Mahmoud Khalil, a US-based Palestinian protester arrested at Columbia University nine days ago, has written that he is a “political prisoner” in a letter sent from a Louisiana detention center.
Khalil was arrested on March 9 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and has been threatened with deportation for leading activities that the Trump administration says were “aligned to Hamas.” He was a leader of the hardline pro-Palestinian group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, and his detainment was part of a broad crackdown on campus anti-Israel protests that the Trump administration says has included support for terrorism and is responsible for a surge in antisemitism. Another person who demonstrated at Columbia has also been arrested.
In his letter, which was dictated to his family Tuesday, Khalil urged the protests to continue.
“If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation,” he wrote. “In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”
Khalil called his arrest “a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” a reference to Israeli airstrikes in Gaza that ended a two-month ceasefire. Israel rejects the accusation that it is committing genocide in its war against Hamas, which was triggered on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian terror group led some 5,000 attackers to invade southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking hundreds of hostages.
Israel says the resumed airstrikes are because Hamas refused offers to extend the first phase of the truce framework under which batches of hostages were released in return for a halt in the fighting, humanitarian aid to Gaza, and the release of thousands of Palestinian security inmates from Israeli prisons.
Khalil also blamed Columbia’s leaders for his arrest, accusing them of having “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation —to go unchecked.”
Khalil was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and came to the US on a student visa in 2022, getting his US permanent residency green card last year.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a consortium of dozens of student groups that took a leading role in the anti-Israel encampment protest last spring. In December last year, it was banned from the Instagram platform after posting plans for a protest that included an image of a figure holding a Molotov cocktail.
The protest announcement also had photos apparently of university trustees, saying they were “enemies,” “murderers,” and “violently genocidal Zionists,” and included inverted black triangles on a red background. Red inverted triangles, which Hamas uses to mark its targets in propaganda videos, have been adopted as a protest symbol by anti-Israel activists.
The Trump administration, along with a range of Jewish groups, have long faulted Columbia for not doing enough to curb disruptive anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protests that, according to many Jewish students, created a hostile atmosphere. Shortly before Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration froze $400 million in grants to Columbia over campus antisemitism, and the school responded last week by expelling and suspending a range of students.