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Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate who was detained by Ice on Saturday night, was linked by Donald Trump, without evidence, to “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. But for those who know him, Khalil was a student, a steady negotiator and a leader whose activism placed him at the center of a national movement for Palestinian solidarity.
Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder who is currently in immigration detention in Louisiana, was a lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a role that thrust him into the spotlight during the pro-Palestinian encampment protests last spring – long before his high-profile arrest. He gained a reputation among fellow protesters as a principled and strategic organizer, earning praise for his ability to de-escalate tense situations.
“Khalil is not some faceless protester, he is one of the kindest and bravest people I’ve ever met,” a fellow organizer, Maryam Alwan, said.
Born in Syria in 1995 to Palestinian parents, Khalil spent his childhood in a place and family shaped by conflict. At age 18, he fled Syria for Lebanon two years after the start of the Syrian civil war. Lauren Bohn, a journalist and communications professional, met him in Beirut as she was reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis. “He often referred to himself as a ‘double refugee’ as a Palestinian in Syria and a Syrian refugee in Lebanon,” she wrote in a heartfelt tribute to him on Monday. She described Khalil teaching himself English while working with Syrian refugees to help them rebuild their lives through the Syrian-American education non-profit Junsoor. Simultaneously, he pursued a degree in Computer Science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
Khalil went on to work for the British government’s foreign office on Syrian issues from inside Lebanon. He looked after the Chevening scholarship program and managed projects with a focus on accountability, justice and gender equality in Syria. “Mahmoud is an extremely kind and conscientious person and he was loved by his colleagues at the Syria office,” the former British diplomat Andrew Waller, who worked as a policy adviser at the time, told Middle East Eye. Khalil then went on to intern for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, in their New York headquarters, according to his LinkedIn.
Khalil arrived at Columbia in January 2023 as a graduate student at the School of International and Public Affairs studying for a master’s in public administration. When the war in Gaza began, he was part of a small group of organizers who planned the first campus protest for Palestine on 12 October, just five days after Hamas’s attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s retaliatory bombardment. When he spoke, people listened, activists said.
Students who knew him said he was warm and generous, even to those he barely knew, and that it was those qualities that paved the way to his leadership with CUAD. The scholar Zachary Foster, a historian of Palestine who Khalil invited to speak to the encampment, said he was “one of the kindest people” he had ever met, “generous with his time, open minded, and thoughtful”. Alwan said Khalil would host Middle Eastern dinners and enjoyed sharing Arab culture.
His wife, who is eight months pregnant, said in a statement released on Tuesday evening: “For everyone who has met Mahmoud they can attest to his incredible character, humbleness, selflessness and his love for helping others. He is always willing to stand up for the oppressed,” she said. “It is clear the love that people have for him from the outpour of love I have been receiving from everyone he has crossed paths with.”
Last spring, during the Gaza solidarity encampment, Khalil became CUAD’s lead negotiator, the bridge between student protesters demanding divestment from Israel and the university administration. While critics of the protests often accuse demonstrators of hiding behind masks, Khalil spoke bare-faced on microphones and in front of cameras broadcasting news from the Manhattan campus to the rest of the world.
“As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,” he told CNN last spring. In response to accusations of antisemitism made against the movement, he told CNN that there was “no place for antisemitism” and said: “Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.”
Last spring, negotiations with the university on severing ties with Israel were tense, as Khalil and his team went back and forth presenting proposals and counterproposals on what divestment could look like.
“He de-escalated when the university refused to negotiate in good faith,” the Columbia campus activist Maryam Iqbal said. “It’s why we made him lead negotiator.”
In one update to the press last April, he reported: “There are no assurances from the university that no NYPD or any other law enforcement including the national guard will be brought into the university.” Days later, Columbia administration authorized an NYPD raid of the campus. More than 100 students were arrested.
“He was always that voice of reason that we would run to when it felt that things were too much to handle,” Iqbal said. “He would calm us down and help us through the psychological toll this university took on us since day one.” On Tuesday, she said her “heart broke” when she found out Khalil had reached out to Columbia administration a day before his arrest, asking for protection.
Khalil’s detention has sent shockwaves through activist circles, raising concerns over the criminalization of pro-Palestinian protest and the weakening of safeguards for free speech and immigrant rights. But if recent protests by his supporters in New York are any indication, they’re not standing down.
