'Exclusive: Mahmoud Khalil's Attorney on Breaking Developments in Detained Columbia Graduate's Case' by Jeremy Scahill
"I am a political prisoner": 'Mahmoud Khalil says he is being targeted for political beliefs'
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I cannot recommend highly enough listening to the fantastic and informative interview Jeremy Scahill recorded with Mahmoud Khalil’s attorney, Amy Greer of Dratel & Lewis, a law firm that specialises in criminal defence in New York. Ms. Greer has a very interesting background which has helped to prepare her for the excellent work she is doing presently.
The following is the description for the interview as published by Drop Site News
Exclusive: Mahmoud Khalil's Attorney on Breaking Developments in Detained Columbia Graduate's Case
The judge rebuked the Trump administration Wednesday, and Khalil expanded his civil suit against Columbia University to name Attorney General Pam Bondi, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and others.
By Jeremy Scahill • Drop Site News • March 19, 2025
It has been 11 days since Department of Homeland Security agents working under the direction of the Trump White House detained Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, handcuffing him in the lobby of his apartment building. Khalil is a legal U.S. permanent resident and green card holder, and his wife, who is eight months pregnant, is a U.S. citizen. DHS took him to 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, then to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, before shipping him to Louisiana—a significantly less favorable jurisdiction.
On Wednesday, Judge Jesse M. Furman in the Southern District of New York denied the Trump administration’s attempt to move Khalil’s case—and therefore the jurisdiction—from New Jersey to Louisiana. The New Jersey court will now decide if Khalil himself will be moved out of the notorious Louisiana facility. “What I think is important is that he did not transfer the case to Louisiana, which would be away from his entire legal team and would just put the case in a very different situation,” said Amy Greer, one of Khalil’s attorneys, in an interview with Drop Site. Greer said she hopes that Khalil is granted bail and released from ICE custody. “Mahmoud's wife would love to have him back home and supporting her and of course we would all want that too, as does his whole community want him back as soon as possible.”
Greer, who represents Khalil in the deportation case alongside attorneys from the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, CLEAR, and other attorneys, said that the Trump administration’s recent defiance of orders issued by federal judges, including in deporting people from the U.S., raises alarm bells in Khalil’s case. “I think it's absolutely a concern. We can't operate in a vacuum here thinking that the rule of law will insulate us completely,” she said. “The public support [for Khalil], that's all we can rely on right now.”
One of the central tactics the Trump administration is deploying in its crusade against speech opposing Israel’s wars has been to cancel or withhold federal funding to Columbia and dozens of other colleges and universities. A U.S. congressional task force announced just days before Khalil’s arrest that it would “conduct a comprehensive review of the more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments to Columbia University to ensure the university is in compliance with federal regulations, including its civil rights responsibilities.” Four days later, on March 7, the Trump administration announced it had canceled approximately $400M in federal grants to Columbia saying it had failed to “protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment.” The next day, Khalil was arrested.
After his detention, Khalil and several other anonymous students filed a federal lawsuit to block Columbia University and Barnard College from handing over private disciplinary records to the House Committee on Education and Workforce, arguing that doing so would violate their First Amendment rights and the privacy rights guaranteed to them as students. The suit, led by CAIR-NY and the firm Dratel & Lewis, claims that the House Committee’s demand to the universities was “coercive,” constituting “jawboning”—an effort to indirectly silence speech that skirts the First Amendment and constitutes an abuse of power.
The suit also named the congressional committee chair, Illinois Republican Rep. Tim Walberg, as a defendant. “The committee is using the cudgel of individual student disciplinary records, and the agencies are using the cudgel of withholding funds, all to pressure Columbia to turn over identifying information of students, to scale back academic freedom and the right of free speech and association on its campuses, and also to turn over names and associations of students, faculty and staff that obviously these agencies,” said Greer. “We felt compelled to bring the suit.”
In a letter made public earlier this week, the pressure was made even more explicit. The letter, sent on March 13 by the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration to Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, and co-chairs of the trustees of the university, makes Columbia’s federal funding contingent on several demands, including the “expulsion or multi-year suspension” of activists who participated in the occupation of Hamilton Hall in April, 2024. This is despite the fact that—as Drop Site has previously reported—Columbia set up an office expressly for the purpose of investigating and punishing Columbia students for participating in pro-Palestine protests. To date, at least 22 students have been expelled, suspended, or had their degrees revoked.
