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When a history of resistance to the lurching authoritarianism of Donald Trump’s second presidency is written, it could well begin on 11 April 2025, inside a small immigration courtroom in remote, central Louisiana.
It was there, in the early afternoon, that a slight young man dressed in a blue uniform jumpsuit spoke calmly but directly to the new administration – away from the gaze of television cameras and 1,000 miles (1,610km) from his friends and family. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organiser, had been arrested a month earlier – snatched from the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building as he returned home with his wife. Now, detained in the small town of Jena, he sat before a judge who had just ruled that he was eligible to be deported from the United States purely for his political views.
Khalil asked for permission to speak. He paused for a moment, before sharply rebuking the jurist who continued to hold his fate in her hands by throwing her own words back at her. He reminded her that she had guaranteed that the court would ensure him “due process” and “fundamental fairness”.
“Neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process,” he told her, in effect branding the venue a kangaroo court. “This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family.”
This administration is trying to do everything in its power – and beyond its power – to punish me and deport me
I was one of a handful of journalists in Jena that day. It was a period of particular distress in the US, his arrest being the first of a spate of high-profile detentions of students seized off the streets by immigration agents over their political views. In that moment of fear, when so many were going silent, I was taken aback by the quiet courage that seemed to come so naturally to Khalil even as formal political opposition to Trump’s iron fist had largely faltered.
Four months on, and now bailed from detention and back in New York, I ask Khalil where it had come from and whether he would define it as an act of bravery.
“No. I have always believed in standing up against injustice,” he says in his gentle voice. “I knew that it was predetermined. That it was a play. It was theatre. I did not want to play within their rules.”
***
On a bright summer’s day in Brooklyn, Khalil invites me to his new apartment that commands a towering view over the borough’s low-rises. The walls are freshly painted white – he had moved in just a few weeks earlier – and we sit on a grey sofa by the window. His four-month-old son, Deen, is crying softly in the next room as Noor Abdalla, his wife, soothes him.
It is an archetypal scene of a young New York family: a baby rocker sits beside a large TV, white tulips lean against a ceramic vase, bright artwork adorns the walls. Khalil is warm and candid, he offers me chocolate and water before we start talking. But the grim reality of his situation soon lingers as we dial an attorney from his legal team who listens in to our three-hour conversation as a precaution.
Although he is free from detention, the Trump administration’s case against him is still winding through the courts. While he is a legal permanent resident, he acknowledges deportation could still be the ultimate outcome.
“This administration is trying to do everything in its power – and beyond its power, in fact – to punish me and deport me,” he says. “Up until very recently, they were trying to re-arrest me.”
He is working on contingency plans for if and when that happens, he acknowledges, without describing specifics. For now, he has attempted to return to a degree of normality. He spends his days with baby Deen, learning to be a father after he missed the birth while detained. He recently rode the subway for the first time since his release, but still finds himself looking over his shoulder. The move to Brooklyn was partly to create distance from Columbia’s campus and all the past wounds of its recent history. But still, it remains difficult to focus.
A Palestinian refugee, intimately familiar with the experience of repeated displacement, he remains resolute in the face of a prospective fresh exile.
“Even if I am deported, I would continue to speak out for Palestine,” he says.
Khalil’s life was changed forever when agents in plainclothes came to his old apartment back in March. His arrest, captured on video by Abdalla, marked a turning point as Trump ramped up his era of mass deportations and began a censorship campaign against the campuses that saw large protests of Israel’s war in Gaza. Khalil remained calm as he was placed in handcuffs and driven away, with his wife – heavily pregnant – left on the sidewalk, desperately calling their lawyer.
I wonder if he has ever watched the video back?
He shakes his head.
In a time where you know that injustices are happening around you, staying silent is complicity
“It is a moment I would never want to remember,” he says. “It was one of the most difficult, scariest moments in my life. I do not want to watch a moment where I was helpless to support Noor.”
