Some legal experts are voicing their expert opinions on foreign protesters being deported by President Donald Trump and his administration and liberals are not going to like what they have to say.

The controversy started when Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Syrian born Armenian national Mahmoud Khalil, who has been the main antagonist of the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, on March 8.

Many liberals and left-wing groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have claimed that Khalil was simply exercising his constitutionally protected First Amendment right to free speech.

“You can disagree with his views or his politics, but there is no evidence he has broken any law,” Democrat Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said. “Because once it becomes normal for the regime to disappear people simply for protesting against the regime’s policies, once a citizen or a resident of America can be locked away with no charges against them simply because they protested, there is no going back for America.”

But some experts who spoke to The Daily Caller News Foundation took issue with the free speech characterization.

“This is definitely not a free speech issue,” Immigration Reform Law Institute Investigations Director Matt O’Brien said.

O’Brien, formerly an immigration judge, highlighted a section in the U.S. code that says, “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”

He pointed to the 1998 Ruiz-Massieu case in which the Board of Immigration Appeals held that a letter from the Secretary of State that determined that a non-citizen’s presence in the United States could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” is enough to warrant deportation.

“Hamas is a [Department of State] designated terrorist organization, so Rubio’s stated reasons for invoking 1227 [an immigration statute] fall squarely within the holding in Ruiz-Massieu,” O’Brien said.

Heritage Foundation Border Security And Immigration Director Lora Ries concurred.

“The U.S. Government has both an immigration option and/or a criminal one. So far, he’s been arrested and charged in the immigration context,” Ries said. “It does not matter if he hasn’t been charged with a crime to pursue his immigration removal; a criminal charge is not a requirement.”

“Temporary visa holders can have their visa revoked if they are found inadmissible, and permanent visa holders (green cards) can lose their green cards and be removed if they violate a ground of removability,” she said. “The U.S. Government hasn’t charged terrorism-related grounds of deportability or sought to have a green card revoked for too long. And it shows.”