William C. Banks was a young professor at Syracuse University studying national-security law when a colleague asked him to join an unusual immigration case.
The lawsuit involved eight pro-Palestinian activists — seven of Palestinian descent and one Kenyan — who were accused of having ties to a Palestinian terrorist organization. Some were legal permanent residents; three were still students in southern California. The activists were labeled deportable under a 1950s immigration law, and on an early January morning in 1987, the FBI arrested seven of them and later took in an eighth. The group became known as the Los Angeles Eight, and Banks became an expert on their case.
The Trump administration has recently used the same immigration law and similar national-security arguments to justify detaining a handful of pro-Palestinian student activists. The federal government has also revoked the visas of hundreds of other international students, often without alerting them ahead of time. President Trump and his allies say the activists espouse antisemitic rhetoric or support terrorist groups. Critics say the government is stifling international students’ free-speech rights.
A judge last week ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student and prominent figure in last spring’s Gaza campus protests, could be deported despite holding a valid green card.
For the LA Eight activists, closure took 20 years. A judge ruled in 2007 that the government didn’t have the evidence to justify their deportation.
The key difference between the immigration crackdown in the 1980s and today, Banks said in an interview, is that Trump-administration officials “simply aren’t playing by the rules” when it comes to giving activists their due process. The Trump administration is also ignoring a judge’s order to return a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.
Banks spoke with The Chronicle about government surveillance and what he expects from the surge in student immigration cases. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get involved in the case of the LA Eight?
At that time, I had become interested in what was then a new field called national-security law. Three of my colleagues and I at different law schools wrote a textbook in the field. We started teaching courses. One of my specialties from the early days was electronic surveillance, the law called FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978). The FBI was able to use it to secretly surveil Americans and others in the United States in pursuit of foreign intelligence information, particularly including information related to terrorism. So that’s how the bureau started an investigation of the LA Eight. Those poor individuals had no idea until much later that they were being surveilled or investigated in any way.
Before the whole case was dismissed, a good immigration lawyer contacted me and asked me if I’d be part of a program to talk about the matter. I said, “Are you sure? I don’t know anything about this stuff.” He said, “Yes, you do.” And actually, my contribution was more about the authority for the government to conduct an investigation of these people at all, not whether the immigration laws allowed them to be singled out or deported or charged criminally.
That’s a bit of a roundabout way to get involved in an immigration case.
No kidding. Back in the day, immigration law was sort of a dark corner of legal education. There weren’t very many experts in the field. There weren’t many involved in politically charged immigration matters like this.
Who are the LA Eight? Tell me about the people.
There were seven men and a woman. She was Kenyan. The others were Palestinian. They had come over a period of many years to the United States. They were doing various kinds of jobs, and they were active in political causes in the LA area, particularly in support of Palestine.
The controversy around Palestine then was the group known as the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). It was a time when the Reagan administration had decided that they needed to become very proactive in combating terrorism. Not only abroad, which they began to do, but to have a program that would root out terrorist activities in the United States. So they created a Reagan executive order that has myriad parallels to the Trump executive orders that have been issued since January 20. The executive order created a task force to root out the terrorist supporters inside the United States.
And they (the LA Eight) were arrested. This was one of these made-for-television raids. Pre-dawn, FBI SWAT teams, helicopters overhead. They had warrants to arrest Khader Hamide and his wife, and they picked up the other six around LA at other locations. One of them was taking a college chemistry exam. Many of them were students. They were here on student visas. Hamide and one other were permanent residents. They were all here lawfully. No one was out of status, and when they were picked up for these so-called terrorist activities, they were prosecuted. During their deportation proceedings, the eight got together and filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the surveillance.
What are the similarities and differences between the case then and today?
I think the difference is that the government then was playing by the rules. They were providing the individuals with opportunities to contest their deportation or criminal charges against them through the traditional judicial process.
What’s the same? Almost everything else. There’s a patina of fear and distrust that the government wishes to wash over a group of individuals based on their nationality, their ethnicity, the color of their skin, their politics. That they’re different from us, that they’re seeking to wreak havoc or harm the United States in some way. There’s no transparency on the part of the Trump administration to sort out who was who and whether any individual is tarred with those characteristics that they say are generally present. Justice in the United States is about individuals, not about groups.
The LA Eight case took 20 years to resolve. Do you expect Mahmoud Khalil’s case, for example, to play out for that long?
I certainly hope not. If they’re going to continue to hold him and insist that he’s deportable, I would hope that he’ll be allowed to have proceedings very soon in a federal court. It should all happen in a matter of weeks and months, not years and decades.
Do any other cases or time periods remind you of what’s happening today?
The LA Eight is a wonderful analog because it’s like déjà vu, isn’t it? In a dark sort of way. But there are other darker periods in U.S. history where the government used immigration laws to control people. That’s really going back to the 1920s and ‘30s. After World War I, there was a lot of xenophobia inside the United States. We put quotas, for example, on the numbers of Italians, Jews, Germans, etc., who could be admitted into the country. And then we’d have a sort of subjective screening. And the subjective screening would put the authority in the hands of people like ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). So this is quite a striking period in our history, to be sure, but it’s not unprecedented.
It’s a frightening time. In these individual cases, like Khalil, many of us are very worried about how the Trump administration is managing this. The most important thing for a law-trained person like me to observe is that they simply aren’t playing by the rules. There’s a chance here that they will defy the courts, and if they defy the courts, we’ve got a different set of problems to confront. That’s a constitutional crisis.
