On Saturday, the US immigration forces arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian refugee who played a key role in orchestrating last year’s Columbia University campus protests, spurring divergence from Israel and causing widespread disruption to student lives.
Halil, whose family came from Tiberias city in northern Israel, received his master’s degree from Columbia University last December. Then, the whole campus protests (as well as those held at several Canadian institutions), intense student and birth negotiations, and waves of anti-Semiticism, the waves of Kuhalil, can take the waves.
“Of course there’s no place for anti-Semitism,” he told CNN in April. “What we are witnessing is anti-Palestinian sentiment that takes some of these forms and are in different forms and anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism (yes).”
Khalil was inside his apartment when US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers entered him and took him into custody on Saturday night, his lawyer, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.
File – Surrounded by members of Columbia University’s Apartheid Divest Group, including Sueda Polat, second from the left, and members of the media outside of Columbia University on Tuesday, April 30, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file).
Mary Altafer / AP
Greer says he spoke to ice agents during his arrest and told them he was ordered by the State Department to seize Halil’s student visa. When she told the agent he was a permanent resident, they told them they would cancel his green card instead.
Halil’s wife, an eight-month-old American citizen, was present in his custody.
On Sunday, Homeland Security spokesman Tricia McLaughlin said Halil’s arrest was “in support of President Trump’s executive order banning anti-Semitism.”
In a post about Truth Social on Monday, Trump called Halil a “a fundamental foreign pro-Hamas student.”
His arrest is the first in the Trump order crackdown on college students who participated in protests against Israeli Hamas conflict last year. The president called the people involved “terrorist sympathizers” and declared that they no longer had the right to remain in the United States.
“We will find these terrorist sympathizers from our country, arrest them and deport them. They will never come back,” he writes.
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Meanwhile, Halil has long maintained his position as a supporter of both Palestinians and Jews, and told CNN last spring, “I believe that Palestinians and Jews’ liberation cannot be intertwined and crossed hands and one-way without each other.”
After his detention, protesters lined up the streets of New York City and demanded Khalil’s release.
Authorities said Halil was in custody at a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. However, when his wife tried to visit him over the weekend, he was not there.
Ben Wisner, director of the American Civil Liberties (ACLU) Union speech, privacy and technology projects, said Monday that Halil was taken to a Louisiana detention center on Sunday night without notice to his family or attorneys.
As of Wednesday, Halil remains in Louisiana.
“We couldn’t get any more details on why he was in custody,” Greer told the Associated Press. “This is a clear escalation. The administration is chasing that threat.”
Protesters gather at Foley Square and march through the streets of Manhattan downstream in protest of the detention of Palestinian student activist and Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, by New York’s US immigration and customs enforcement, on March 10, 2025.
Selcuk Acar/ Getty Images)
Efforts to deport Halil were blocked by federal judge Jesse Furman on Monday afternoon. Furman ordered a hearing on the Halil incident in New York City Wednesday morning.
What happened last spring?
Halil began studying at Colombia’s International Public Service School in 2023, just before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th and incited a devastating conflict.
The subsequent conflict attracted the attention of Colombian students. Colombian students began setting up camps on campus, screaming for rallying to end university financial investments in Israel, demanding that a ceasefire be called.
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Halil, who did not directly participate in the camp for fear of revoking a student’s visa, took on the role of negotiator and spokesman representing the apartheid dibust at Columbia University, a coalition of student-run anti-Israel Hama conflict organizations.
Halil frequently spoke to the press and was accused of protecting the interests of student activists during discussions with the university about conditions for ending the protest.
The demonstration escalated in early May after student groups failed to meet the deadline for demolishing the camp. As a result, students, alongside the public, occupy and were trapped inside the university’s building, Hamilton Hall.
Student demonstrators will lock weapons to protect potential authorities from reaching fellow barricaded protesters inside Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall on Tuesday, April 30, 2024 in New York City. (Photo: Alex Kent/Getty Images).
Alex Kent/Getty Images
According to media reports, Colombia adopted police assistance to remove protesters, and more than 280 people were arrested.
After the escalation, Halil told the BBC that the school had moved to stop him, but chose not to do so.
“After reviewing the evidence, they have no evidence to pause…it shows how random the suspension is… they made it randomly and without legitimate procedures,” he told the BBC.
Almost a year later, Halil is once again unclear where he is, but is now facing deportation, with Wisner saying “unprecedented, illegal, not America.”
“To be clear, the First Amendment protects everyone in the United States. Government actions are clearly intended to threaten and cool the speech on one side of the public debate. The government must quickly return Khalil to New York, return him to his family and reverse this course on discriminatory policies,” he concluded.
When asked to designate the crimes Halil committed at a press conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, chairman Mike Johnson said he had experienced firsthand the “angry mob in Columbia at the height of such things.”
“…If you’re on a student visa and you’re an aspiring young terrorist who wants to prey on your Jewish classmates, you’ll go home,” he told reporters.
He did not designate a crime that Halil was said to be guilty.
– Includes files from Associated Press
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