WASHINGTON — A Cornell University student who participated in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests and was asked to surrender by US immigration officials said on Monday he was leaving the United States, citing fear of detention and threats to his personal safety.

Momodou Taal, a doctoral candidate in Africana Studies and dual citizen of the UK and The Gambia, participated in protests against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza following the October 7, 2023, terror onslaught, which he praised on social media. His attorneys said last month that he was asked to turn himself in and that his student visa was being revoked.

US President Donald Trump has pledged to deport foreign pro-Palestinian protesters and accused some of them of supporting Hamas, being antisemitic and posing foreign policy hurdles.

Protesters, including some anti-Zionist or left-wing Jewish groups, claim the Trump administration wrongly conflates what they describe as their criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism and support for terror groups.

However, Taal’s public track record includes vocal support for Hamas’s October 7 massacre, in which thousands of terrorists invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages to Gaza, amid widely documented atrocities and overt and systematic targeting of civilians.

Last year, Taal was in a group of activists who disrupted a career fair on campus that featured weapons manufacturers and the university thereafter ordered him to study remotely.

He had previously come under fire for a tweet posted on October 7 that said “glory to the resistance!” In another X post two days later, Taal further expressed support for the atrocities, declaring himself to be “an anti-imperialist who believes that colonized peoples have the right to resist by any means necessary.”

Taal filed a lawsuit in mid-March to block deportations of protesters, a bid that was denied by a judge last week.

“Given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,” Taal said on X.

Mike Kotlikoff, Cornell’s new president, has said he isn’t too worried that protest activity on his campus will ignite the kind of sweeping federal sanctions other Ivy League universities have faced following anti-Israel protests.

“I’m very comfortable with where Cornell is currently,” Kotlikoff said in an interview last week, five days after being appointed permanently to the position he has held on an interim basis since July 2024.

“We’ve had a relatively peaceful two semesters this year,” he added. “We’ve had a couple of situations where individuals who were protesting really went over the line and infringed on other people’s rights, and in both of those cases, there were consequences for those infringements.”

The Trump administration said on Monday that it was reviewing $9 billion in federal contracts and grants awarded to Harvard University, part of a crackdown on what it says is antisemitism on college campuses.

The focus on Harvard comes after the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University, which was the epicenter of campus protests last year. Columbia earlier this month announced it had made some changes demanded by the Trump administration to start negotiations to win back its federal funding.

In addition to targeting funds, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have detained some foreign student protesters in recent weeks and are working to deport them.

Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in early March and is legally challenging his detention. Trump has accused Khalil of supporting Hamas, which the latter denies.

Khalil was a leading member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which has endorsed “armed resistance” against Israel and called “for the total eradication of Western civilization.”

The Trump administration claimed after Khalil’s arrest that he had withheld his previous work for UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, in his visa application, saying that was grounds for his deportation.

Badar Khan Suri, an Indian studying at Georgetown University, was detained earlier in March. Suri’s lawyer denies he supported Hamas. A federal judge barred Suri’s deportation.

The legal team of Yunseo Chung, a Korean American Columbia University student, said last week that her lawful permanent resident status was being revoked. A judge ruled she cannot be detained for now. A spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security alleged Chung has engaged in concerning conduct, including when she was arrested by police during a protest at Barnard College last month that DHS termed “pro-Hamas” as the demonstrators who took over the campus handed out Hamas pamphlets.

A judge on Friday temporarily barred the deportation of a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University named Rumeysa Ozturk, who was taken into custody by immigration officials and who, a year ago, co-authored an opinion piece calling to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that the administration has revoked the visas of at least 300 students because of protest activities. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he said.