In a letter penned from a federal detention facility in Louisiana, pro-Palestinian activist and political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil posed a simple and urgent question: “Who has the right to have rights?” If we ask the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, which guarantee due process and equal protection, the answer is clear: people do. 

Not citizens, but people. 

The Trump administration is violating this principle by punishing student organizers like Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi as part of its broader campaign against immigrants. These arrests are grave constitutional violations, each further eroding the fragile state of our collective civil rights.

Over the last two years, I’ve written op-eds about the horrors of the Israeli government’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, protested with Students for Justice in Palestine, participated in Seders led by Jewish Voice for Peace and joined the encampment on Northrop Lawn. 

I’ve taken these actions because I am a humanist and an American taxpayer who refuses to believe the intentional starvation and extermination of an entire population can ever be justified. 

It’s not more complicated than that. 

What about these beliefs change because I happened to be born a U.S. citizen?

That is the legal distinction between myself, Khalil, Ozturk, Mahdawi and the thousands of immigrants who have been wrongfully detained and targeted since January. When we set aside how we are recognized by the state, our actions remain the same.

The consequences of this widening dragnet of fascism are unfolding around us. 

One of the 11 University of Minnesota students whose legal status was terminated, Doğukan Günaydın, has been held in Sherburne County jail for over a month. Rather than fighting for its own student’s release, this administration is helping to facilitate the training of his captors by leasing a gun range to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

An immigration judge ruled that the Department of Homeland Security failed to make a case for his removal, yet he remains in ICE custody because he is a “danger to public safety.” Their evidence? A misdemeanor drunk driving ticket from 2023.

The point is not to excuse the offense, but to remind us that perfection is not a prerequisite for deserving constitutional protection. 

An estimated one in seven Minnesotans have a DWI on their record. Should their rights be stripped away too?

From the American South to Nazi Germany, fascist governments have redrawn the boundaries of citizenship to justify oppression and consolidate power. This power struggle plays out first on the bodies and lives of vulnerable people. 

That’s the beauty of due process, which requires the government to follow strict procedures before depriving anyone of their rights. It does not assume guilt or innocence. It demands integrity from the legal system the public can trust. Equal protection was brought about as an enforcement mechanism to animate due process in reluctant states following the abolition of slavery. 

Some of the most regrettable rulings passed down from the Supreme Court involve the denial of citizenship and the narrowing of rights to disenfranchised people who are not nondisabled, landowning white men.

And for the most part, the Court has taken these lessons seriously. It is widely held that denying constitutional protections to people solely based on their nation of origin causes needless harm and undermines our shared humanity. The very document used to deny civil rights has also been essential to expanding them.

The Constitution is both limiting and limitless, depending on who’s reading it. It carries the deep contradictions of this country, and in that paradox lies the seriousness of our obligation to defend each other when these protections come under threat.

How we uphold these principles for one will determine how the government treats us all.

The University claims to be a refuge for people from every marginalized background. Indeed, the depth, breadth and diversity of our intellectual community is what I love most about learning here. But their promises ring hollow when they continue to enforce draconian, reactionary rules that sanction departments, silence research centers, punish student groups for disrupting the status quo and rescind job offers to scholars for exercising their rights to speak, think and assemble freely. 

If the federal government wants to attack universities in broad daylight, let it. Their fixation on our campus makes it a site of power, and we are well-positioned to resist.

A bully like Donald Trump seeks compliance, not cooperation, with his vision for our institution. Weaponizing citizenship is just another desperate attempt to silence dissent and assert his power. 

To students, faculty, staff, alumni, administrators and the community at large, the question Khalil asked from his detention cell remains. If we want to preserve what remains of our democracy, we cannot be afraid to answer: Who here has the right to have rights, and how will we defend them?

Kelly Rogers is an Urban Studies undergraduate in the College of Liberal Arts and a former opinions columnist for the Minnesota Daily.