His overwhelming memory of that night is his fear that Abdalla, a US citizen, might also face arrest. He repeated her phone number in his head so as not to forget it. But he also remembers making “chill” small talk with the arresting agents as he was driven away. They spoke about the iftar dinner, the breaking-fast meal taken during Ramadan, he had just eaten.
“I did not fear them whatsoever,” he recalls. “I saw them eye to eye.”
Shortly after the arrest, he overheard an incoming phone call from the White House, requesting an update. He was then presented with a document that accused him of no crime, but argued his presence in the US compromised foreign policy interests. (A memo signed by US secretary of state Marco Rubio, disclosed later, argued this was due to participation in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities”.)
He read it and laughed in disbelief.
“Are they really going this far in coming after me?” he thought.
After 36 hours of travel under guard, he ended up in Jena, the sprawling centre four hours from New Orleans, hidden away in a pine forest by a country road. It is known as one of the harshest immigration jails in the US. Inside his large detention dormitory, the TV was blaring and he saw Trump at a press conference on the White House lawn perusing Teslas with Elon Musk.
The president was asked about Khalil’s arrest.
“We ought to get him the hell out of the country,” Trump replied.
It was at this point he started to realise the enormity of it all – a public narrative about him spiralling out of his control, laundered through a vast rightwing disinformation infrastructure branding him an antisemite and terrorism supporter.
“Who I am has been skewed so much,” he recalls thinking. “I was like: ‘Damn my future is basically done … my reputation, my career aspirations.’”
But through the horror, he says he knew his record would ultimately speak for itself. “That was my salvation,” he says. “I was 100% confident I had a very clean history. They would be able to get no dirt on me.”
He spoke to Abdalla by phone. She was safe. She told him about an outpouring of support across the world. He sighed with relief.
***
That quiet courage, which Khalil has carried throughout this ordeal, has been forged since childhood, at the multiple junctures he was forced to upend his life.
He was born in a small Palestinian refugee camp named Khan Eshieh on the outskirts of Damascus, the youngest of four brothers. His paternal grandparents were displaced from their farmland outside of Tiberias, in what is now Israel, during the Nakba of 1948. His father was a welder who left school at the age of 10. His mother, a low-level civil servant, ended her education at 16.
His Palestinian identity was omnipresent growing up; most of his neighbours were displaced from the same region as his grandparents. And his grandmother, who was illiterate, would tell stories of her life in Palestine, always with a view to eventual return.
“You could see the struggle in her face,” he says.
His parents, both largely apolitical, instilled in him the values of a formal education and he excelled, graduating with aspirations to become a commercial pilot. But the forces of history had other plans. The final few years of his schooling in Syria coincided with the pro-democracy movements that swept across the region during the Arab spring. One of his first forays into formal activism came on 15 May 2011, as part of a series of “Nakba Day” demonstrations at Israel’s borders. At least a dozen protesters were killed during the clashes with Israeli forces. Dozens more were injured.
Khalil was one of them. Aged 16, he was shot in the leg and spent a number of days in hospital. “That was the first real encounter of violence, direct violence, by Israel against me,” he says.
What shocked me, when I was kidnapped [by US immigration], was just how reminiscent that was to cases I witnessed in Syria
The experience propelled him further into the tumultuous politics of the era – initially heady and full of promise before quickly deteriorating into state brutality and civil war. He witnessed the crackdowns of the Assad regime on close friends and family who helped provide shelter to Syrians fleeing Damascus. Khalil became involved in organising smaller acts of resistance: street protests, spray painting and posting anti-Assad comments on social media.
“These things were the very minimum we could do,” he says. “In a time where you know that injustices are happening around you, staying silent is complicity. Pure complicity.”
It all intensified after graduating high school. He had been set to study aerospace engineering at the University of Aleppo, but the city was burning as the civil war raged. On 11 January 2013, a week after he turned 18, two of his childhood friends and co-organisers named Bashar and Ali were snatched off the street by Syrian intelligence officers. He feared he would be next.
