United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) have arrested a Palestinian graduate student who played a prominent role in last year’s pro-Palestinian protests at New York’s Columbia University, the student workers’ union said on Sunday.
The student, Mahmoud Khalil at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs, was arrested at his university residence on Saturday, the Student Workers of Columbia union said in a statement.
Khalil’s wife is a US citizen and he has a permanent residency green card, the union said. He remained in detention on Sunday. Khalil’s wife declined to comment through one of Khalil’s fellow students.
Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer, told the Associated Press news agency that she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the lawyer that Khalil was in the country as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that too, according to the lawyer.
Greer said the authorities declined to tell Khalil’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, whether he was accused of committing a crime. Khalil has since been transferred to an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
“We have not been able to get any more details about why he is being detained,” Greer told the AP. “This is a clear escalation. The administration is following through on its threats.”
The arrest appeared to be among the first known actions under President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport international students who joined the protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept college campuses last year. His administration has claimed participants forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas, which is designated as a ‘terror’ organisation by the US.
The move has been described as an attack on First Amendment freedoms.
Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian origin, has been one of the school administrators’ lead negotiators of the pro-Palestinian student protesters, some of whom set up a tent encampment on a Columbia lawn last year and seized control of an academic building for several hours in April before police entered the campus to arrest them. Khalil was not in the group that occupied the building but was a mediator between Columbia provosts and the protesters.
The protesting students called for Columbia’s divestment from companies with ties to Israel, a ceasefire and an end to the war that killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians and turned the enclave into rubble after nonstop bombardment. The US provided the bulk of the ammunition for the war.
Columbia said last year that it would consider expediting some of the students’ demands through its investments committee.
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