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An activist who was a key organizer of the pro-Palestinian pupil protest motion at Columbia College was arrested by ICE over the weekend.
The effort to detain and deport pupil activists by President Donald Trump took a brand new flip as federal authorities arrested an activist who helped set up pro-Palestinian pupil protests at Columbia College. Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate pupil on the college till final December, was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers final Saturday night at his university-owned residence. In keeping with his lawyer, Amy Greer, Kahlil is a authorized inexperienced card resident of the USA. In addition they threatened to arrest his spouse, an American citizen who’s eight months pregnant.
Division of Homeland Safety Tricia McLaughlin confirmed Khalil’s arrest on Sunday evening to the press. “Khalil led actions aligned to Hamas, a delegated terrorist group,” she stated. “ICE and the Division of State are dedicated to imposing President Trump’s govt orders and to defending U.S. nationwide safety.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio went additional in a publish on X, previously Twitter, linking to a different article masking the arrest and writing: “We will likely be revoking the visas and/or inexperienced playing cards of Hamas supporters in America to allow them to be deported.”
“We are going to vigorously be pursuing Mahmoud’s rights in court docket, and can proceed our efforts to proper this horrible and inexcusable — and calculated — unsuitable dedicated in opposition to him,” Greer stated in a press release, including that Khalil’s arrest “follows the U.S. authorities’s open repression of pupil activism and political speech.” Greer stated that they had been not sure of his “exact whereabouts,” stating that they had been advised that he was being held in an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, however when his spouse arrived to go to she was advised he wasn’t there. She speculated that he might be as distant as Louisiana.
Khalil had served as a negotiator between college students who erected encampments at Columbia and college officers final spring. It made him a goal for pro-Israel figures who labeled him as antisemitic, together with Columbia College professor Shai Davidal who overtly known as for him to be deported. The arrest has sparked outrage from a number of civil liberties teams. Columbia Regulation Faculty immigrant rights director Elora Mukherjee stated that revoking Khalil’s inexperienced card with no legal offense “in retaliation for his public speech, that’s prohibited by the First Modification of the U.S. Structure,” expressing it was a uncommon scenario.