Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers arrested a former Columbia College scholar over his involvement within the pro-Palestine protests that swept the campus over the previous 12 months, regardless that he has a inexperienced card and was by no means charged with against the law. Columbia, the positioning of a monthslong pro-Palestine encampment, grew to become a selected obsession for right-wingers and liberal Zionists alike, who accused the college of turning a blind eye to campus antisemitism even because it despatched the New York Police Division to arrest its personal college students. This newest arrest alerts that the Trump administration is equally decided to punish protesters — and offers a glimpse into the surveillance instruments it can exploit to perform that.
Mahmoud Khalil, who graduated from the college’s Faculty of Worldwide and Public Affairs final December, was picked up by ICE in his university-owned condominium on March 8, his lawyer, Amy Greer, told the Related Press. Khalil’s arrest got here simply days after Axios reported that the State Division can be utilizing AI to revoke visas for pro-Palestine scholar protesters. Throughout the arrest, brokers from ICE’s Homeland Safety Investigations (HSI) division reportedly instructed Greer — who was on the cellphone with Khalil and his spouse, a US citizen — that they have been performing on State Division orders to revoke Khalil’s scholar visa. After Greer instructed the brokers that Khalil is a everlasting resident, and Khalil’s spouse confirmed them his inexperienced card, the brokers stated they have been revoking his inexperienced card, regardless that the company doesn’t have the authorized authority to try this. Then the brokers threatened to arrest Khalil’s spouse regardless of her US citizenship. She is eight months pregnant.
In an emailed assertion to The Verge, Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin stated that Khalil had been arrested “in assist of President Trump’s govt orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
The remainder of her assertion was equally imprecise: “Khalil led actions aligned to Hamas, a delegated terrorist group. ICE and the Division of State are dedicated to imposing President Trump’s govt orders and to defending US nationwide safety.”
McLaughlin’s assertion and Khalil’s arrest spotlight the diploma to which the federal government, typically spurred by pro-Israel advocates, has equated protests in opposition to Israel’s struggle on Gaza with each antisemitism and terrorism. Whereas civil rights organizations have known as Khalil’s arrest a violation of the First Modification, different teams that declare to advocate without spending a dime speech on faculty campuses have remained silent.
Greer has known as the arrest a transparent case of retaliation. “ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud follows the US authorities’s open repression of scholar activism and political speech, particularly concentrating on college students at Columbia College for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza,” she told CNN. “The US authorities has made clear that they’ll use immigration enforcement as a software to suppress that speech.”
An individual’s inexperienced card can’t be revoked with out due course of
In a habeas corpus petition filed within the Southern District of New York, Greer requested a federal decide to order Khalil’s launch, as soon as once more describing his immigration arrest as a violation of his First Modification proper to free speech. “Even the specter of detention and deportation has a chilling impact on speech,” Greer wrote. On Monday night, Decide Jesse Furman prohibited DHS from deporting Khalil whereas his case is below judicial evaluation and ordered all events to fulfill for a listening to on Wednesday, March twelfth in response to Khalil’s habeas petition.
It’s not extraordinary for ICE to arrest folks with inexperienced playing cards; anybody who’s not a US citizen, together with lawful everlasting residents, might be put into deportation proceedings for violating immigration legislation. However the onus is on ICE to show that somebody is “deportable.” Since lawful everlasting residents have authorized standing within the US, those that find yourself in deportation proceedings typically get placed on ICE’s radar after being charged with sure prison offenses. Beneath the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, authorized immigrants, together with these with inexperienced playing cards, might be deported for having been convicted of an enormous array of crimes — months and even years after their conviction. However these deportations need to be ordered by an immigration decide; an individual’s inexperienced card can’t be revoked with out due course of.
However there aren’t any stories of Khalil having a prison report, which raises questions on why ICE detained him — and the way they discovered him. (The NYPD didn’t reply to The Verge’s request for remark.) His arrest raises questions on ICE’s surveillance equipment and the opportunity of authorities overreach.
