Immigration authorities arrest pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia

Mahmoud Khalil speaks during a press conference about students who were arrested and suspended for protesting at Columbia University, near the campus in New York, April 22, 2024. Federal immigration authorities on Saturday detained Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student and well-known activist who played a major role in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian student movement last year, his lawyer said on Sunday, March 9, 2025. (Bing Guan/The New York Times)

By Eliza Shapiro

Federal immigration authorities on Saturday detained a well-known activist who played a major role in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian student movement last year, his lawyer said Sunday.

The arrest of the activist, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was a significant escalation of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on what he has called antisemitic campus activity.

The activist, Mahmoud Khalil, is of Palestinian heritage and graduated in December with a master’s degree from the university’s school of international affairs, according to his LinkedIn. His lawyer, Amy Greer, confirmed that he was a green card holder and said the arrest would face a vigorous legal challenge.

“We will vigorously be pursuing Mahmoud’s rights in court, and will continue our efforts to right this terrible and inexcusable — and calculated — wrong committed against him,” Greer said in a statement. The arrest, she said, “follows the U.S. government’s open repression of student activism and political speech.”

Greer said she was not sure of Khalil’s “precise whereabouts,” and that he may have been transferred as far away as Louisiana. Khalil’s wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, tried to visit him at a detention center in New Jersey but was told he was not being held there, Greer said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement Sunday night that Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”

“Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” she said. “ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.”

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a link on social platform X to a news article about Khalil’s arrest and issued a broad promise: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

The immigration agents who detained Khalil told him his student visa had been revoked, Greer said, even though he does not currently hold such a visa. Revoking a green card is quite rare, said Elora Mukherjee, director of the immigrants’ rights clinic at Columbia Law School, and in a vast majority of cases where it does happen, the holder has been accused and convicted of criminal offenses, she said.

If the government was to revoke Khalil’s green card “in retaliation for his public speech, that is prohibited by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Mukherjee said, adding that she was still learning details about this particular case.

Jodi Ziesemer, director of the immigrant protection unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group, said the revocation process is typically lengthy. A green card holder can be detained, but not deported, during that process, she said.

Khalil was a fixture at the protests that engulfed Columbia last spring, making the New York City campus the national epicenter of demonstrations against the war in the Gaza Strip. He described his role to reporters as a negotiator and spokesperson for Columbia’s pro-Palestinian group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

The Trump administration has made Columbia the first target of its push to punish what the president has deemed elite schools’ failures to protect Jewish students during campus protests.

On Friday, the administration announced that it had canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to the university. In a social media post last week, Trump vowed to punish individual protesters his administration considered “agitators.”

“All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.”

In a statement Sunday, Columbia administrators did not comment directly on the arrest.

“Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community,” the statement read. “We are also committed to the legal rights of our students and urge all members of the community to be respectful of those rights.”

The arrest drew swift condemnation from some free speech groups, immigrant rights’ activists and politicians on Sunday.

Donna Lieberman, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that the detention “reeks of McCarthyism.” She added that the arrest was “a frightening escalation of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech and an aggressive abuse of immigration law.”

Zohran Mamdani, a New York Assembly member from Queens who is running for New York City mayor, called the detention “a blatant assault on the First Amendment and a sign of advancing authoritarianism under Trump.” Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has faced backlash from some pro-Israel groups for his criticism of Israel.

And Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement, “This blatantly unconstitutional act sends a deplorable message that freedom of speech is no longer protected in America.”

But the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, which has been calling for aggressive action against pro-Palestinian demonstrators, praised Khalil’s detention in a series of social media posts, calling Khalil, without evidence, a “ringleader” of the chaos at Columbia.

Khalil told Reuters before his arrest Saturday that he feared that he would be targeted by the federal government.

“Clearly Trump is using the protesters as a scapegoat for his wider agenda fighting and attacking higher education and the Ivy League education system,” he said.

Khalil was active as a negotiator for protesters last week at Barnard College, a women’s college affiliated with Columbia, which erupted after the college announced that it was expelling two students for disrupting a course on modern Israel. When Barnard’s president, Laura Rosenbury, called protesters on the phone to negotiate during one sit-in on campus, Khalil held up a megaphone to amplify her voice.

Khalil was briefly suspended from Columbia last spring for his role in the protests before the school reversed the decision. He has a diplomatic background and has worked at the British Embassy in Beirut, according to an online biography.

Over the past few days, critics of the protest movement at Columbia have singled out Khalil on social media. Shai Davidai, a vocal pro-Israel professor at Columbia who was barred from campus after the university said he intimidated and harassed employees, called on Rubio to deport Khalil.