The same night he made plans to flee, crossing the border into Lebanon the next day. “I left everything behind,” he says. “I fled without a plan. My biggest worry was that they would confess the names of the people around them. And you wouldn’t blame them to confess under such torture by the regime.”
Bashar and Ali were murdered after their arrest, their deaths confirmed only a few months ago after the Assad regime collapsed at the end of 2024.
Khalil recognises the different shades of authoritarianism he has faced throughout his life.
“What shocked me at the very beginning, when I was kidnapped [by US immigration], was just how reminiscent that was to cases I witnessed in Syria,” he says. “You would have plainclothed officers without any warrant come and take you just because of your political speech.”
***
Khalil languished in Jena for more than 100 days. He had known little about the US’s deportation machine, and the detention center’s reputation as a legal black hole, until he experienced it all.
He slept in a large dorm room lined with bunkbeds, holding about 70 men. He spent time dictating well-written dispatches over the phone to his legal team. He read literature: Out of Place, the autobiography of the Palestinian academic Edward Said; Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychologist Viktor Frankl’s memoir of surviving the Holocaust. But mostly he shared stories with the other men detained with him. Many had been picked up during routine check-ins with immigration officials. Others were recently apprehended at the southern border. A few had been detained in Jena for more than a year. The majority of people who pass through immigration court in Jena have no lawyers as mandatory legal representation is not guaranteed.
One man, a Georgian national, had been held for about eight months, picked up with his wife in California. Held in separate detention centres about two hours apart, the couple, who were fleeing Georgia’s new pro-Russia government, had not been able to speak to each other since their arrest. The man, a carpenter, spent hours fashioning improvised rosaries from commissary items, including crayon, ground coffee and bread – hardened into beads by heat in a microwave. Khalil shows me a set, still impressed by the ingenuity.
Many of the men, Khalil says, have since been removed from the US.
For Khalil, the lowest moment came on the night his son was born. His requests for a furlough to attend the birth were denied and so he was forced to listen on the phone in the middle of the night, whispering quiet words of encouragement as Abdalla laboured. The line cut around 2am, and by the time he called back he heard his newborn son crying in the background. He whispered the call to prayer down the line to welcome baby Deen into the world.
“It was a very difficult moment that I don’t wish anyone to go through,” he says, his eyes drifting. “It was a clear act of cruelty just to punish me.”
***
Abdalla emerges to say hello with Deen in her arms. Khalil’s face lights up. At four months, his son has a full head of hair, deep dimples and expressive brown eyes that follow his father around the room.
I ask her how it feels to have her husband back.
“Not having him for the first two months of Deen’s life was hard,” she says. “We missed a lot of milestones that you can’t get back. So we are catching up on lost time.”
The new apartment is their “safe space”, she says. The couple have been largely welcomed with open arms here, receiving spontaneous acts of kindness: an unexpected free lunch, smiles on the street. I am the first journalist they have invited over.
Khalil met his future wife, now a dentist, in Lebanon in 2016, while working for a non-profit helping educate Syrian refugees. She visited on an exchange program. He had worked his way up from nothing after fleeing Syria, taking construction jobs during the day and volunteering for a refugee charity in the evenings, which granted him free room and board in their office. Eventually he attended university to study computer science and took remedial English classes. He gradually let go of his dream to fly commercial jets, becoming more immersed in the work of government and bureaucracy.
Khalil and Abdalla bonded over games of backgammon and stayed in touch after she returned home to Flint, Michigan. He was attracted to her kindness and gentle nature. She found his intellect and ambition appealing, and eventually pushed him to apply for a job at the British embassy, where he worked on Syria policy until moving to New York in 2023. Their long-distance relationship lasted seven years.
I ask how fatherhood has changed him since he returned home.
