Mahmoud Khalil’s 104 days in ICE Detention

Fresh Air

Mahmoud Khalil recounts his 104-day ordeal in a Louisiana immigration detention center following his arrest in New York. A Palestinian refug

Key takeaways

• Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in Manhattan in March 2025 despite holding a green card and having no criminal record.
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Khalil a threat to US foreign policy to facilitate deportation proceedings.

Main topics

• ICE detention conditions
• Pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University

Notable quotes

I finally would have a chance to actually plan for more than next year or next month.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful testimony to the human impact of aggr

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:01) This election season, you can streamline your news intake with Up First. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight, so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know. In short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow Up First on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (0:22) This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. On the night of March 8th, 2025, my guest, Mahmoud Khalil, was walking into the lobby of his apartment building in New York with his wife, who was eight months pregnant. A man in plain clothes slipped in behind them and within minutes put Khalil in handcuffs. Within two days, he was in an immigration jail in rural Louisiana, more than a thousand miles from home. Khalil had a green card. He had no criminal record and had never been charged with a crime. But he had become one of the most visible faces of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student and the negotiator between the protesters and the administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that he should be deported, invoking a provision that had never been used against a permanent resident in this way. Khalil spent 104 days in detention. His son was born while he was inside. A federal judge ordered him released in June of last year, but the government is still trying to remove him. And Khalil is preparing to ask the Supreme Court to hear his case. This month, he sued Columbia, accusing the university of failing to protect him and other Palestinian students from harassment and of retaliating against them when they reported it. Khalil was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and fled the country at 18. His new memoir, drawn in part from the diary he kept in detention, is called No Land to Stand On. And Mahmoud Khalil, welcome to Fresh Air. Speaker 1 (1:57) Thank you so much, Tanya. Thank you for having me. Speaker 2 (2:00) I want to start with the night that you were arrested. Officers took you to 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan in the middle of the night. They photographed you. They took your fingerprints. And then they took a DNA swab. And would you read what happened from there in the book? Speaker 1 (2:19) I thought of all the other times I had sat at the same setup. Consulates, visa interviews, immigration offices, proving again and again that I had the right to exist in spaces that barely tolerated me. Each time, the same performance. Convince us that you are not a threat, that you have enough money and a compelling reason to travel or reside. Prove you won't get stuck in our country and will return home. But where was home? Syria, where I was born but couldn't return to? Germany, where my family lived but I had no right to stay? Algeria, where I had a passport but whose soil I barely knew? America, which had given me a green card and then snatched me off the street? Or Palestine, the only answer that ever felt true, the only place that ever made sense? even though I had never set foot there. Speaker 4 (3:22) Mahmoud, thank you so much for reading that. Before that night, what did your green card mean to you? Speaker 1 (3:31) You know, I was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, holding temporary Speaker 5 (3:37) cards or ID cards. It was Speaker 3 (3:40) written on a temporary ID card Speaker 5 (3:42) for Palestinian refugees. Then when I fled to Lebanon, the same happened when I had to renew my residency every year because it was a temporary residency. So to be in the United Speaker 3 (3:54) States and for the first time in my life having... You know, something written on it, permanent. It meant to me stability. It meant to me that I finally would have a chance to actually plan for more than next year or next month. And I really felt safety with that, especially in a place where my wife, Noor, and I have always envisioned Speaker 5 (4:22) sort of living and building a life and building a family. So it's really like meant more than anything, safety and stability. Speaker 4 (4:31) Take me back to a few weeks before that arrest. You and your wife, Noor, were living in New York. She was eight months pregnant. You had just finished your degree. What did an ordinary night look like for the two of you? Speaker 3 (4:45) I mean, at that time, I was waiting to start my new job, like on the 1st of April, basically. So I was basically doing, you know, all the house. stuff because Noor would be working and would come home tired. She was pregnant. And we were just like looking for strollers and building our baby registry. And Noor is from Michigan and we were debating whether she would give birth in Michigan or in New York. We ended up deciding that it should be New York because it would be closer. So it was literally just like any Other couple expecting a baby. Speaker 4 (5:28) You were also, though, reading those Know Your Rights guides before you were arrested because people had been calling at that moment for your deportation because of the demonstrations at Columbia. How seriously before that moment did you actually believe they might come for you? Speaker 