This free speech group at Columbia is taking on Trump when the university won’t – and winning

The Knight Institute is defending free speech at a school now synonymous with compromising on it

When he first learned that federal agents had detained Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in the lobby of his university housing complex, Jameel Jaffer knew he was in for a fight.

Jaffer is the director of a Columbia-affiliated institute devoted to the defense of the first amendment, and Khalil, a green card holder, had been a fixture at the pro-Palestinian encampments on campus. Months earlier, Jaffer's organization had hosted a symposium about the free speech rights of noncitizens. The institute had been established to defend the very constitutional principles the Trump administration was now openly flouting - and that Columbia seemed too scared to defend.