Palestinian Student Organizer Arrested And Detained By U.S. Department Of Homeland Security

The arrest of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil took place in the wake of increased threats by the Trump administration to student activists

By Peoples Dispatch

Agents with the US Department of Homeland Security arrested Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil on Saturday, March 8, at his residence in New York City. Khalil was active in the Palestine solidarity movement at Columbia University and was one of the lead negotiators with the university administration during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in Spring 2024.

Khalil is currently being detained in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center where he could be processed for deportation. At the time of writing, neither his legal team nor his family knows of his whereabouts. The day after his detention, his wife, who is eight months pregnant, went to visit him at an ICE detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he was reportedly being held, and she was informed that he was not there. His attorney Amy Greer said in a statement to media that they have not been given any concrete information about his whereabouts but had heard a rumor that he could be transferred to Louisiana.

A press release informing on Khalil’s detention also detailed that the DHS agents forced their way into the apartment building where Khalil lives with his wife and did not identify themselves. They also threatened his wife, who is a US citizen, with arrest.

In the short phone exchange that the officers had with Khalil’s attorney, they rejected her request for a copy of the warrant for his arrest and hung up on her.

His attorney Amy Greer said in a statement to media: “ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud follows the US government’s open repression of student activism and political speech, specifically targeting students at Columbia University for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza…The US government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech.”

Trump’s crackdown on student protesters

Khalil’s unprecedented arrest comes amid threats made by members of the Trump administration to crack down on the historic Palestine solidarity movement at college campuses across the US. The president himself had written on March 4, “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled…”

On January 29, Trump signed an executive order on “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” which directed officials, including from the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Education, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, to guide higher education institutions to “report activities by alien students and staff” that Trump’s administration could consider as anti-semitic or supportive of terrorism. Such reports could “lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.”

From this executive order, the “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” was launched on February 3, which is composed of representatives from the Department of Justice, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, along with others, and is coordinated through the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

On February 28, this Task Force announced it would visit 10 universities that had “experienced antisemitic incidents since October 2023” including: Columbia University, George Washington University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota and the University of Southern California. Notably, the US government announced on Friday, March 7, that it was pulling USD 400 million in grants to Columbia University for inaction on antisemitism.

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said in the White House statement about the Executive Order released on January 30, “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

Axios published a report on March 6 stating that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was launching an “AI-fueled ‘Catch and Revoke’ effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups.” According to State Department officials, this effort would apparently involve reviews of the social media accounts of student visa-holders to look for “evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel”.

Rubio’s current actions seem to be the fulfillment of a year-long promise. On October 30, 2023, weeks after protests had begun to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Marco Rubio penned an editorial in Fox News with fellow Republican senator Dave McCormick titled, “We have one word for terror supporters who abuse our broken visa system”. They wrote: “Foreign nationals supporting Hamas and their brutality against both Israelis and Americans have no place in our great nation. And they certainly don’t have a constitutional right to entry into the United States. In fact, their very presence here violates the law.”

Widespread opposition to arrest

Organizations and individuals across the United States have heavily criticized the arrest of Mahmoud and called for his immediate release. Through an online petition, over 500,000 people have sent letters to different government agencies, including DHS and ICE, as well as administrators and officials at Columbia University and Barnard, calling for the immediate release of Khalil from detention. The petition accuses Columbia University of being complicit in the campaign to criminalize student activists, stating: “Columbia’s continued acquiescence to federal agencies and outside partisan institutions has made this situation possible. Like many other Arab and Muslim students, Khalil has been the target of various zionist harassment campaigns, fueled by doxxing websites like Canary Mission. This racist targeting serves to instill fear in pro-Palestine activists as well as a warning to others.”

Organizations part of the Shut It Down for Palestine coalition including the Palestinian Youth MOvement, Jewish Voice for Peace, the People’s Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, ANSWER Coalition, and Writers Against the War on Gaza, have called for a protest on Monday, March 10, outside the ICE Detention Center where he was first held in the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building.