NEW YORK – When protests over the Israel-Hamas battle took root on Columbia College’s campus final spring, Mahmoud Khalil grew to become a well-known, outspoken determine in a pupil motion that quickly unfold to different U.S. faculties.
The international-affairs graduate pupil was a fixture in and across the protest encampment on Columbia’s Manhattan campus, serving as a spokesperson and negotiator for demonstrators who deplored Israel’s navy marketing campaign in Gaza and pressed the Ivy League faculty to chop monetary ties with Israel and firms that supported the battle.
“We wish to be seen,” Khalil said final April.
Now that visibility has helped make him the face of President Donald Trump’s drive to punish what he calls antisemitic and “anti-American” campus protests. Within the first publicly identified arrest of the crackdown, federal immigration brokers took Khalil, a authorized U.S. resident married to an American citizen, from his condominium Saturday and held him for potential deportation.
To Trump and his administration, Khalil’s arrest is a gap transfer in a marketing campaign to rid the nation of overseas college students accused of serving to to make American campuses intimidating territory for Jewish college students. To civil rights advocates and Khalil’s attorneys, his detention is an assault on free speech and an try to suppress pro-Palestinian views.
And to some who’ve labored alongside the 30-year-old graduate pupil on the protests and elsewhere, his arrest is a startling takedown of somebody with diplomatic expertise that he delivered to bear within the charged days of the demonstrations.
“You couldn’t meet a kinder or nicer individual to work with. He’s considerate. He’s clever. He’s conscientious,” mentioned former British diplomat Andrew Waller, a colleague of Khalil’s from the U.Ok.’s Beirut-based embassy for Syria.
Khalil labored there from about 2018 to 2022, operating a scholarship fund and supporting the U.Ok.’s diplomatic engagement with Syria, Waller mentioned, noting that the function required an in depth background examine.
He mentioned the 2 spoke just a few weeks in the past, and Khalil was centered on changing into a father — his spouse is pregnant — and on strife in Syria, the place he was born and raised in a Palestinian household. Khalil additionally expressed concern that he is likely to be focused by the brand new Trump administration, Waller mentioned.
Flight from civil battle to the halls of academia
After ending highschool in Syria, Khalil was on monitor to check aviation engineering there, however his plans have been upended by the nation’s civil battle, he wrote in a 2017 essay for a world schooling charity. He recounted that he left for Beirut, obtained a job with an schooling nonprofit that helps Syrian youngsters, and went to a Lebanese college.
“The place would I be if, like numerous different Syrian refugees earlier than me, I couldn’t get a scholarship, couldn’t work, or worst of all, couldn’t go away Syria within the depths of the continuing battle?” he puzzled within the essay.
Khalil earned a bachelor’s diploma in laptop science and determined to proceed his research at Columbia, in keeping with a web based bio for a 2020 worldwide growth convention the place he was listed as a speaker.
Then, final spring, protests over the battle in Gaza erupted at Columbia, the place demonstrators arrange tents in the midst of campus and took over an administration constructing. A wave of similar demonstrations unfold to another faculties across the nation.
Khalil served as a distinguished pupil mediator on behalf of pro-Palestinian activists and Muslim college students involved for his or her security.
However pictures of his maskless face at protests, alongside along with his willingness to share his title with reporters, rapidly made him a goal amongst those that noticed antisemitism within the demonstrations.
“I’m a straightforward scapegoat for them to say, ‘Have a look at this Palestinian who by no means wore a masks and was lively within the faculty protests,” Khalil instructed an Related Press reporter in an interview final week.
The Columbia Jewish Alumni Affiliation, in the meantime, has known as Khalil a “ringleader of the chaos” on campus. A brand new Columbia disciplinary committee has investigated various allegations against Khalil, most not too long ago whether or not he violated a college anti-harassment coverage by calling a dean “genocidal.”
Focused by the Trump administration
Khalil is now being held in a federal detention advanced in Louisiana.
White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned Tuesday that Khalil ought to be deported as a result of he organized “protests that not solely disrupted faculty campus lessons and harassed Jewish American college students and made them really feel unsafe on their very own faculty campus, but in addition distributed pro-Hamas propaganda.” The U.S. authorities has designated Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, as a terrorist group.
Those that protested alongside Khalil dispute that account.
“If somebody distributed one thing at a protest that has nothing to do with the group, they attribute it to him for having his face on the motion,” mentioned Maryan Alwan, a Columbia College senior.
She described Khalil as mild-mannered and gifted at navigating inner disputes amongst pupil protesters. Exterior of activism, she mentioned he loved cooking and taking part in drums in Columbia’s Arab Music Ensemble.
Columbia protest leaders have insisted they’re anti-war, not antisemitic, and the demonstrations embody some Jewish college students and teams.
Nonetheless, a Columbia activity drive on antisemitism discovered “severe and pervasive” issues with the local weather on campus. The group mentioned in a report that in the course of the demonstrations, Jews and Israelis had been verbally abused, humiliated in lessons and ostracized from pupil teams.
Khalil completed his grasp’s diploma research in December and has been scheduled to obtain his diploma in Might, his attorneys mentioned in a courtroom submitting.
In the meantime, he and his spouse expect their first baby. She is eight months pregnant, in keeping with his attorneys. Whereas not giving her title, they launched an announcement during which she implored the general public “to see Mahmoud by my eyes as a loving husband” and father-to-be.
“I would like your assist to deliver Mahmoud dwelling, so he’s right here beside me, holding my hand within the supply room,” she wrote.
Copyright 2025 The Related Press. All rights reserved. This materials is probably not printed, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed with out permission.
