The United States has always had the right to say that bad behavior by immigrants was grounds for deportation, visa revocation, or denial of reentry. This goes back many years, and one of the most famous cases is silent film star Charlie Chaplin, born in London, England in1889, and despite many year of residence in the US, still a British subject, whose reentry permit was revoked the day after he left for England—on a ship—in 1952.
One cause célèbre for anti-deportation enthusiasts is a guy named Mahmoud Khalil, who has been leading riots at Columbia in support of Hamas and the Palestinians who shelter Hamas in Gaza. He and his friends have done things like setting up tent cities, illegally occupying buildings, harassing people, et cetera, and this had been largely unpunished.
It’s been unpunished by Columbia University, by the City and State of New York, and by the Biden Administration—as an attack on the civil rights of normal Columbia staff and students, it’s a federal case—especially given that the City and State of New York are refusing to help.
Staff, by the way, includes the black janitors who have clean up after the rioters:
There was an election in November, so it’s not going unpunished by the Trump Administration, which has been revoking student visas of the pro-terrorist rioters. Khalil, however, is not in the US on a student visa—he’s a Permanent Resident, with a Green Card. When ICE agents were told about that, they said they’d revoke that, instead. Seems reasonable to me:
Source: Rights and Responsibilities of a Green Card Holder (Permanent Resident), USCIS.gov
Various judges are trying to interfere, and of course, people calling themselves “Principled Conservatives” are writing and tweeting about “due process”—a principle that really doesn’t apply to immigration decisions of this kind.
Another Green Card resident who’s been in the papers is Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University transplant doctor who was denied reentry to the U.S.—headlines keep saying deported, but the point of a denial of reentry is that she voluntarily left, and the immigration authorities wouldn’t let back in—after a trip to Lebanon, where she is apparently a citizen.
Lawyers for the government said the doctor “had already departed the United States” by the time Customs and Border Protection officers at Boston’s Logan Airport received notice of Judge Leo Sorokin‘s instructions, the judge said in a brief order Monday.
Alawieh, a Rhode Island transplant doctor and assistant professor at Brown University, was detained on Thursday in Boston after visiting family in Lebanon, her cousin claimed in a lawsuit challenging Alawieh’s detention.
Why was she being refused reentry after a trip visiting family…and attending a funeral? The funeral was of a terrorist leader.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Monday that Alawieh had told Customs and Border Protection officers that she traveled to Beirut to attend the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
“A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security,” the DHS statement continued.
Deported Brown University doctor allegedly showed support for Hezbollah leader, DHS says, CBS, March 18, 2025
Let’s return to Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin had two problems with the public—and with the United States immigration authorities. One was moral turpitude—Chaplin had repeatedly had sex with underage girls, three of whom he married.
This led to problems, including a messy 1927 divorce trial [‘Perverted, degenerate and indecent acts’: Charlie Chaplin and the original A-list divorce scandal, by Martin Chilton, The Telegraph, July 25, 2020] a paternity suit that he lost, and a prosecution under the Mann Act, for “transportation of women across state boundaries for sexual purposes.”, for which he was acquitted. (Harvey Weinstein said Chaplin was his idol.)
One headline on the Mann Act trial was “Tentative Jury in Chaplin Case – British Nationality Of Actor Made Issue“, The San Bernardino Daily Sun, March 22, 1944.
According to the New Yorker
In 1945, the film historian F. X. Feeney writes, “Senator William Langer put forward bill S.536 calling for the Attorney General to investigate and determine whether the ‘alien’ Chaplin should be deported because of ‘his unsavory record of law breaking, of rape, or the debauching of American girls 16 and 17 years of age.’ ”
The other point was that he was a notable Communist sympathizer. Hollywood historian Scott Eyman published a book called Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided [Vanity Fair Magazine excerpt here] which claims, as almost all MSM reporting on Hollywood Communists claims, that this was unfair persecution of someone who was merely “liberal” and that Chaplin was “driven into exile.” In fact, he was a Communist sympathizer, and if this didn’t make him deportable, once Chaplin boarded the RMS Queen Elizabeth for England, he could be denied reentry, especially while the US was at war with the Communists in Korea.
The United States government has the right to do this kind of thing—the American people just have elect leaders who will do it.