To develop into a everlasting resident, Khalil needed to register with US Citizenship and Immigration Companies (USCIS), the DHS company that handles authorized migration. Beneath the Privateness Act, USCIS and different companies should usually safeguard folks’s “personally identifiable info” — together with their identify, deal with, and biometric identifiers. However there are some exceptions to this. USCIS is allowed to share information with different DHS companies “so long as there’s a mission want consistent with the requestor’s official duties.” A DHS policy memo issued in 2007 states that the division “offers the very best precedence to the sharing of potential terrorism, homeland safety, legislation enforcement, and associated info” and that DHS personnel “will need to have well timed entry to all related info they should efficiently carry out their duties.”
(USCIS hyperlinks to this memo, hosted by Homeland Safety Digital Library, in its coverage handbook chapter on “privateness and confidentiality.” That hyperlink, nevertheless, is now lifeless and results in the next message: “Content material on this platform is being reviewed and eliminated to align with the President’s govt orders and DoD/DHS priorities. Till that evaluation is full, web site content material will not be accessible.” The memo can nonetheless be accessed through the Wayback Machine. It’s unclear whether or not DHS has up to date its insurance policies.)
When requested whether or not USCIS shared any of Khalil’s info with HSI, a USCIS spokesperson directed The Verge to DHS. DHS didn’t remark.
Immigration officers have entry to a number of state, native, and federal government databases, some mixture of which can have contained Khalil’s deal with and different private info. However ICE doesn’t essentially must depend on different authorities companies for this info, because it has entry to most Individuals’ information. A 2022 Georgetown Law study discovered that ICE can find three out of 4 adults within the US by way of their utility information, and it has entry to only as many individuals’s driver’s licenses. Virtually all of this info, the report’s authors wrote, might be accessed “warrantlessly and in secret.” ICE has entry to a lot of our information that it “now operates as a home surveillance company,” the report discovered.
It’s seemingly that every one ICE wanted to search out Khalil was his identify — which has been publicized a lot of instances by teams whose sole function is to determine and surveil pro-Palestine scholar activists.
“HSI is a complicated investigative part of ICE so they might be able to finding folks’s addresses, maybe by way of conventional instruments like LexisNexis, in the event that they nonetheless contract with ICE,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst on the Migration Coverage Institute’s US immigration program, instructed The Verge.
One among these organizations is Canary Mission, a database that has tracked pro-Palestinian scholar protesters for over a decade. Canary Mission has published the names, photographs, and different figuring out info of scholar activists throughout the nation — together with Khalil’s. Final October, the Heritage Basis, the right-wing suppose tank behind Challenge 2025, introduced its personal effort to surveil anti-Israel college students, which it dubbed Project Esther. After Trump’s reelection, the right-wing Zionist group Betar stated it was compiling a list of international critics of Israel. The group stated it shared the “names of a whole bunch of terror supporters” with the Trump administration, which it hoped would goal these people for deportation.
In April 2024, amid protests that had taken over Columbia’s campus, Khalil — who was within the nation on a scholar visa on the time — instructed reporters the college’s harsh response to the encampments made him fear about his authorized standing. “That’s why for the previous six months, I’ve barely appeared on the media,” Khalil stated at a press convention. “That’s why I’m not suspended. I didn’t take part, fearing that I will likely be arrested and finally deported from this nation.”
“I haven’t been capable of sleep, fearing that ICE or a harmful particular person would possibly come to my dwelling”
Whereas different college students held down the encampments on Columbia’s garden, Khalil was amongst these negotiating with college directors on the protesters’ behalf. The scholars’ essential demand was divestment: they needed the college to divest from weapons producers and different firms that assist Israel’s struggle on Gaza.
Khalil’s fears didn’t subside after he grew to become a everlasting resident final 12 months. In actual fact, Zeteo reports that Khalil requested Columbia directors to guard him from harassment simply someday earlier than his arrest. “Since yesterday, I’ve been subjected to a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing marketing campaign led by Columbia associates Shai Davidai and David Lederer who, amongst others, have labeled me a safety risk and known as for my deportation,” Khalil wrote in a March 7 e mail to Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong. His e mail cited a January publish on X from Betar. “He’s on our deport listing!” the group wrote of Khalil.
“I haven’t been capable of sleep, fearing that ICE or a harmful particular person would possibly come to my dwelling,” the e-mail learn. “I urgently want authorized assist, and I urge you to intervene and supply the required protections to forestall additional hurt.”
