Mahmoud Khalil’s 104 days in ICE Detention

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. On the night of March eighth, twenty twenty five, my guest, Makmoud Khalil. Was walking into the lobby of his apartment building in New York with his wife, who was eight months pregnant. A man in plain clothes slipped in behind them and within minutes put Khalil in handcuffs. Within two days, he was in an immigration jail in rural Louisiana, more than a thousand miles from home.

Khalil had a green card. He had no criminal record and had never been charged with a crime. But he had become one of the most visible faces of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student and the negotiator between the protesters and the administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that he should be deported, invoking a provision that had never been used against a permanent resident in this way. Khalil spent 104 days in detention. His son was born while he was inside.

A federal judge ordered him released in June of last year, but the government is still trying to remove him. Khalil is preparing to ask the Supreme Court to hear his case. This month he sued Columbia, accusing the university of failing to protect him and other Palestinian students from harassment and of retaliating against them when they reported it. Khalil was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and fled the country at eighteen. His new memoir, drawn in part from the diary he kept in detention, is called No Land to Stand On

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