Fifty-one percent of Democrats and 73 percent of liberals oppose the deportation of a Hamas-boosting Arab migrant who led anti-Israel protests at Columbia University in New York, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports.
The poll spotlights the Democratic Party’s risky entanglement in radical, anti-Jewish identity politics, much of which was imported by the party’s pro-migration laws and politicians.
In mid-March, Rasmussen asked 1,219 likely voters:
Mahmoud Khalil, a student from Syria who led anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, has been detained by federal immigration authorities who plan to deport him. Should Mahmoud Khalil be deported?
Overall, 45 percent support the detention and 37 oppose the detention. Eighteen percent said they were not sure.
Moderates split 36 percent yes, 41 percent no.
Seventy-three percent of conservatives and 67 percent of Republicans support the detention.
Khalil, who is not a citizen, began protesting Israel’s counter-offensive less than a week after Hamas launched its bloody and chaotic cross-border October 7 raid. The raiding Hamas gunmen yelled Islamic slogans as they killed roughly 1,000 Jewish civilians, including many young people at an early-morning rave.
President Donald Trump’s administration is deporting migrants who believe in “hateful ideologies,” even if they do not break laws. Khalil’s supporters say he should not be deported because his pro-Hamas advocacy is protected by free speech.
A sign reading ‘Release Mahmoud Khalil’ rests against a fence during a pro-Palestine protest organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement organization outside of the White House in Washington, D.C. on March 18, 2025. (BRYAN DOZIER/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
A second question by Rasmussen framed the Khalil issues around free-speech rights, asking: “Which is closer to your opinion, that Mahmoud Khalil was exercising his free speech rights, or that he was supporting the terrorist organization Hamas?”
Forty-three percent picked “free speech,” while 40 percent picked “supporting the terrorist organization Hamas?”
Seventy-six percent of liberals picked the speech option, as did 46 percent of moderates.
Amid the partisan divide on migration policy, polls show divided opinion over the proper balance of power between the Presidency and the courts. Democrats say progressive judges must block Trump’s policies, while Republicans expect the Supreme Court to override the lower-court judges.
Since 2021, President Joe Biden’s deputies used a variety of legally questionable policies to jump the foreign-born population past 50 million, or one-six residents of the United States.
The migrants’ arrival, and the resulting chaotic diversity, have imposed huge pocketbook and civic burdens on ordinary Americans, even as they also expanded the economy, aided major Wall Street investors, and expanded the flow of taxes to government officials.
But the diversity has also hit Democrats, including the leading Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
He has been a determined advocate for more migration. “The one thing I’d really like to do is immigration reform. If that [2013 “Gang of Eight”] bill had passed, the country would be a different place,” Schumer said in June 2023.
But this year, the Democrats’ splits over might helped cause him to cancel a book tour for his new book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning.
Left-wing antisemitism is “much harder to grapple with than antisemitism on the right,” Schumer wrote in his book, according to an article in Forward.com, which explained, “because it often comes from political allies and because it can masquerade as human rights activism.”
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