The government’s letter also called for a ban on mask wearing and instructed the university to “formalize, adopt, and promulgate a definition of antisemitism” consistent with President Trump’s Executive Order. The Trump administration has consistently conflated criticism of Israel or Zionism with anti-semitism. The suit charges that this directive is “tantamount to an Israel-specific speech code that subjects students to punishment for making common and typical criticisms of one particular foreign country.” The letter also required the university to abolish its own judicial board and place all power under the president of the university and to put the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under “academic receivership” for a minimum of five years.
“U.S. taxpayers invest enormously in U.S. colleges and universities, including Columbia University, and it is the responsibility of the federal government to ensure that all recipients are responsible stewards of federal funds,” the March 13 letter from the government to Columbia asserted. “Columbia University, however, has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Pursuant to your request, this letter outlines immediate next steps that we regard as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.”
On Wednesday, Khalil’s legal team is filing an amended complaint, expanding the civil suit in response to that letter. The suit names as additional defendants Attorney General Pam Bondi, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and the head and general counsel of the Department of Justice Taskforce to Combat Antisemitism, Leo Terrell and Sean Keveney. Josh Gruenbaum, the Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner of the General Services Administration, is also named.
“The government cannot use a third party to launder their efforts to infringe your first Amendment rights. They can't say to Columbia or to other entities, we're going to take away your licensing, take away your funding, we are going to hyper regulate you as a way to coerce you into doing our dirty work and infringing upon those free speech, free expression and free association rights,” said Greer. “That's exactly what's been happening here.”
Khalil’s suit also points to a February 13 letter sent by Committee Chair Rep. Tim Walberg to the president and trustees of Columbia requesting records concerning both the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall in April 2024 as well as several alleged protests and incidents since September 2024. “Columbia’s continued failure to address pervasive antisemitism that persists on campus is untenable, particularly given that the university receives billions in federal funding,” Walberg wrote.
The suit argues the reference to “billions in federal funding” an “an improper use of the Committee’s power to ‘do indirectly what [they] are barred from doing directly,’ which is to chill and suppress speech.” The Committee’s letter, they write “in effect coerces the University to ignore the law by making oblique threats to the ‘billions in federal funding’ the Universities receive.”
Mahmoud Khalil’s attorneys are engaged in what may well be a precedent-setting case that cuts to the core of issues surrounding speech, due process and the right of all of us to dissent from the foreign policies of the US government and to oppose the genocidal policies of foreign governments—in this case Israel. The Trump administration is using Khalil as a test case in its sweeping campaign to dramatically expand the powers of the executive branch and to crush some of the rights granted under the Constitution.
“I think what happens with this case,” Greer said, “is a true bellwether to whether or not we, as Americans, want to preserve our right to speech and expression and association, or whether we're going to let this administration roll back those rights.”
Please click on the image below to listen to the interview which is embedded on the Drop Site News Substack page.
The following is an article referenced during the interview as published by The Guardian which includes the link to Mahmoud Khalil’s statement that he dictated from his cell at the ICE detention centre in Louisiana where he has been held following his arrest in New York on March 8th.
‘I am a political prisoner’: Mahmoud Khalil says he’s being targeted for political beliefs
Exclusive: Palestinian activist and green card holder speaks out from Louisiana immigration detention for first time
By Anna Betts in New York • The Guardian • Tuesday 18 Mar 2025 21.18 GMT
In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.
“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”
Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.
The Trump administration, he said, “is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent”, warning that “visa-holders, green-card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”
The statement, which Khalil dictated to his friends and family over the phone from an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, railed against the US’s treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel’s renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University’s surrender to federal pressure to punish students.
“My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” the statement said. “With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”
Khalil described his arrest at his university-owned apartment building in New York in front of his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant with their first child. The agents who arrested him “refused to provide a warrant” before forcing him into an unmarked car, he said.
“At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety,” he said. “I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side.”
He was then transferred to an Ice facility in New Jersey before being flown 1,400 miles away to the Louisiana detention facility, where he is currently being held. He spent his first night in detention, he said, sleeping on the floor without a blanket.
In his remarks, Khalil said that in Louisiana, he wakes to “cold mornings” and spends “long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law”.
“Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”
“Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities,” he added.
Khalil drew comparison between his current treatment in the US and the ways in which he said the Israeli government uses detention without trial to lock up Palestinians.
“I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba,” he added, referring to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 after the creation of Israel.
“I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention – imprisonment without trial or charge – to strip Palestinians of their rights,” he said.
“I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.”
Khalil’s arrest ignited protests and caused alarm among free expression advocates, who view the deportation attempt as a violation of his free speech rights. Khalil has not been accused of a crime. His lawyers argue that the Trump administration is unlawfully retaliating against him for his activism and constitutionally protected speech. In an amended petition filed last week, they contended that his detention violates his constitutional rights, including the rights to free speech and due process, and goes beyond the government’s legal authority.
