Two days before US agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University student and anti-Israel activist asked his wife if she knew what to do if immigration agents came to their door.

Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife of more than two years, said she was confused. As a legal permanent resident of the US, surely he did not have to worry about that, she recalls telling him.

“I didn’t take him seriously. Clearly I was naive,” Abdalla, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, told Reuters in her first media interview.

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.

US Department of Homeland Security agents handcuffed her husband on Saturday in the lobby of their university-owned apartment building in Manhattan. Khalil’s arrest is one of the first efforts by US President Donald Trump, a Republican who returned to the White House in January, to fulfill his promise to seek deportation of some foreign students involved in the pro-Palestinian protest movement over its alleged support for terror groups and antisemitism.

Earlier on Wednesday, Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist in New York, sat in the front row of a Manhattan courtroom as Khalil’s lawyers argued to a federal judge that he had been arrested in retaliation for his outspoken advocacy against Israel’s military action in Gaza amid the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, in which invaders led by the terror group killed 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251.

The lawyers told the judge that was a violation of Khalil’s constitutional free speech rights.

The judge extended his order blocking Khalil’s deportation while he considers whether the arrest was constitutional.

Trump has said, without evidence, that Khalil, 30, has promoted Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist terror group that governs Gaza. His administration has said Khalil is not accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump says his presence in the US is “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that Khalil was detained for deportation due to support for the Hamas terror group.

“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers,” Leavitt said.

Khalil was a leading organizer for the Columbia protest movement. Columbia protesters held disruptive demonstrations on campus starting soon after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, that have continued into recent weeks. Protesters have openly endorsed violence and US-designated terror groups, and Jewish and Israeli students and faculty have said the activists created a hostile and discriminatory environment. A university task force reported “crushing” discrimination against Jews and Israelis on campus.

On Sunday, the Trump administration transferred Khalil from a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement jail in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near Manhattan, to a jail in rural Jena, Louisiana, about 1,200 miles (2,000 km) away.

Abdalla and Khalil met in Lebanon in 2016 when she joined a volunteer program Khalil was overseeing at a nonprofit group that provides educational scholarships to Syrian youth. They started as friends before a seven-year long-distance relationship led to their New York wedding in 2023.

“He is the most incredible person who cares so much for other people,” she said. “He is the most kind, genuine soul.”

The couple is expecting their first child in late April. She said she hoped Khalil would be free by then. She showed Reuters a picture of a recent sonogram: a boy whose name they have yet to choose.

“I think it would be very devastating for me and for him to meet his first child behind a glass screen,” Abdalla said. “I’ve always been so excited to have my first baby with the person I love.”

The government has said it has begun proceedings to deport Khalil and is defending his detention in the court proceedings until then.

Trump has called the anti-Israel student protest movement antisemitic and said Khalil’s “is the first arrest of many to come.”

Khalil completed his studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December but is yet to receive his master’s degree diploma.

He became a high-profile member of the Ivy League university’s student protest movement, often speaking to the media as one of the lead negotiators with Columbia administration over the protesters’ years-long demands that the school end investments of its $14.8 billion endowment in weapons makers and other companies that support Israel’s government.

The Trump administration says pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, including Columbia, have included support for Hamas, which the US has designated as a terrorist organization, and antisemitic harassment of Jewish students. Student protest organizers say criticism of Israel is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism.

Some members of Jewish faculty at Columbia held a rally and press conference in support of Khalil outside a university building on Monday, holding signs saying “Jews say no to deportations.”

But Abdalla said no one from Columbia’s administration had contacted her to offer help, which she found frustrating.

She said her husband’s focus was on supporting his community through advocacy and in more direct ways. She has had a few brief phone calls with Khalil from jail, where he told her he had been helping other detained migrants with poor English fill out forms written in legalese and donating food to his jail-mates, bought from his commissary account.

“Mahmoud is Palestinian and he’s always been interested in Palestinian politics,” she said. “He’s standing up for his people, he’s fighting for his people.”

Abdalla ended Wednesday’s interview abruptly when she saw Khalil was calling her from jail.

Federal laws say aliens are inadmissible to the US, or “deportable,” if they engage in terrorist activities, including anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” Green card holders are considered aliens.

Last week, at a protest Khalil attended at Columbia affiliate Barnard College, demonstrators passed out pamphlets from the “Hamas media office,” and photos of the late Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah, according to students at the scene.

Hamas and Hezbollah are US-designated terrorist groups.

Days after Khalil was arrested, Columbia administrators warned faculty and students of the journalism school to keep a low profile over Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and protests against Khalil’s arrest, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

According to the report, Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer and adjunct professor, advised non-US citizen students to avoid publishing material on those topics.

“If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East,” he reportedly said.

“Nobody can protect you,” journalism school dean, Jelani Cobb said. “These are dangerous times.”

White House spokeswoman Leavitt said Tuesday the school had refused to help officials identify people “engaged in pro-Hamas activities,” according to the report.

The Trump administration has also turned its attention further afield.

Earlier this week, the US Department of Education sent letters to 60 colleges and universities warning them that they could face consequences if they did not fulfill their responsibility to protect Jewish students.

“We expect all America’s colleges and universities to comply with this administration’s policy,” Leavitt told reporters.