Columbia activist in detention was public face of protest against Israel

People gather to protest the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a well-known activist who played a major role in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian student movement last year, outside the Jacob Javitz Federal Building in Manhattan, on Monday, March 10, 2025. The arrest of Khalil, a permanent resident of the U.S., sets up a fight over free speech and immigrant rights. (Caitlin Ochs/The New York Times)

By Ana Ley

As protests over the conflict in the Gaza Strip ignited rancor and division at Columbia University last year, one student stood out for his role as a negotiator representing activists in talks with the school officials who were desperate to achieve peace on campus.

Mahmoud Khalil, 30, emerged as a public face of students opposed to the war, leading demonstrations and granting interviews. He delivered a message that his side viewed as measured and responsible but that has been branded by some, including the Trump administration, as antisemitic.

Khalil has been involved in demonstrations as recently as January, when four masked demonstrators entered a class on the history of Israel taught by an Israeli professor at Columbia to accuse the school of “normalizing genocide.” Videos of an unmasked Khalil at a related sit-in were soon circulated on social media among critics of Columbia’s protest movement, with some calling for him to be deported.

Over the weekend, Khalil was at the center of the news again. He was arrested by federal immigration officials in a dramatic escalation of President Donald Trump’s crackdown against what he has called antisemitic campus activity. Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States, had been living in Columbia’s student housing when he was detained and then transferred to the Central Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana.

Late Monday afternoon, the streets of lower Manhattan in New York were flooded with about 3,000 protesters, according to police, who had come to demonstrate against Khalil’s detention.

“I support immigrants’ rights and freedoms and I support the Palestinian fight for liberation,” said Alan Yaskin, who attended the demonstration and said that he identifies as Jewish. “Mahmoud Khalil was exercising rights everyone is entitled to.”

Khalil’s friends said they were stunned to hear of his arrest, describing him as kind, expressive and gentle. He is someone who loves to dance, to read Arab poetry and to play Arab music, said Maryam Alwan, a friend and student who is a pro-Palestinian organizer on campus. He hosted dinners at his home, with Middle Eastern fare served.

“One of my friends last year was graduating and wasn’t able to get a graduation robe,” Alwan said. “He just gave her his.”

On Monday, a federal judge in Manhattan ordered the U.S. government not to remove Khalil from the country while the judge reviewed a motion filed by Khalil’s lawyers challenging the legality of his detention.

Federal immigration officials did not immediately reply to questions about Khalil’s transfer, including why he was taken more than 1,000 miles from his home in New York City, where he had been arrested.

Trump hailed the arrest in a Truth Social posting Monday and pledged that more student arrests are forthcoming.

“ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas student on the campus of Columbia University,” the president wrote. “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

Khalil’s arrest drew outrage from students and faculty at the university. Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, described him as brave, yet mild-mannered — a “consummate diplomat” who worked to find middle ground between protesters and school administrators.

Howley, who has known Khalil for about a year, having met him after Khalil began speaking out in campus protests, said he was frustrated by depictions of Khalil as a dangerous person.

“This is someone who seeks mediated resolutions through speech and dialogue,” he said. “This is not someone who engages in violence, or gets people riled up to do dangerous things. So it’s really disturbing to see that kind of misrepresentation of him.”

But the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, in a thread on social platform X, called him a “ringleader of the chaos” at Columbia and said he was involved in two building takeovers at Columbia and Barnard College.

Khalil was born and raised in Syria because his grandparents were forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Tiberias, now part of Israel, according to his lawyers’ legal filing. He is Palestinian and graduated in December from Columbia with a master’s degree from the School of International and Public Affairs. He is married to an American citizen who is expecting their first child next month, his lawyer said.

In a statement released by his lawyer, Amy Greer, on Monday night, his wife, who was not identified, said, “I urge you to see Mahmoud through my eyes as a loving husband and the future father to our baby. I need your help to bring Mahmoud home, so he is here beside me, holding my hand in the delivery room as we welcome our first child into this world.”

According to the court filing from his lawyer, Khalil and his wife were returning to their apartment on Columbia’s Manhattan campus from a friend’s home about 8:30 p.m. Saturday when they were approached by immigration officers dressed in plain clothes. All of them entered the lobby of the apartment building, which is owned by Columbia.

The agents who detained Khalil told him his student visa had been revoked, even though he does not hold such a visa, according to the legal filing. When Khalil’s wife showed the officers documents demonstrating that he is a lawful permanent resident — not a student visa holder — they arrested him and said that his green card had also been revoked. The officers threatened to arrest Khalil’s wife if she did not go up to her apartment and leave her husband behind, the court document said. They then handcuffed him and took him outside where vehicles were waiting.

Khalil married his wife on Nov. 16, 2023, and became a lawful permanent resident in 2024.

As news spread about his detention, a petition calling for his release amassed more than 1.7 million signatures by Monday evening. A group of faculty members from Columbia gathered Monday evening with Jewish community leaders and immigrant rights advocates to denounce what they described as “the unprecedented and unconstitutional arrest of a permanent resident and Columbia graduate student in retaliation for his political activity.”

Sophie Ellman-Golan, communications director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and a Barnard College graduate, described Khalil’s arrest as “so deeply wrong and scary.”

“To target someone for their political speech in this way, to target a permanent resident in this way, is an aberration,” Ellman-Golan said.