On the evening of March 8, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) arrested and detained a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University over his pro-Palestinian activism on Columbia’s campus.
Mahmoud Khalil, who received a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December, was returning to his university-owned apartment with his wife, Noor Abdalla—who is eight months pregnant—when he was grabbed by plainclothes ICE agents, video released by the ACLU shows.
While Abdalla called their lawyer, the agents told them that the State Department had revoked his student visa. Khalil was reportedly in the United States on a student visa as recently as 2024, but has since obtained a green card, granting him legal permanent residency.
When Khalil informed the agents of this, however, they allegedly told him they would revoke his green card as well. Evidently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had personally targeted Khalil under the Cold War-era Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which allows him to declare someone “deportable” if they have “reasonable ground to believe” that the immigrant’s “presence or activities in the U.S. . . . . would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”According to Abdalla, who is a U.S. citizen, the agents then threatened to arrest her as well.
Just one day prior to the arrest, Khalil told university officials that he feared for his life. “Since yesterday, I have been subjected to a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai [an assistant professor] and David Lederer [an undergraduate student] who, among others, have labeled me a security threat and called for my deportation,” he wrote in an email to interim Columbia President Katrina Armstrong. “Their attacks have incited a wave of hate, including calls for my deportation and death threats.”
Among the most dire threats, he said, was a post from Betar, a rightwing Zionist group so reactionary and combative that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—which has recently come under fire for condoning anti-Palestinian violence, appearing to defend Elon Musk after he performed a sieg heil during President Donald Trump’s Inauguration weekend, and even praising Khalil’s arrest—has dubbed it an “extremist” group.
“I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home,” Khalil wrote in the email to Armstrong dated March 7. “I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”
Abdalla says the university never responded.
“The officers later barricaded Mahmoud from me,” she said in a statement. “We were not shown any warrant and the ICE officers hung up the phone on our lawyer.”
Typically, a green card holder can only be deported if they are convicted of a crime. Khalil has not been charged with one, according to court records. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told The Verge on Monday that Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
In spring of 2024, Khalil was one of the primary facilitators of attempted negotiations between student protesters organized under a coalition called Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and Columbia administrators. In April, he told reporters that he did not directly participate in the encampment on the college lawn due to concerns that he might be targeted by law enforcement. “That’s why I’m not suspended,” he said during a press conference at the time. “I did not participate, fearing that I will be arrested and ultimately deported from this country.” A month later, he told reporters that he was briefly suspended by Columbia, and that the school had promptly reinstated him after reviewing the decision.
After being forcibly detained, Khalil seemingly disappeared. He was initially taken downtown, then to an ICE facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but when Abdalla tried to find him there, officials told her he was no longer at the facility. His location was unknown to his family and lawyer until March 10, when his name finally appeared on the federal database of ICE detainees at a privately-owned detention facility in Jena, Louisiana.
An attorney representing the Department of Justice said in court that Khalil is not in immediate danger of deportation while immigration proceedings are ongoing.
Under pressure from the Trump Administration, Columbia has cracked down on students known to have been involved in last year’s encampment protest and in ongoing Palestinian solidarity activism on campus. Since last April, both Columbia and its sister school, Barnard College, have aggressively targeted pro-Palestinian activists for suspension, expulsion, and even post-graduate withdrawl of degrees.This prompted outrage from pro-Palestinian student groups, who staged sit-ins calling on the school to grant amnesty to student activists.
During one sit-in on March 5, administrators implored activists to vacate the Milstein Library building on account of a “bomb threat.” After the protesters refused to leave, New York Police Department officers entered campus to arrest students. The alleged bomb threat raised suspicions among many students, including those in the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
“Instead of evacuating campus @BarnardCollege sent a PRIVATE EMAIL to CUAD (@ColumbiaBDS) claiming there was ‘threat of a pipe bomb,’ ” Columbia SJP wrote on X. “NYPD ordered protestors move back 1,000 feet from the library, yet on-campus freshman dorms received no notice to evacuate and multiple staff, students, and workers were left on the second floor of the library. If the bomb threat wasn’t manufactured by Barnard administrators, they put thousands of people on campus at extreme risk in order to arrest and brutalize protestors gathered at the lawn.”
Since Khalil’s detainment, other reports of violence against student immigrant activists have poured in. In the past week, the Department of Justice has raided Columbia student dorms for supposedly harboring “illegal aliens” and detained at least one other Palestinian student activist, Leqaa Kordia, for potential deportation. Trump has said that Khalil’s detainment is “the first of many to come.”
At a press conference hosted by Jews For Racial & Economic Justice near Columbia’s campus on March 10, community leaders spoke out in defense of Khalil. “My committed Jewish faculty colleagues and I have warned that the false characterization of [Columbia] as a hotbed of antisemitism would be used as an alibi for what’s actually at stake for the Republican establishment and now the Trump Administration—strict control of speech, of protest, and of higher education at large,” said Professor Marianne Hirsch, a member of the Columbia Jewish Faculty Group.
Sonya Posmentier, an associate professor at nearby New York University and a member of the Sanctuary Campus Network, which organizes to protect college students from deportation, also spoke at the press conference, calling on faculty across the country to stand with at-risk students who are protesting the genocide in Gaza, and to “take on some of that risk” themselves.
“Being willing to show up with our bodies is something that I hear our students asking for,” she told The Progressive. “To be in spaces of protest with them; to speak out with them.”
