The office appears to be in turmoil, and Heap’s second-in-command isn’t helping. On Thursday, Recorder’s Office chief of state Sam Stone decided the time was right to tweet a joke about using a missile to kill a New York pro-Palestine activist whom the Trump campaign has targeted for retribution.
Stone’s tweet was in response to a news story about Mahmoud Khalil, who is suing the Trump Administration for $20 million “or an official apology” for his 104-day detention in Louisiana. Immigration agents arrested Khalil, who is a legal permanent resident of the United States and a grad student at Columbia University, because of his pro-Palestine activism. It took a protracted court battle to get him released.
“Can we send him an Official Hellfire Missile instead?” Stone asked in a tweet.
Stone did not respond to questions from Phoenix New Times about whether it was appropriate to joke about using violent rhetoric in response to people exercising their First Amendment rights.
Martin Quezada, the attorney and civil rights director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on Heap to fire Stone.
“While we are disheartened to see this kind of hatred becoming further normalized and desensitized in our nation, we are grateful that the despicable, hateful, and racist nature of this individual has been clearly exposed,” Quezada said in a written statement. “Now, we call on Recorder Heap to demonstrate true leadership by affirming that such language, in any context, constitutes a terminable offense, not out of political convenience, but because it is simply the right thing to do.”
Mahmoud Khalil's arrest by immigration agents over his political stances generated widespread protest.
Diane Krauthamer/Flickr/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Khalil was born in a refugee camp in Syria to Palestinian parents after they were forced from their home by Israeli settlers. He was a key leader in organizing protests at Columbia University against Israel’s bloody campaign in Gaza, in which more than half of the 57,000 Palestinians killed have been women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
He was arrested by ICE agents at his apartment in March and detained in Louisiana — far from his U.S. citizen wife and child, who was born while he was locked away — for more than three months. While he was incarcerated, Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a memo stating that Khalil had not broken the law but should be deported anyway because his beliefs went against U.S. foreign policy interests.
On June 11, federal Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled that the detention was unconstitutional, and Khalil was freed nine days later. The next day, he marched through Manhattan, covered by a Palestinian flag.
Khalil’s lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of falsely imprisoning him. Khalil said he plans to give any money awarded to him by a judge or in a settlement to groups who have been targeted by what he calls the Trump administration’s “failed effort” to suppress free speech against Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians.
Many MAGA types have gleefully embraced political violence and rhetoric, including regarding Khalil. But Stone, a former staffer of conservative ex-Phoenix City Council member Sal DiCiccio who once advised Kari Lake but broke with her over election denialism, has at least once previously rejected it.
“Political violence is not acceptable,” he tweeted on Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. “Period.”
