Mahmoud Khalil’s 104 days in ICE Detention

Tonya Mosley (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya 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 a hundred and four 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.

Mahmoud Khalil (1:35)

Thank you so much, Tonya. Thank you for having me.

Tonya Mosley (1:38)

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?

Mahmoud Khalil (1:57)

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?

Tonya Mosley (3:00)

Mahmoud, thank you so much for reading that. Before that night, what did your green card mean to you?

Mahmoud Khalil (3:09)

You know, I was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, holding temporary cards or ID cards. It was written on a temporary ID card 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 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 sort of living and building a life and building a family. So it's really like meant more than anything, safety and stability.

Tonya Mosley (4:09)

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?

Mahmoud Khalil (4:23)

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 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 they would be closer. So it was literally just like any other couple expecting a baby.