Mahmoud Khalil – a student who was a lead negotiator during last year’s Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University – faces deportation after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last Saturday (March 8). While a US judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation for now, he is still yet to be released. Donald Trump, who promised during his election campaign last year to crack down on pro-Palestine protests, has warned that Khalil’s detention will be “the first of many to come”. The incident has been widely denounced as a brazen attack on freedom of speech. 

Khalil, 29, is a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Syria and moved to the US in 2022 to undertake a master’s degree at Columbia University, New York, which he completed last December. He has a green card (which means he has permanent legal residency in the US) and he is married to an American citizen who is currently eight months pregnant. The ICE officials, upon entering his accommodation, reportedly believed that he was in the US on a student visa, but decided to detain him anyway after realising their mistake. He is now being held at a facility in Louisiana, thousands of miles away from New York, where he has been denied the right to speak privately with his lawyers.

“This feels like a historical moment in terms of the escalation that we’re seeing: abducting a student, detaining him, and making his location unknown for a certain amount of time so that his attorney couldn't reach him,” Sabiya Ahamed, Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal, an organisation which defends the rights of people who speak out for Palestine in the US,  tells Dazed. “This is a McCarthyite attack. It is the Trump administration showing the extent that it’s willing to go to suppress the movement for Palestinian liberation.”

If Trump can just abduct green card holders at will, what’s next?

Khalil hasn’t committed a crime, nor even been accused of committing one. Justifying his detention, a spokesperson for the Department for Homeland Security claimed that he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organisation”, and both Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have used similar language. There is no evidence to support this accusation beyond Khalil’s involvement in the Gaza solidarity encampment and his outspoken advocacy on behalf of Palestinians. What he is really being punished for is the legitimate exercise of his constitutional rights in opposing the mass slaughter of civilians. 

Almost as disturbing as the actions of the Trump administration, Ahamed suggests, is Columbia University’s willingness to collaborate with it. “We don’t want to lose sight of the fact that the response to the student movement over the last year and a half, which happened mostly under the Biden administration, laid the groundwork for what Trump is doing now,” she says. “Universities calling the police on their own students and suspending or even expelling students over their advocacy for Palestine; rhetoric from the highest offices, including Biden himself, painting the student movement as violent – it all set the stage for what we’re seeing today.” Despite mounting calls from its student body, Columbia has yet to call to condemn Khalil’s detention or call for his release. According to his wife, Khalil had asked the university for legal support in the days leading up to his arrest, after he became the target of a harassment and doxxing campaign from anti-Palestinian organisations. He did not receive a reply. 

This is partly a story about immigration law being weaponised to crush dissent and this aspect shouldn’t be downplayed: the White House has already signalled its intention to target more pro-Palestine protesters for deportation. But the implications could be more wide-reaching. If such reckless disregard for the rule of law is allowed to stand, then all bets are off and no one’s rights are assured. “I don’t think this administration is only thinking about immigration and non-citizens,” says Ahamed. “If their goal is to stamp out the movement for Palestine as much as possible, then they might try to look at whatever other avenues they can use to target activists, many of whom are US citizens. Palestine is the testing ground. If Trump can just abduct green card holders at will, what’s next? It seems like anyone who challenges Trump.”

These efforts to suppress the Palestine solidarity movement may already be backfiring. “The Trump administration is trying to instill fear, so it’s important to find optimism anywhere we can,” says Ahamed. “It’s obviously a scary moment, but we want to acknowledge that the movement is still ongoing despite these threats.” There have been large protests in support of Khalil in New York and a robust response from civil society, with several groups launching legal action on his behalf. “The Center for Constitutional Rights and CLEAR [Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility] filed a motion to try to bring Mahmoud back to New York from Louisiana,” says Ahamed. “A legal petition was filed less than 12 hours after he was detained, challenging the unlawful detention, and there’s the Action Network petition.” The petition has currently amassed over three million signatures. It seems that a broader than usual constituency of people are outraged, including many liberals: The New York Times – itself no stranger to smearing the Palestine movement – published a column warning that Khalil’s detention marked “the greatest threat to free speech since the Red Scare.” 

For Khalil’s supporters, the priority now is securing his release. In a post which was shared on Instagram, his wife wrote: “US immigration ripped my soul from me when they handcuffed my husband and forced him into an unmarked vehicle. Instead of putting together our nurses and washing baby clothes in anticipation of our first child, I am left sitting in our apartment, wondering when Mahmoud will get a chance to call me from a detention centre. I demand the US government release him, reinstate his green card, and bring him home.”

Sign the Action Network petition to free Mahmoud Khalil here and follow Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition for news on upcoming protests here.