3 (5:47) For not one moment, I felt like this is serious because The most basic thing, I did not commit any crime. I did not do anything wrong, even within the civil disobedience that some students participated in at Columbia. I did not even participate in that. So to me, it was, you know, let me read Know Your Rights just in case. But I was in Mexico. We were doing Noor and I having one last. trip, like a baby moon, they call it, I learned. So I was in Mexico, we came back, like I did not really think a lot about these attacks online. And even, you know, when some students called me to come and negotiate when they were having a sit-in at Barnard University, I showed up because I was like, you know, the students trust me, the administration know me, they would talk to me. Speaker 3 (6:46) I would be able to at least find a solution so that everyone is safe, everyone is happy. But I think that's where I miscalculated. At no point I felt that there is actually like a big risk. Even I was discussing it with my friends a day or two before my arrest. We were having like a big Speaker 5 (7:07) dinner. or iftar at our house the night before. Like over 20 of our friends came over and every one of them was really concerned like about seeing this smear campaign and doxing happening online. And they was downplaying it that, you know, no, it's not gonna, nothing gonna happen. Like at the end of the day, I'm a permanent resident and they committed no crime. Speaker 4 (7:31) You mentioned being a negotiator at Barnard and at Columbia. So your role in the protests, What's a little different from, say, someone leading chants with the bullhorn? You were actually the one sitting across the table from administrators at the university. Take me into one of those meetings. What were you negotiating and who were you speaking for? Speaker 1 (7:53) During the encampment, the students, mostly they nominated me to be in this position for Speaker 3 (8:00) different reasons. One of them, my experience as... Working in diplomacy, I spent five years working Speaker 5 (8:07) for the British Embassy in Beirut, for the Foreign Office, doing diplomacy. Before that, I came with very long Speaker 3 (8:15) experience working in such spaces, working in bureaucracy. I was, of course, older than most. So they trusted my judgment, given that experience. And for the administration as well, it was that I'm someone who... talks their language in terms of what should happen, how things should happen. But a lot of these conversations, to be honest, were, I would say, superficial from the point that Colombia dealt with us as a PR threat or a brand issue rather than... A public relations threat. Exactly, public relations threat. Or an issue to deal with rather than... actually like students were grieving for what's happening in Palestine. Students were actually asking for change. Speaker 4 (9:06) I remember a lot of the international students hid their faces during the protests because they were worried about their visas, but you did not. Why was it important to you to be seen? Speaker 1 (9:22) I think it was less than about being seen, more about I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was, you know, protesting. I Speaker 3 (9:32) was mediating between parties. Why would I hide my face? Speaker 2 (9:39) Mahmoud, I want to take us through you arriving at this detention center. So the next morning, after immigration agents booked and processed you in Manhattan, they put you on a plane and no Speaker 4 (9:52) one would tell you where that plane was going. And at one point, you write about this in the book that you thought, maybe they're taking me to Algeria. And you write that your first feeling was, at least I'd be free. What was the second feeling? Speaker 1 (10:11) The second feeling was really, and I would put it like as the first feeling is just the fear about Noor's safety. Because the last thing I heard before Speaker 5 (10:22) being shoved into the unmarked car of eyes was them threatening Noor of arrest if she does not leave me. And Speaker 1 (10:32) all Speaker 3 (10:34) these two days when I was basically left and, you know, without any sort of, communication with the outside world. Speaker 5 (10:42) I was like, what happened to Noor? Is Speaker 1 (10:45) she okay? Did they actually arrest her? Is the baby okay? And these were the most, I would say, difficult two days of my life, where you Speaker 3 (10:57) were expecting only to follow orders. No one would tell you anything. I would ask. to call Noor, to call my lawyer. They wouldn't. They would say, like, later, later, later. And being taken from one place to another, being, you know, after I was served with the Rubio determination that I am somehow a foreign policy threat, that was shocking to me because I was like, does the government have anything against me that I don't know of? Are they making up something? You know, like... Every scenario, in a place you are alone, you're only with officers, literally every scenario ran in my head. And that was terrifying, these two days. Speaker 4 (11:38) Remind us again what that determination was from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. So Speaker 3 (11:45) the charge is that the foreign policy of the United States found my presence in the country to have adverse consequences to the foreign policy of the United States and threats to national security. And in it... We discovered later because that was only one sentence on my charge. But Speaker 5 (12:09) later, a month later, when the government had to show the evidence, they only Speaker 3 (12:15) had the actual determination, which was like a short document saying that my activities in the United States, otherwise lawful, have created a hostile environment for Jewish students. it goes against the United States' efforts to combat anti-Semitism. And that was very cynical to me. And sort of, I laughed when I saw this. I'm like, if I'm Speaker 4 (12:41) a Speaker 3