestinian activism. Fast forward to this month, when federal agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate student, and Georgetown professor Badar Khan Suri. Like the LA Eight, both are in the U.S. legally, being threatened with deportation, and both are targets of the Trump administration's crackdown on what they describe as antisemitic pro-Hamas speech on college campuses across the country. For insight into this moment and what we can learn from the plight of the LA Eight, we turn now to David Cole. He represented the LA Eight over their 20-year fight to remain in the United States. David Cole, welcome to the program.
DAVID COLE: Thanks for having me.
SUMMERS: I just want to start by asking you, as briefly as you can, could you just walk us through what happened to the LA Eight?
COLE: Well, as you indicated in your opening, they were arrested at gunpoint. They were all detained initially as national security threats. When we challenged that assertion, the government said it wanted to rely on secret evidence that we couldn't see to show that they were security threats. The judge said, no, I'm not going to look at secret evidence unless you can show it to the defendants, essentially. And the government said, OK, well, then we're not going to show it to the judge either, and they were allowed out. After about the first month, they were free for the entire 20-year saga of their case, but it took 20 years to prevail in a case in which the government targeted our clients for essentially advocating for Palestinian self-determination.
SUMMERS: As you mentioned, these cases went on for more than two decades. How did that affect the lives of the LA Eight, their families?
COLE: Well, the principal restriction on them was that they weren't able to leave the country, and so a number of them lost parents who were living back in Palestine and were unable to go see their parents in the last years, months, days of their lives without giving up their right to stay in this country. And they just had for two decades, hanging over their heads, the fact that they may lose the right to be in this country, despite the fact that they engaged in no unlawful activity, because of what they said and what they believed in.
SUMMERS: What are the similarities that you see between their case and those that are being brought today against Mahmoud Khalil and the others?
COLE: Well, it's really deja vu all over again. The government is targeting Palestinians engaged in nothing more than protest activities on campuses. Why? - because the government disagrees with the viewpoints expressed, and so they are seeking to deport people for their speech. And what we established in the LA Eight case was that the First Amendment protects all of us in the United States.
SUMMERS: In order to pursue these deportations, the government is using a rarely invoked part of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the U.S. secretary of state to deport any noncitizen whose presence in the U.S. could be deemed to have, and I'm quoting here, "adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States." Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made the claim that Khalil's case, at least, it's not about free speech, but it's about who is and who is not allowed to be in the country to begin with. What do you make of that argument?
COLE: First of all, the notion that a college student's speech on a single campus in the United States somehow poses serious, adverse foreign policy consequences is laughable. But in addition, it's a violation of the First Amendment because what is the basis upon which he says Mr. Khalil's activities undermine our foreign policy? Nothing more than his pure speech, and speech is protected for all of us.
SUMMERS: If the government is successful in deporting someone like Khalil or Badar Khan Suri, what kind of ripple effects might that have for free speech in the United States?
COLE: Well, it will send a tremendous chill across this country, and that is its intention. President Trump on Truth Social essentially said, you know, this is the first step. We're going to go after anyone who engages in what he calls illegal protests, which he seems to define as protests he doesn't like. But the First Amendment is here to say that is not the government's prerogative. The government in the United States has to tolerate speech, even speech that it disapproves of - especially speech that it disapproves of.
SUMMERS: David Cole is a former lawyer for the LA Eight and national legal director for the ACLU. He is now at Georgetown Law. David, thank you so much for talking with us.
COLE: Thanks so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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