Who Is the Palestinian Columbia Student Detained For His Protest Activity?
Several months ago, Reason interviewed Mahmoud Khalil at a protest encampment. Now he’s sitting in ICE detention.
President Donald Trump promised last week to round up the "agitators" responsible for "illegal protests" on college campuses. Over the weekend, his administration claimed its first scalp: Mahmoud Khalil, a lead negotiator for pro-Palestinian protest camp at Columbia University.
Plainclothes agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up at Khalil's university accommodations on Saturday night and detained him, claiming that his student visa was being revoked. When Khalil's pregnant American wife showed the agents that he had a permanent residency rather than a student visa, "one agent was visibly confused and said on the phone, 'He has a green card,'" according to a press release by Writers Against the War on Gaza.
The ICE agents then told Khalil's attorney, Amy Greer, over the phone that his green card was also being revoked, Greer told the Associated Press. Greer, who has filed a habeas corpus petition, could not find out where Khalil was being detained. ICE agents originally said Khalil was being sent to a facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but his wife visited the center and was told that Khalil was not there, Greer told CNN.
ICE's online detainee locator indicates that Khalil is currently being held in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center. Greer's law firm, Dratel & Lewis, did not immediately respond to a follow-up request for comment from Reason.
"On March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization," the Department of Homeland Security posted on X.
Just a few days before his detention, the A.P. quoted Khalil in an article about Columbia University's new Office of Institutional Equity. The office, which was set up to fight "disciminatory harassment," has focused heavily on pro-Palestinian protesters. Khalil told the A.P. that the office tried to put his graduation on hold because of "around 13 allegations against me, most of them are social media posts that I had nothing to do with," but backed off when his lawyer got involved.
The Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, an organization formed in response to the student protests, called Khalil a "ringleader of the chaos" on campus and praised the decision to detain him. Groups of pro-Israeli alumni have been trying to get pro-Palestinian activists deported for several months, reports The Intercept.
Of course, many of the students actually charged with crimes over the protests were U.S. citizens who couldn't be deported. Although Khalil did not participate in the infamous student occupation of campus buildings in April 2024, he was a spokesman and mediator for the student protesters, Al Jazeera reports. A month later, students set up a new protest encampment during alumni reunion. Reason spoke with Khalil at that encampment.
"The tent massacres in Rafah, using American-made weapons, have impacted Palestinian students a great deal, and we have heard nothing from the university, no condemnation, no expressions of care, silence from the university," he told a gaggle of reporters. "We have gathered peacefully in community to grieve and feel safe with each other."
In a previously unreported interview, Khalil also told Reason about his life story. "I was born in a refugee camp in southern Damascus. My grandparents were ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948," he said. "They stayed in the closest camp to Palestine, and they lived and died in that refugee camp."
As Syria fell into civil war, Khalil moved to neighboring Lebanon. He worked as a local manager for two British government programs, the Chevening Scholarship and the Conflict, Stability, and Security Fund, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2023, he enrolled in a master's program at Columbia's School of International Public Affairs.
Khalil told Reason that he was not worried about the political repercussions of being such a high-profile activist, because he wasn't planning to go back to Lebanon and Syria. Nor was he worried about how it would affect his career prospects in America, because "I wouldn't work for an institution that doesn't value Palestinian lives. So if they don't want to employ someone who is standing for Palestine, that's my gain," he said.
The prospect that he might be arrested by the U.S. government seemed so remote that it didn't come up.
It's not clear exactly which legal authorities the Trump administration used to revoke Khalil's green card, nor how that will hold up in court. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nor is it clear where Khalil would be deported. Palestinian refugees and their descendants cannot obtain Syrian or Lebanese citizenship, only residency. Complicating the case even more, Al Jazeera reported that Khalil has Algerian citizenship. The Algerian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rounding up "a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime marked an extraordinary move with an uncertain legal foundation," the A.P. reports. Civil libertarians argue that it's clearly unconstitutional.
"The Trump administration's detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder studying in this country legally—is targeted, retaliatory, and an extreme attack on his First Amendment rights," the New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman declared in a statement. "Ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campus. Political speech should never be a basis of punishment, or lead to deportation."
