NEW YORK (AP) — When protests over the Israel-Hamas struggle 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 army marketing campaign in Gaza and pressed the Ivy League faculty to chop monetary ties with Israel and corporations that supported the struggle.
“We want to be visible,” Khalil mentioned 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 condo 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 and 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 dropped at bear within the charged days of the demonstrations.
“You couldn’t meet a kinder or nicer person to work with. He’s thoughtful. He’s intelligent. He’s conscientious,” mentioned former British diplomat Andrew Waller, a colleague of Khalil’s from the U.Okay.’s Beirut-based embassy for Syria.
Khalil labored there from about 2018 to 2022, operating a scholarship fund and supporting the U.Okay.’s diplomatic engagement with Syria, Waller mentioned, noting that the function required an in depth background test.
He mentioned the 2 spoke a couple of weeks in the past, and Khalil was targeted on turning 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 may be focused by the brand new Trump administration, Waller mentioned.
Flight from civil struggle to the halls of academia
After ending highschool in Syria, Khalil was on monitor to review aviation engineering there, however his plans have been upended by the nation’s civil struggle, he wrote in a 2017 essay for a global schooling charity. He recounted that he left for Beirut, acquired a job with an schooling nonprofit that helps Syrian kids, and went to a Lebanese college.
“Where would I be if, like countless other Syrian refugees before me, I could not get a scholarship, could not work, or worst of all, could not leave Syria in the depths of the ongoing war?” he questioned within the essay.
Khalil earned a bachelor’s diploma in pc science and determined to proceed his research at Columbia, in accordance with a web based bio for a 2020 worldwide improvement convention the place he was listed as a speaker.
Then, final spring, protests over the struggle in Gaza erupted at Columbia, the place demonstrators arrange tents in the midst of campus and took over an administration constructing. A wave of comparable 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 together with his willingness to share his title with reporters, rapidly made him a goal amongst those that noticed antisemitism within the demonstrations.
“I’m an easy scapegoat for them to say, ‘Look at this Palestinian who never wore a mask and was active in the school protests,’” Khalil instructed an Related Press reporter in an interview final week.
The Columbia Jewish Alumni Affiliation, in the meantime, has referred to as Khalil a “ringleader of the chaos” on campus. A brand new Columbia disciplinary committee has investigated numerous allegations towards Khalil, most lately 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 complicated in Louisiana.
White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned Tuesday that Khalil needs to be deported as a result of he organized “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.” 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 someone distributed something at a protest that has nothing to do with the group, they attribute it to him for having his face at the action,” mentioned Maryan Alwan, a Columbia College senior.
She described Khalil as mild-mannered and gifted at navigating inside 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 embrace some Jewish college students and teams.
Nonetheless, a Columbia process power on antisemitism discovered “serious and pervasive” issues with the local weather on campus. The group mentioned in a report that through the demonstrations, Jews and Israelis had been verbally abused, humiliated in courses 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 court docket submitting.
In the meantime, he and his spouse predict their first little one. She is eight months pregnant, in accordance with his attorneys. Whereas not giving her title, they launched a press release through which she implored the general public “to see Mahmoud through my eyes as a loving husband” and father-to-be.
“I need your help to bring Mahmoud home, so he is here beside me, holding my hand in the delivery room,” she wrote.