Hey everyone, Jody Avergan here.

Welcome to our series that we are calling Some Sunday Context, original conversations

and favorites from the archives that may help give some historical context to the very

rocky history we're living through right now in 2025.

Today, a story about surveillance and deportation threats of a

prominent activist. Here in 2025, we saw this week the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia

university student who is one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests that have taken

place on that campus over the last year. Immigrations and customs

enforcement officers arrested Khalil last Saturday, took him to a detention center in New Jersey,

then to one in Louisiana, where he remains. For a while, no one knew his location, not his lawyers,

not his colleagues, not his eight months pregnant wife. One of the more chilling

parts of this case is that everyone seems to acknowledge that Khalil is being targeted for his

political beliefs. The Trump administration's own justification for revoking his green card

and putting him into custody is that he organized protests and espoused anti-Israel beliefs.

Regardless of your stance on the war in Gaza, the right to protest, the right to free speech,

it's kind of right there in the First Amendment.

But that doesn't necessarily protect you from surveillance and detention and targeting.

And the slope here is very, very slippery, which is why I think so many people of conscience are concerned

and protesting over Khalil's arrest. All of this made me think of a story we did a couple

years ago about another prominent activist who was targeted for surveillance and threatened with

deportation, John Lennon. The parallels aren't exact, but it is worth listening to this episode about how

John Lennon was targeted by the FBI for his political speech, faced trumped-up charges,

...