His attorneys are currently fighting in a New York court to have him transferred back to New York and to secure his release. A federal judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation while the legal challenge is pending.
Throughout Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and since assuming office, Trump has repeatedly pledged to deport foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, frequently framing such demonstrations as expressions of support for Hamas.
Khalil, who has worked for the British embassy in Beirut, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between the pro-Palestine protesters and university administrators.
The Trump administration has accused the former student of leading “activities aligned to Hamas” and was attempting to deport him using a rarely invoked legal provision from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the US secretary of state the power to remove someone from the US if their presence in the country is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.
Federal prosecutors are asking the New York court to order his challenge to his detention moved to Louisiana, where it would likely face more conservative judges.
Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and member of Khalil’s legal team, said that what happens to Khalil will reverberate beyond his case. “The Trump administration has clearly signaled that this is their test case, their opening shot, the first of many more to come,” she said.
“And for that test case, they chose an intrepid and deeply principled organizer who is beloved and trusted in his community,” Shamas said.
After Khalil’s arrest, Trump said that it was just “the first of many to come” and vowed on social media to deport other foreign students he accused of engaging in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity”.
Khalil said in his statement that he has always believed that his duty “is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear”.
“My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the US has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention” he said. “For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand US laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities.”
He added: “That is precisely why I am being targeted.”
Khalil also criticized Columbia University, arguing that university leaders “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.”
The university has increasingly taken disciplinary actions against students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is stepping up its attacks on the school under the guise of fighting antisemitism, which it claims run rampant at the university. The administration is using the same argument to threaten dozens of others American universities with potentially crippling funding cuts.
Students, Khalil said, have an important role to play in fighting back. “Students have long been at the forefront of change – leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa,” he said.
“In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”
He concluded: “Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.”
Read Khalil’s full statement here.
You can download Khalil’s statement in PDF format to share at the link below if you wish.
I rarely use Wikipedia as a resource however, in this instance I am sharing an excerpt from the dedicated page, Detention of Mahmoud Khalil which includes information about Mahmoud’s interesting background.
Mahmoud Khalil
Mahmoud Khalil was a graduate student at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at the time of the 2024 Columbia University pro-Palestinian campus occupations.[1] He is an Algerian citizen with permanent residency in the U.S. under the green card program.[14][15]
Khalil was born in a refugee camp in Damascus, Syria in 1995[16][17] to Palestinian refugees from Tiberias.[18] He and his family fled to Lebanon in 2012 after the onset of the Syrian civil war.[16][19] Journalist Lauren Bohn, who met Khalil in Beirut while reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis, said Khalil "often referred to himself as a 'double refugee' as a Palestinian in Syria and a Syrian refugee in Lebanon".[16] Bohn reported that Khalil taught himself English while working with Syrian refugees through the Syrian-American education nonprofit Junsoor.[16] Simultaneously, he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Lebanese American University in Beirut.[16][18]
Khalil then spent years working for the British government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, managing the Chevening Scholarship from the British embassy in Beirut and supporting diplomats with his language skills and local knowledge.[19] In 2022, he immigrated to the U.S. on a student visa to attend SIPA.[20] Khalil married his wife, Noor Abdalla, in New York in 2023 after a seven-year long-distance relationship. Abdalla is a U.S. citizen and a dentist.[20] Khalil then received a green card in 2024.[20] The couple had met in 2016 when Abdalla joined a volunteer program that Khalil was overseeing in Lebanon. They are expecting their first child in late April 2025.[20]
Khalil completed work on his master's degree in December 2024 and was due to graduate in May 2025.[20][21] As a student, he interned for UNRWA, a United Nations relief agency that supports Palestinian refugees.[16]
Mahmound Khalil is “a lawful permanent resident of the United States in possession of a green card.”
The war that is being waged by Trump and his cabinet upon people who support the people of Gaza, of Palestine and/or protest peacefully against the genocide being carried out against people of all ages in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East is a disturbing form of McCarthyism. Similar templates have been and are being using in the UK, Germany and elsewhere around the world. You know it is a globalist agenda when the shoe fits.
Please share Jeremy Scahill’s original post with the interview far and wide.
Related posts:
Vanessa Beeley was the first person I became aware of being detained by Anti Terrorism Police in the UK at Heathrow when she made a trip from Damascus to the UK on November 30, 2021. If you haven’t already, please read Vanessa’s blog about this unpleasant experience linked below.
Tim Walberg is a Michigan State Representative & a terrible one at that .