On Saturday, U.S. immigration forces arrested prominent Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian refugee, who played a significant role in orchestrating last year’s Columbia University campus protests that urged the institution to divest from Israel, causing widespread disruptions to student life.
Khalil, whose family is from the northern Israeli city of Tiberias, completed his master’s degree at Columbia University last December after leading the charge at a months-long, campus-wide protest (similar to those held at some Canadian institutions) characterized by encampments, intense student-faculty negotiations and a wave of antisemitism, which Khalil condemned.
“There is, of course, no place for antisemitism,” he told CNN in April. “What we are witnessing is anti-Palestinian sentiment that’s taking different forms and antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism (are) some of these forms.”
Khalil was inside his apartment when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers entered and detained him on Saturday night, his lawyer, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.
FILE – Members of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group, including Sueda Polat, second from left, and Mahmoud Khalil, center, are surrounded by members of the media outside the Columbia University campus, Tuesday, April 30, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File).
Mary Altaffer / AP
Greer says she spoke with an ICE agent during the arrest who informed her they were ordered by the State Department to seize Khalil’s student visa. When she told agents that he was a permanent resident, they said they would revoke his green card instead.
Khalil’s wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, was present during his detainment.
On Sunday, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that Khalil’s arrest was undertaken “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
In a post on Truth Social on Monday, Trump referred to Khalil as “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.”
His arrest marks the first in a Trump-ordered crackdown on university students who participated in protests against the Israel-Hamas conflict last year. The president referred to those involved as “terrorist sympathizers,” declaring that they no longer had the right to remain in the U.S.
“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again,” he wrote.
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Meanwhile, Khalil has long maintained his position that he supports the liberation of both Palestinians and Jewish people, telling CNN last spring, “I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other.”
Following his detainment, protesters lined New York City streets demanding Khalil’s release.
According to Greer, authorities said Khalil was being held in a detention centre in Elizabeth, New Jersey. However, when his wife attempted to visit him on the weekend, he was not there.
The director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Monday that Khalil was flown to a detention centre in Louisiana on Sunday night with no notice given to his family or lawyer. His whereabouts remain unclear.
“We have not been able to get any more details about why he is being detained,” Greer told the AP. “This is a clear escalation. The administration is following through on its threats.”
Protesters gather in Foley Square and march through the streets of Lower Manhattan in protest of the detention of Palestinian student activist and Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York, on March 10, 2025. (Selcuk Acar/ Anadolu /Getty Images).
Selcuk Acar/ Getty Images)
Efforts to deport Khalil were blocked by federal Judge Jesse Furman on Monday afternoon. Furman ordered a hearing on Khalil’s case, to be held Wednesday morning in New York City.
What happened last spring?
Khalil began his studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in 2023, shortly before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct.7, inciting a devastating conflict.
The ensuing conflict brought media attention to Columbia students, who began setting up encampments on campus and holding teach-ins in a rallying cry to end the university’s financial investments in Israel and request that it demand a ceasefire.
Khalil, who did not participate directly in the encampments for fear of having his student visa revoked, took on a negotiator and spokesperson role, representing Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student-run anti-Israel-Hamas conflict organizations.
Khalil frequently spoke to the press and was charged with upholding the interests of student activists during discussions with the university regarding conditions to end the protests.
Demonstrations escalated in early May after the student body failed to meet its deadline to dismantle encampments. Consequently, students, alongside members of the public, occupied Hamilton Hall, a university building, shutting themselves inside.
Student demonstrators lock arms to guard potential authorities against reaching fellow protesters who barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall at Columbia University on Tuesday, April 30, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Alex Kent/Getty Images).
Alex Kent/Getty Images
Columbia employed police assistance to remove the protestors and more than 280 people were arrested, according to media reports.
Following the escalation, Khalil told the BBC that the school moved to suspend him, but then chose not to.
“After reviewing the evidence, they don’t have any evidence to suspend … it shows how random the suspension was … they did that randomly, and without due process,” he told the BBC.
Almost a year later, Khalil — again, whose current location is unknown — now faces deportation, which Wizner said was “unprecedented, illegal, and un-American.”
“To be clear: The First Amendment protects everyone in the U.S. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate. The government must immediately return Mr. Khalil to New York, release him back to his family, and reverse course on this discriminatory policy,” he concluded.
When asked to specify what alleged crimes Khalil had committed during a press conference at Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that he experienced firsthand the “angry mob at Columbia at the height of that stuff.”
“… if you are on a student visa and you’re an aspiring young terrorist who wants to prey upon your Jewish classmates, you’re going home,” he told reporters.
He did not specify the crimes Khalil is allegedly guilty of.
—With files from the Associated Press
