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Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student activist who led campus pro-Palestinian rallies and is now resisting the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, has accused the university of laying “the groundwork for my abduction” and called on the student body to continue demonstrations and protests.
Khalil, a green-card holder who is in custody in Louisiana as his case moves through the courts, was detained on 8 March. The Trump administration is seeking to deport him under a provision in federal immigration law that permits the state department to deport non-citizens considered to be a threat to US foreign policy.
Federal officials have said that Khalil, who has not been charged with any crime, led activities “aligned to Hamas”, which the US designates a terrorist organization.
In an op-ed published Friday in the Columbia Spectator, dictated to his attorney, Khalil accused Columbia’s leadership of suppressing student dissent over Israel’s war in Gaza, which it launched after the 7 October 2023 terror attack by Hamas.
“Since my abduction on March 8, the intimidation and kidnapping of international students who stand for Palestine has only accelerated,” Khalil said, pointing to the arrest of three other students, the self-deportation of a fourth and another who is fighting similar orders but without arrest.
“The situation is oddly reminiscent of when I fled the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and sought refuge in Lebanon,” Khalil continued. “The logic used by the federal government to target myself and my peers is a direct extension of Columbia’s repression playbook concerning Palestine.”
Khalil also accused the university of suppressing student dissent under the auspices of combating antisemitism and bowing to pressure from Congress to turn over student disciplinary records and creating a taskforce on antisemitism “that broadly categorized anti-Israel sentiment as hate speech to condemn protests”.
He urged students to continue their protest efforts. “It is incumbent upon each of you to reclaim the University and join the student movement to carry forward the work of the past year,” he wrote.
The US secretary of sate Marco Rubio said last month that the state department had revoked roughly 300 students visas. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio said at a news conference in Guyana.
Khalil mentioned other students who had been arrested and are facing deportation, including the Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, whom the Department of Homeland Security has said “engaged in activities in support of Hamas”.
Khalil said that Öztürk, whose deportation has been temporarily blocked by a judge, and others have been “snatched by the state”.
Öztürk was a signatory to an opinion piece in the Tufts University student newspaper that called on the university to label Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide”. Tufts has said the op-ed is consistent with speech permitted under its policies of free expression.
Khalil’s letter comes a month after Columbia University’s president, Katrina Armstrong, resigned as the university acceded to administration demands to crack down on what the administration deemed acts of antisemitism at the campus.
Trump threatened to withdraw $400m in federal funding to Columbia if the university did not agree to a series of changes including banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to remove or arrest individuals, and taking control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East from its faculty.
