Immigration and Customs Enforcement denied pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s request to be by his wife’s side as she went into labor Sunday, leaving him in a Louisiana detention facility while she gave birth in New York.
Khalil has been one of the most vocal targets of President Donald Trump’s retaliation campaign against student activists who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza.
A green card holder, Khalil has been fighting deportation since being abruptly arrested in March as he and his wife, a U.S. citizen, returned to their Columbia University apartment.
Khalil’s wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, said in a statement that refusing to allow Khalil’s temporary release “was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer.”
Attorneys for the Columbia activist had even suggested Khalil be given a GPS ankle monitor, even though his detention is related to a civil matter and not a criminal one, according to emails published by NPR. The denial came less than one hour after the request was made.
“My son and I should not be navigating his first days on earth without Mahmoud,” Abdalla said in her statement, obtained by HuffPost. “ICE and the Trump administration have stolen these precious moments from our family in an attempt to silence Mahmoud’s support for Palestinian freedom.”
“I will continue to fight every day for Mahmoud to come home to us. I know when Mahmoud is freed, he will show our son how to be brave, thoughtful, and compassionate, just like his dad,” she concluded.
A lawyer for Khalil told The New York Times that his client was able to communicate with his wife for at least some of the birth, and that both mother and baby are healthy.
“It was definitely just punitive,” the lawyer, Marc Van Der Hout, told the Times. “It was an utter lack of humanity.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been trying to remove Khalil from the country under an obscure law that allows him to deport people who are a threat to the nation’s foreign policy dealings.
Earlier this month, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Khalil could be deported for his views on Palestinians, although he will not be removed immediately as legal proceedings play out elsewhere.
Khalil has written several opinion pieces during his incarceration. His most recent, published by The Washington Post, stated that, “all too often, America has been a democracy of convenience.”
“Rights are granted to those who align with power. For the poor, for people of color, for those who resist injustice, rights are but words written on water,” he wrote in the piece published Thursday.
“Like the thousands of students that I advocated with at Columbia — including Muslim, Jewish and Christian friends — I believe in the innate equality of all human beings. I believe in human dignity. I believe in the right of my people to look at the blue sky and not fear an impending missile,” Khalil said.