NEW YORK (AP) — When protests against the Israeli-Hamas War took root on Columbia University’s campus last spring, Mahmoud Khalil quickly became a familiar and outspoken figure in the student movement that spreads to other US universities.
Graduate students with international disabilities: Protest Camp On the Manhattan Campus in Columbia Act as a spokesman and negotiator For demonstrators who lamented Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and forced Evie League schools to cut economic ties with Israel and the businesses that supported the war.
“We want to be visible.” Halil said Last April.
That vision helped him to become the face of President Donald Trump’s willingness to punish anti-Semitism and “anti-American” campus protests. In the first publicly known arrest of the crackdown, federal immigration agents took Halil, a legal US resident who married American citizens from his apartment on Saturday and detained him for a potential deportation.
For Trump and his administration, Halil’s arrest is the launching move to drive away a country accused of helping to turn American campuses into intimidating territory for Jewish students. For civil rights advocates and Halil’s lawyers, his detention is an attack on free speech and an attempt to curb Palestinian views.
And for those who worked with a 30-year-old graduate student in protests and elsewhere, his arrest is an astounding takedown of someone with the diplomatic experience he endured on the day the protest was indicted.
“You couldn’t meet the kind or better people you would work with. He is thoughtful. He is intelligent. He is conscientious,” said British diplomat Andrew Waller, a colleague of Halil, at the embassy based in Beirut, England for Syria.
Halil worked there from 2018 to 2022, running a scholarship fund, supporting the UK’s diplomatic involvement with Syria, and said that his role requires extensive background checks.
He spoke a few weeks ago, and Halil had focused on becoming a father – his wife is pregnant – and he was born and raised in a Palestinian family in the Syrian conflict. Halil also expressed concern that he might become a target for the new Trump administration, Waller said.
Flying from civil war to academia halls
After graduating from high school in Syria, Halil was on track to study aviation engineering there, but his plans were improved by the country’s civil war, he wrote in a 2017 essay for the International Education Charity. He said he left for Beirut and got a job at an education nonprofit organization that helps Syrian children and went to the University of Lebanon.
“If, like the countless Syrian refugees before me, I could not get scholarships, work, or at worst, leave Syria deep in the ongoing war, where would I be?” he wondered in the essay.
Khalil has decided to continue his research in Colombia, according to the 2020 International Development Conference online bio, with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree and listed as a speaker.
Then last spring, protests against the war in Gaza erupted in Colombia, where demonstrators set up tents in the middle of campus and took over the management building. a A wave of similar demonstrations It is spread to other universities across the country.
Halil served as a prominent student mediator on behalf of pro-Palestinian activists and Muslim students associated with their safety.
However, with an apprehension to share his name with reporters, images of his masked face in the protest quickly targeted him among those who saw anti-Semitism at the demonstrations.
“I’m an easy scapegoat for them to say. “Look at this Palestinian who never wore a mask and was active in school protests,” Halil told an Associated Press reporter in an interview last week.
Meanwhile, the Colombian Jewish Alumni Association is known as the “masterminds of Chaos” on campus. New Colombian Disciplinary Committee We investigated various allegations against Haliland whether or not the university’s anti-harassment policy was recently violated by calling the dean a “genocide.”
Trump administration target
Halil is currently being held at a federal detention housing complex in Louisiana.
White House press chief Caroline Leavitt said Tuesday that Halil should be deported for “not only disrupting classes on university campus, harassing Jewish American students, making them feel unsafe on their university campus, but also organising protests that dispersed Prohama propaganda.” The US government has designated Hamas, the radical group that controls Gaza, as a terrorist organization.
Those who protested along with Khalil dispute the account.
“If someone distributes something in a protest that has nothing to do with the group, they attribute it to him by putting his face in action,” said Marian Alwan, a senior at Columbia University.
She explained that Halil is gentle and talented at navigating internal conflicts among student protesters. Outside of activism, she said he enjoyed cooking and playing drums in the Arab Music Ensemble in Colombia.
Colombian protest leaders argue that they are anti-war rather than anti-Semitism, and the demonstrations include Jewish students and groups.
Still, the Colombian task force on anti-Semitism has discovered “serious and widespread” issues regarding the campus climate. The group said in the report that Jews and Israelis were verbally abused, humiliated by their class and expelled from the student group during the demonstrations.
Halil will earn his master’s degree in December and will be earning his degree in May, his lawyer said in court filings.
Meanwhile, he and his wife are expecting their first child. According to his lawyer, she is 8 months pregnant. While not giving her name, they issued a statement pleading her to be fathered, “to see Mahmoud through my eyes as a loving husband.”
“He is by my side and holds my hand in the delivery room because he needs your help to bring Mahmoud home,” she wrote.
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