Last month I asserted that I would not stand idly by and let harm come to my neighbors through the actions of the federal government. I am therefore compelled to demand that my neighbor Mahmoud Khalil be released from jail, where he sits accused of no crimes, and returned to his family in New York. The state can press charges against him from there, if they wish. I am motivated not just from a sense of basic fairness, but from concern for the ongoing health of the American Constitution, and all of the laws flow from it.

I don’t know Khalil personally; I didn’t even know his name before last week. But I do know that he is my neighbor, and my fellow New Yorker. Maybe he isn’t my fellow American citizen, but he is a legally established permanent resident of this country, giving him nearly all the same rights that I have, short of voting in elections. Those rights include the right not to be arrested at home, jailed, and then transported a thousand away from his family—all without being charged with any crime.

I probably don’t agree with many of Khalil’s political views, in either direction or amplitude, including the speech and actions at Columbia University that brought him to the attention of the second Trump administration. This has zero bearing on my conviction that the law as defined by the Constitution applies to him, and to any case brought against him. If the state thinks he committed a crime, then let the state say this out loud, and give him a chance to defend himself in court. This is literally a bedrock-level right of every citizen and resident of the United States. It’s right there in 250-year-old ink: fading, but I dare say that you can still make it out.

The Constitution protects Mahmoud Khalil no less than it does me. And if it can’t protect him, then his mistreatment makes me—me personally, and everyone in America I know and love—all of us, it makes all of us suddenly unsafe. For the sake of their own stability and freedom, every American should know that Khalil’s fate is very much bound up in their own.