“It absolutely makes me think [more] about risks,” he acknowledges. “When you have someone depending on you, you want them to have as normal a life as possible. But at the same time it pushes me towards advocacy. When I see Deen I always remember the children who are being killed because of Israel, who don’t have the luxury of being in New York. [I think of] immigrant children who don’t have the luxury of having an American passport that would somehow protect them.”
But Palestinian liberation is never far from his imagination.
“I want Deen to be able to visit his home town, his ancestors’ town, and live equally with everyone,” he says.
The pro-Gaza protests at Columbia marked the first time Khalil had ever assumed a public-facing role. Having set his sights on a behind-the-scenes job in government bureaucracy, he was instead thrust into a spring of campus tumult in 2024 as students constructed encampments, staged rallies and, in late April, occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall, leading to an overwhelming police response.
Khalil served as a negotiator with the university’s administration, presenting students’ demands, including divestment from companies with ties to Israel. He was not present on campus during the Hamilton Hall occupation.
The negotiations were protracted but civil. A Columbia administrator, anonymously quoted in the New York Times, later described Khalil as “thoughtful, passionate, and principled, sometimes to the point of rigidity”. It strikes me as apt, but I wonder if he agrees?
“Pretty much,” he says, smiling. “I don’t know about rigidity though, because it was not my position, it was the students’.”
Unlike many of those on the protest frontlines, Khalil did not wear a face mask, leaving him vulnerable to online doxing from hardline pro-Israel groups, which have supplied the Trump administration with lists of candidates for deportation.
Liberation doesn’t mean throwing anyone out. Liberation means liberating everyone, whether the oppressed or the oppressors
“I have never worn a mask during a protest because I knew that the purpose of doxing was to intimidate us, to silence us,” he says. But the campaign ramped up again after the election of Trump, shortly before Khalil’s arrest. He had not foreseen how dangerous it might become.
The allegations of antisemitism have never been substantiated with hard evidence. Khalil says Jewish students played an “integral” role in organising the campus protests and argues it is Israel and the Trump administration’s policies that fuel global antisemitism through their policies.
So how does he visualise a free Palestine?
“I imagine it as a place where everyone lives in dignity, freedom, equality, regardless of who they are, where they come from,” he says. “I don’t think there’s an alternative to that, to have a lasting and just peace in the Middle East.
“Liberation doesn’t mean throwing anyone out. Liberation means liberating everyone, whether the oppressed or the oppressors.”
Khalil remains scathing of Columbia’s response to the protests and its later capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands it suppress pro-Palestinian protest. Yet he expresses an honest sadness that he was unable to walk the stage to collect his master’s degree in May this year. He is the first in his family to graduate from university. His parents had planned to travel from Germany, where they now live, to witness it. He had bought his gown a year in advance.
“I know it would have been an incredibly important moment for my parents, who have fought and sacrificed so much for me to get to this point,” he says. Instead, he received the accolade as an emailed PDF file.
***
It was late June when Khalil emerged from Jena on a sweltering humid afternoon. He raised his fist in the air to celebrate and walked towards a small group of journalists. He had lost about 15lbs (6.8kg). A federal judge in New Jersey had just ordered his release, having found the Trump administration’s foreign policy argument was likely unconstitutional.
Related: Relief and a raised fist as Mahmoud Khalil goes free – but release ‘very long overdue’
I had asked him that day to respond in his own words to the “threat” label that Trump had branded him with. “Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this,” he told me.
I had not fully comprehended what he meant by “the wrong person” at the time. But as our conversation comes to a close, it becomes clear. The adversity that Khalil has faced – from displacement to detention – in such a short span of life has only fuelled his sense of mission. He will not be forced into submission or silence. He views his past and future as inextricable from the wider Palestinian struggle stretching from 1948 to the current slaughter in Gaza. “It is a drop in the sea of Palestinian sorrow and grief, where families are being erased, children are being killed, houses being raided and dignity is eroded,” he says.
He takes a moment before we wrap up, seemingly a little exhausted.
“My story is just a small story,” he says. “A story of how violence against Palestinians can be transported around the world.”