Davidai, a professor at Columbia Enterprise Faculty, is thought for harassing pro-Palestine college students on X. The college temporarily suspended him from campus final fall for “repeatedly harassing and intimidating” college staff. Davidai has praised Khalil’s arrest, whereas Lederer, an engineering scholar, has accused Khalil of distributing “Hamas propaganda.”
After Khalil was arrested, ICE instructed his spouse and lawyer that he was being held at an ICE detention middle in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the AP stories. However he wasn’t there when his spouse tried to go to the detention facility on March 9. As of Monday morning, Greer didn’t know the place her consumer was being held. ICE’s detainee locator now says Khalil is being detained at LaSalle detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, a privately owned detention middle operated by the GEO Group. Khalil’s whereabouts have been first reported by Zeteo.
It’s not unusual for ICE to switch the folks it has arrested to far-away detention facilities. Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director of the Detention Watch Community, stated ICE typically makes use of transfers to “goal and retaliate in opposition to activists talking up in opposition to the immigration and ICE detention system.” The remoteness of those services typically signifies that detainees are removed from not solely their family and friends but in addition from attorneys and oversight teams. In accordance with the newest Census data, lower than 5,000 folks stay in Jena. In the meantime, the GEO Group’s detention middle there can maintain as much as 1,160 people.
“The arrest of Khalil and his subsequent detention and switch is a continuation of that follow,” Ghandehari instructed The Verge. “ICE is very liable to transferring folks to extra rural places, like Jena, Louisiana, that aren’t solely distant from an individual’s assist system, however are additionally arduous to entry. It’s an isolation tactic designed to punish folks and make it more durable for them to struggle their immigration instances.”
ICE has been accused of going after activists up to now. In 2018, activist Ravi Ragbir sued ICE for concentrating on him and different noncitizens who criticized its enforcement practices. Ragbir, the manager director of the New York Metropolis-based New Sanctuary Coalition, had been arrested throughout a routine ICE check-in that 12 months. ICE settled the go well with with Ragbir in 2022, and the federal government gave him a three-year reprieve from deportation.
Additionally in 2018, members of the Vermont-based group Migrant Justice sued DHS, claiming it had retaliated in opposition to its members by concentrating on them for immigration enforcement after they organized a marketing campaign to guard undocumented farmworkers within the state. The group additionally sued the Vermont Division of Motor Autos, alleging that the company systematically handed alongside immigrants’ non-public info to ICE for enforcement functions. Vermont’s DMV settled with Migrant Justice in 2020.
Immigrant advocacy organizations have equally decried Khalil’s arrest, calling it a transparent case of retaliation. To them, Khalil is being punished for exercising his proper to free speech in criticizing Israel’s therapy of Palestinians.
“That is solely the start”
“The illegal detention of Mr. Khalil reeks of McCarthyism,” Donna Lieberman, the manager director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, stated in a press release. “It’s clear that the Trump administration is selectively punishing Mr. Khalil for expressing views that aren’t MAGA-approved — which is a daunting escalation of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, and an aggressive abuse of immigration legislation.”
Experiences recommend that Khalil is not at all the administration’s solely goal. The Scholar Employees of Columbia told Reuters that one other scholar had acquired an e mail from the US consulate of their dwelling nation saying their US visa had been revoked with out giving any purpose. A day after the scholar, who the union declined to call, acquired the e-mail, three ICE brokers entered the scholar’s constructing and tried to get into their condominium, representatives from the union instructed Reuters.
Khalil’s arrest is seemingly at odds with Trump’s recent boasts that he’s “stopped all authorities censorship and introduced again free speech in America.” Nevertheless it’s completely constant along with his administration’s stance on pro-Palestine protests on faculty campuses. In actual fact, simply someday earlier than Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration pulled $400 million in funding from Columbia, claiming the college had didn’t confront antisemitism on campus. “Freezing the funds is without doubt one of the instruments we’re utilizing to answer this spike in anti-Semitism,” Leo Terrell, the pinnacle of the Justice Division Job Pressure to Fight Antisemitism, said in a press release. “That is solely the start.”
Others within the administration put it extra bluntly. “SHALOM, MAHMOUD,” the official White Home account posted on X. On TruthSocial, Trump promised there can be extra: “That is the primary arrest of many to come back.”