Secretary of State Marco Rubio says “we’re going to keep doing it” after arrest of Columbia activist

Washington — Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that Mahmoud Khalil, an activist who is being detained by federal immigration authorities, is “going to leave — and so are others.”

“We’re going to keep doing it,” Rubio said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”

Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old who was born in Syria to Palestinian parents, served as a negotiator on behalf of students during Columbia University’s 2024 student encampment protests. He was arrested March 8 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained in New Jersey before being transported to a federal detention facility in Louisiana. Officials were acting on a State Department order to revoke his student visa, Khalil’s attorney said, but when they were informed that he was in the U.S. as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that, too.  

Rubio said after the arrest that the administration would be revoking the visas and green cards “of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

On Sunday, when asked whether he could provide evidence to support a link to terrorism, or whether Khalil was simply espousing a controversial political point of view, Rubio cited news footage, saying “these guys take over entire buildings, they vandalize colleges.”

“Negotiating on behalf of people that took over a campus, that vandalized buildings,” Rubio said. “That’s a crime in and of itself, that they’re involved in being a negotiator, the spokesperson.”

The secretary of state explained the thought process, which he called “very simple,” outlining that when someone entered the U.S. with a visa — whether as a student or tourist — they do so as a “guest.” 

“And if you tell us, when you apply for a visa, ‘I’m coming to the U.S. to participate in pro-Hamas events,’ that runs counter to the foreign policy interest of the United States of America,” Rubio said. “If you had told us that you were going to do that, we never would have given you the visa.”

Neither Rubio nor the White House have provided evidence that Khalil supported Hamas in any way other than support for the protesters at Columbia University, and Khalil’s lawyers say he is being punished for exercising his right to protest. Khalil’s attorneys have filed a motion to dismiss the case, and declare that his arrest and detention violate the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

A top ICE official in New York said in a court filing on Thursday that ICE charged Khalil as “removable … in that the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe that his presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Rubio said that if Khalil had said he planned to enter the U.S. to become a “spokesperson and one of the leaders of a movement that’s going to turn one of your allegedly elite colleges upside down,” preventing students from attending classes and resulting in vandalization of buildings, “we never would have let him in.”

More broadly, Rubio said the administration “every day now” is approving visa revocations, suggesting that if the visa led to a green card, that has implications for the green card process as well. 

Asked whether people with pro-Palestinian views would be the sole target having their visas revoked, Rubio said members of the Tren de Aragua prison gang would be targeted as well, adding that “we don’t want terrorists in America.”

“We don’t want people in our country that are going to be committing crimes and undermining our national security or the public safety,” Rubio said. “It’s that simple.”