“Unusual,” “chilling,” and “really difficult.”
That’s how legal experts described the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist who was arrested on Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a university-owned apartment building.
Khalil, who is of Syrian nationality, has been a public spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia and its sister institution, Barnard College. A year ago, he helped lead negotiations with administrators at an encampment calling for divestment from Israel.
Last Wednesday, Khalil was seen at a pro-Palestinian sit-in at Barnard’s library, according to videos shared on social media. The demonstration — targeted at Barnard’s decision to expel two students who disrupted an Israeli history class in January — culminated in nine arrests, underscoring months of tensions between the New York institutions and their students.
Three days later, Khalil was taken into custody.
Khalil’s arrest marks the first case of immigration officials’ following through on the Trump administration’s threat to deport international students who have participated in protests connected to the war in Gaza.
President Trump and his allies have accused protesters of antisemitism and tried to tie their activism to Hamas, the terrorist organization behind the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The Trump administration cited allegations that Columbia failed to combat antisemitism in its decision to cut $400 million in federal grants on Friday.
Trump said on Monday that Khalil’s detention was “the first arrest of many to come.”
In recent months, some students and staff have expressed fear about the potential impacts of Trump’s immigration agenda, including the rescindment of a decade-long policy directing ICE not to conduct raids at schools, churches, and hospitals. In February, the first ICE arrest on a campus was reported: a former student at Spokane Community College who allegedly violated visa requirements.
Khalil’s detention has supercharged those concerns and sparked a national uproar over what many academics and First Amendment advocates see as blatant targeting for political speech.
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Some details of what happened to Khalil remain unclear. Amy Greer, a lawyer representing Khalil, has told reporters that he held a student visa and a green card, which granted him permanent residency. Greer said ICE agents told her that the State Department had revoked both of Khalil’s documents.
Khalil is being held at a detention center in Louisiana, according to ICE’s online detainee locator. On Monday, a judge blocked his deportation until a hearing on Wednesday.
ICE arrested Khalil for “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, in an email statement.
Providing material support — such as money, services, or property — to a terrorist organization is among the crimes that would justify revoking a green card, lawyers told The Chronicle. Khalil’s supporters say he has not been charged with a crime.
It’s not clear whether ICE agents entered Khalil’s apartment, which would have required either a judicial warrant or Khalil’s consent. His lawyer has not clarified whether agents had a warrant.
Mahmoud Khalil is paying an unconscionable price.
On Thursday, a day after the Barnard sit-in that led to nine arrests, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X that “violators of U.S. law — including international students — face visa denial or revocation, and deportation.” That same day, pro-Israeli social-media accounts began sharing a video of the sit-in that identified Khalil; some of the posts tagged Rubio. The video was originally posted by Canary Mission, an online database that says it aims to document people and groups who criticize Israel, mostly in higher education.
Among those promoting the video was Shai Davidai, an assistant professor of business, who wrote in a post that the protest was a “deportable offense.” (Davidai was temporarily suspended from Columbia’s campus last fall after the university found that he had repeatedly harassed and intimidated two administrators while accusing them of failing to protect Jewish students and employees.)
To Nadia Abu El-Haj, co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia, “unsubstantiated allegations” about Khalil on social media were partially to blame for his detainment.
“The narratives you have promoted have demonized and increasingly helped to criminalize simply being Palestinian in this country,” El-Haj said at a Monday news conference, “and Mahmoud Khalil is paying an unconscionable price.”
Legal Implications
Khalil’s situation has drawn particular attention to green cards, which grant permanent legal residency to foreign nationals. Many professors are green-card holders who have lived and worked in the United States for decades.
International students like Khalil typically come to the United States on temporary visas. It’s not clear what Khalil’s exact status is; his lawyer has said he recently earned a green card.
There are limited grounds on which a green card can be taken away, according to immigration lawyers, including committing a crime.
It’s possible for legal permanent residents to be deported, but rare, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. She noted, however, that fears of terrorism have in the past heightened scrutiny of immigration applicants of certain nationalities, like Afghan and Iraqi people after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Immigration cases typically go through immigration court, housed in the Department of Justice, or through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in the Department of Homeland Security, she added.
But in cases like Khalil’s, “not knowing what process they’ll go through kind of complicates the situation,” she said.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, who recently retired as a professor of immigration law at Cornell University, said Khalil should be allowed to challenge the accusations against him in court. However, sending him to a detention center makes it harder for Khalil to communicate with lawyers and fight his case, Yale-Loehr added.
The case, Yale-Loehr said, is likely to create a chilling effect among international students.
Last fall, another high-profile incident involving an international student’s participation in a protest drew national attention. Momodou Taal, a British Ph.D. student at Cornell University, said the institution threatened to revoke his visa after he and other pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted an on-campus job fair. Cornell later reversed course.
Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer, a clinical professor of law at Cornell, said the risk of consequences might be too high for some international students.
“People have to gauge their own sense of risk based on their own personal situation and convictions to decide how they want to engage,” she said. “But I do think that immigrant students may be more hesitant to engage after this.”
