Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist Mahmoud Khalil said that his arrest by federal immigration agents and subsequent monthslong detention felt like he was being kidnapped — and that he will use his recent freedom to continue fighting not just on behalf of Gaza, but also for immigrants unjustly targeted by the United States.
Khalil, 30, was freed on Friday after 104 days of detention at a U.S. Immigration and Customs facility in Jena, Louisiana. The activist was taken from his New York City home in March by ICE agents after leading peaceful protests at Columbia University against Israel’s U.S.-funded campaign of violence in Gaza.
“All the ‘Know Your Rights’ information and fliers I read and familiarized myself with were useless,” Khalil told The New York Times in his first interview since getting released. “There are no rights in such situations.”
The activist told the Times that his arrest reminded him of how the Syrian government operated while he was growing up in Damascus. Khalil fled the country for Lebanon just after turning 18 when he learned that Syrian government agents had disappeared two of his friends.
His detention in March — the initial 30 hours of which he spent completely cut off from communication with his pregnant wife — was the very experience he had tried to flee, he said.
“It felt like I was literally being kidnapped, where you have plainclothes agents literally snatching you off your apartment building without introducing themselves, without introducing an arrest warrant,” he told a crowd on Sunday at a rally in New York welcoming him home.
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Khalil has yet to be accused of a crime, though his immigration case continues to make its way through court. He is married to a U.S. citizen and got his green card in November.
Throughout his detention and again over the weekend, Khalil stressed that his experience was not an isolated incident, but part of a wider system in which immigrants in the U.S. are targeted, dehumanized and taken from their families. Since his arrest, protests have erupted against militarized and invasive ICE raids often carried out by plainclothes agents.
“It was often hard to find patience in my detention,” he said at the rally. “The center was crowded with hundreds of people told that their existence is illegal, and not one of us knows when we can go free.”
Khalil described sharing a “dorm” with more than 70 other men while detained at the ICE facility in Jena, the lights always on with no privacy. He told the Times that he “tried my best to make meaning out of my suffering there,” so he spent a few hours every day translating other men’s questions for authorities into English so they could communicate their needs, like “what had happened to the money in someone’s commissary account, or why they hadn’t received their medications.”
The activist said that he heard “one tragic story after another” from his fellow detainees, recalling a father of four whose wife is battling cancer, and a man who was deported after living in the U.S. for more than 20 years. Khalil himself missed the birth of his son Deen while in detention.
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“It’s so normal in detention to see men cry, because they can’t understand why they are there. They know they don’t have documents, but does this actually mean that they should be detained?” he said. “What’s happening behind ICE detention gates is horrendous. It’s a stain on the U.S. Constitution, it’s a stain on the U.S. consciousness, because I fear that in a couple of decades we’ll look back at what’s happening now and regret that.”
Khalil said on Sunday that he will continue “no matter the personal cost” to loudly protest for the freedom of Palestinians, immigrants torn from their families, and those being persecuted by the Trump administration for exercising free speech. While the administration continues to accuse Khalil of being a threat to American foreign policy, the activist said the effort to use his detention “to scare people into silence” has had the opposite effect.
“Mahmoud is free now, but we are not done – because this is bigger than one man, one family or one moment,” his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, said at the rally. “Mahmoud’s release is a victory, but it’s not justice. Justice is accountability. Justice is no more families ripped apart.”