Update on Mahmoud Khalil [View all]

Mahmoud Khalil on exile, liberation and Ice detention: ‘It was a clear act of cruelty’ | Mahmoud Khalil | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/sep/08/mahmoud-khalil-update-release-detention-trump


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.

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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.”