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Mahmoud Khalil was completing a master’s degree at Columbia University when, in March 2025, plain-clothed officers from the Department of Homeland Security snatched him from his home in New York and took him to an immigration detention centre; he was then transferred to another facility in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away. As a green card holder, Khalil has permanent US residency, but secretary of state Marco Rubio had determined that his continued presence in the country would have “adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”, and sought his deportation under a legal provision dating back to the McCarthy era. Khalil was released on bail in June 2024 after a federal judge ruled his detention unconstitutional, but the Trump administration is still trying to have him removed.
Khalil – who was born to Palestinian parents in a refugee camp in Syria – had been targeted because of his advocacy on behalf of pro-Palestinian protesters during campus protests over Columbia University’s links to Israel. They were calling for Columbia to cut its ties with Israeli academic institutions and companies profiting from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza; in response, the university called in the NYPD. There was no suggestion that Khalil had done anything unlawful, and no criminal charges were brought against him; the government had simply identified him as an influential pro-Palestinian voice on campus, and for that reason alone they wanted him gone. He spent a total of 104 days in detention, missing the birth of his son.
Khalil recounts this Kafkaesque ordeal with a quiet fury in his memoir, No Land to Stand On. The episode is a damning snapshot of the Trump administration’s creeping authoritarianism and the cruelty of its immigration enforcement policy. Khalil was a high-profile detainee whose case drew considerable public scrutiny; he had access to lawyers, and was eventually able to extricate himself. Many of his fellow prisoners at the facility, hailing from places as diverse as Georgia, Romania, Senegal, Nepal, El Salvador and Chechnya, were less fortunate. They languish in detention for months on end, at the mercy of an opaque and glacially slow legal bureaucracy, “forgotten in a system designed to forget them”.
Khalil notes that the private ownership of the detention centre produced a perverse incentive structure. It “was not operated by the government, it was operated by shareholders. By people who made money when beds were filled and lost money when they were empty … Every man in this facility was a line item on a balance sheet. Every day we spent here was revenue.” This might explain why, whenever an asylum claim is successful, the state appeals the decision as a matter of course, needlessly extending the applicant’s detention by many more months. So much for the land of liberty.
At Columbia, too, the prerogatives of the private sector impinge on the public interest. The university, Khalil quips, “turned out to be a real estate empire with a campus attached”; its board of trustees is “not so much a neutral administrative body as a deeply ideological one … drawn overwhelmingly from finance, real estate, corporate law, and weapons manufacturers”. So when students called out the university’s entanglement with a state credibly accused of committing war crimes, the college administration treated it “as a crisis to be managed rather than a grievance to be heard”.
In the meantime, a broad coalition characterised by reading groups, fundraising bake-sales and solidarity with anti-Zionist Jewish groups was smeared as an antisemitic hate movement. There was much hand-wringing about student safety, at least some of which was in bad faith: “When pro-Israel students showed up at our events to film and harass us, the administration called it a legitimate expression of campus discourse. When we held a silent vigil, they described it as a security risk.” People may quibble over who is harassing whom in any given flashpoint, but one thing is undeniable: only those on one side of this argument are at risk of being spirited away by unidentified agents of the state on spurious pretexts.
Khalil dislikes being referred to as an activist because the term implies some degree of volition, when in reality he had no choice: “From the moment I was born Palestinian, my existence was political.” His personal backstory, told here in parallel with the account of his arrest and detention, is indeed shaped by political turmoil. As a teenager he was shot in the leg by Bashar al-Assad’s security forces; in 2013, aged 18, he fled Syria for Lebanon, where eventually he ended up working for the British embassy in Beirut. It was there that he met his future wife, a US citizen, before moving to New York in 2022.
What happened next is a warped travesty of the American dream: having grown up under a brutal dictatorship, Khalil settles in the US and exercises its much-vaunted political liberties, only to be locked up without charge alnd threatened with deportation. Palestinians, he concludes, “are the exception to every rule the supposed free world claims to hold sacred”. Given the horrors of the past three years, it’s hard to disagree.
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