After 104 days in ICE detention, Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was released June 20th. Khalil was arrested by federal immigration agents without a warrant on March 8th, separated from his wife Noor Abdalla in the lobby of his campus residential building. Agents took Khalil to a remote detention center in Jena, Louisiana, where he was held as a political prisoner for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza. He was forced to miss the birth of his son while in detention.
Despite having a green card and not breaking any laws during his participation in protests at Columbia, Khalil was facing deportation. He was the first of several activists detained by the Trump administration this year. Several legal battles challenged the legality of his detention, arguing the Trump administration was punishing Khalil for exercising his free speech protected by the First Amendment.
Khalil spoke to the press after his release about returning to his work as an activist:
“The genocide is still happening in Gaza…. This is why I will continue to protest with every one of you, not only if they threaten me with detention; even if they would kill me, I would still speak up for Palestine.”
He also spoke in support of the other thousand immigrants still jailed at the detention center:
“The fact that they put me in that place, that didn’t mean that I was not free. I continued to advocate for Palestinians, for the immigrants who are left behind in that facility, the 1,200 men who, all of them, are incredible men, who the Trump administration are trying to portray as whether criminals or just, like, illegals, as they say. And as I said yesterday, whether you are a citizen, an immigrant, anyone on this land, you’re not illegal. That doesn’t make you less of a human. And this is what the administration is trying to do, to dehumanize me, to dehumanize the immigrants, to dehumanize anyone who actually does not agree with what the administration is doing.”
Khalil’s words remind us that the fight to end the horrible genocide in Gaza is far from over and that we are fighting a dehumanizing system here in the U.S. as well. We can and must come together to free Palestine and end the ICE terror on our immigrant communities.
