Days after a tent demonstration in help of Gaza had been cleared, Jewish college students at Columbia College gathered on Passover to share their causes for collaborating within the campus protests. Becoming a member of them was Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate scholar who had been tapped to liaison with the college administration.
Khalil is presently being held in an immigration detention facility by the Trump administration. However a yr in the past, he skipped out on the primary encampment at Columbia, which might launch a wave of antiwar protests throughout the nation — fearing the danger to his scholar visa.
“That’s why I’m not suspended, by the way,” Khalil mentioned on the April 23 occasion. “Because I did not participate, fearing that I will be arrested and ultimately deported from this country. This is why a lot of the Palestinian students here, they feel very uncomfortable — very, very uncomfortable — participating.”
Khalil, who has since accomplished his worldwide research programs and is now a authorized everlasting resident with a inexperienced card, has not been charged with any crime. His arrest has sparked protests and criticism over its implications free of charge speech. As he made his first look Friday, Columbia agreed to a number of of the Trump administration’s calls for to start out negotiations for $400 million in federal funding that had been revoked over allegations of antisemitism.
Attorneys for the federal authorities say they’ve “reasonable grounds” to consider that his presence in the US might have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” in keeping with courtroom filings. Talking with reporters, Trump administration officers have tried to hyperlink Khalil to a few of the most controversial protest exercise on and round Columbia’s campus.
Interviews with family and friends, courtroom paperwork, and reporting from final spring inform a extra difficult story in regards to the function Khalil might have performed within the demonstrations.
Barry Williams for New York Each day Information
A professional-Palestinian protestor encampment at Columbia College on April 18, 2024 in Manhattan, earlier than NYPD officers cleared it and arrested some protesters. (Barry Williams for New York Each day Information)
Khalil wouldn’t be a part of an unbiased group of activists who forcefully occupied a campus constructing, Hamilton Corridor, which introduced the protests to a grinding halt after Columbia directors known as the cops and campus successfully shuttered within the remaining days of the spring semester.
However he was well-known for his involvement within the broader demonstrations. As college students more and more hid their identities, Khalil, some years older than the undergraduates, didn’t put on a masks. He was quoted within the press. He met with directors, laid out the phrases for activists to take down their tents, and returned with updates to the encampment. He had a suspension reversed after at some point over his cooperation with the college.
“I think the reason that he was chosen for that role was because of his personality and because of the way he is,” his spouse, Noor Abdalla, an American citizen, informed public radio. “He’s calm. He knows how to stay calm in stressful situations, and everybody knew him as the guy who was not going to start yelling or anything like that.”
Khalil himself appeared to anticipate such immigration enforcement was doable whereas he was nonetheless on a scholar visa. On the Jewish college students’ occasion in April, a reporter requested Khalil what would occur to him if he have been deported. He sighed, taking a second to gather his ideas.
“I will live,” he replied. “We would continue to live. The Palestinian people have been under occupation, ethnic cleansing, and all sorts of crimes since 1948. And we prevailed, we will prevail.”
In letters of help filed in courtroom, mates recounted a time Khalil intervened when a protester shouted antisemitic remarks. College described him as a “stand-out” trainer’s assistant, whereas a U.S. authorities official who took a put up in Israel spoke extremely of their friendship. Not too long ago, Khalil helped convene a panel that includes a distinguished Palestinian historian and a former Israeli peace negotiator, one other letter mentioned.
When Khalil was requested if he supported Hamas, a U.S-designed terrorist group — a query letters advised was posed continuously — three mates mentioned he condemned extremism in all types and was dedicated to nonviolence.
Pupil negotiator Mahmoud Khalil on the Columbia College campus in New York at a pro-Palestinian protest encampment in April 2024. (AP Picture/Ted Shaffrey, file)
Khalil served because the middleman with directors on behalf of Columbia College Apartheid Divest, an unsanctioned scholar group that has grown extra radical over the previous yr. Final spring, the coalition distanced itself from one in all its members who posted his perception that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” on-line. However in latest months, its leaders rescinded an apology and clarified its stance: Columbia College Apartheid Divest backed “armed resistance” and Palestinian liberation “by any means necessary,” the group wrote in a press release in October.
With out proof, a far-right, pro-Israel extremist group tied Khalil to the violent comment and requested the federal authorities to intervene. The group, Betar USA, has been compiling a listing of worldwide college students to deport, claiming to share their names on social media and with the Trump administration.
Khalil, who has completed his diploma program and is predicted to graduate in Might, participated in a quick takeover of the library at Barnard School, a Columbia affiliate, throughout which activists distributed supplies purporting to be from the Hamas media workplace, in keeping with movies shared by the protesters, which included far-left activists from the non-Columbia group Unity of Fields. The Trump administration accused Khalil of personally handing out the pamphlets.
“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda, flyers with the logo of Hamas,” mentioned White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt eventually week’s briefing.
“I have those flyers on my desk, they were provided to me by the Department of Homeland Security,” she added. “This administration is not going to tolerate individuals having the privilege of studying in our country and then siding with pro-terrorist organizations that have killed Americans.”
White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt. (AP Picture/Evan Vucci)
Legal professionals for Khalil have denied he distributed leaflets from Hamas, including that no flyers have been launched to this point in federal courtroom.
“The reality is that Mr. Khalil completely and vehemently denies doing anything like that, distributing any flyers like that,” mentioned Ramzi Kassem, an lawyer for Khalil and the founding father of CLEAR, a authorized clinic at CUNY. “He has absolutely no connections to Hamas whatsoever.”
Whether or not Khalil needs to be held accountable in immigration proceedings or in any other case for the actions of Columbia College Apartheid Divest or activists who’ve seized on the campus protests has elicited various responses.
“You’re seeing a lot of people pointing to the worst thing they’ve heard of the movement or someone else, and saying he’s responsible for it,” mentioned Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia. “Mahmoud has the courage to put his face and name out there. This has made him an easy target for people who don’t care about who he is.”
Howley included the White Home in that bucket, suggesting prime federal officers “seem to spend way too much time on social media,” and the accounting of occasions that they learn there.
“Mahmoud’s own commitments are a matter of public record. I wouldn’t want someone holding me responsible for someone who stood next to me once. I would like to be held responsible for the things that I have said.”
Crowd gathers in Foley Sq. to protest the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, March 10, 2025, in Manhattan. (Barry Williams / New York Each day Information)
One Columbia scholar on social media shared movies of the library takeover and different protests the place Khalil was concerned, suggesting they have been proof of his duty for the protests that some Jewish college students have mentioned makes them really feel unsafe.
“Mahmoud Khalil is not the hero some make him out to be,” he wrote on X.
Khalil’s attorneys are due again in courtroom on Tuesday over a separate authorized matter, the place he and his classmates are pushing a Manhattan federal decide to intervene within the federal authorities’s request for scholar disciplinary information.
