Activist Mahmoud Khali: Trump administration targeting those who don't fit its vision of America

ITV News

14 hours ago

On a leafy street on the Upper West side, a building supervisor sweeps the steps to a red brick apartment block with perfectly tended pots of geraniums marking its entrance.
Home to staff members and postgraduates studying at the University of Columbia, inside the lobby it is library-quiet.
But the peace here was shattered on an ordinary Saturday four months ago when agents from ICE - the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement - snatched one of its student residents as he came back from dinner with his heavily pregnant wife.
Watching the video Noor Khalil filmed on her phone as Mahmoud was taken is a slightly surreal experience.
"You don't need to do that," she says incredulously, as men who refuse to tell her who they are working for handcuff her Palestinian husband. As they bundle him into a car she frantically calls a lawyer; audibly fighting back tears as Mahmoud is driven away into the night.
In the months before she sees him again, Noor gives birth to their first child, a little boy called Deen. It's a moment the couple have dreamt of for years. But Mahmoud misses it all because ICE has flown him more than a thousand miles south to a detention centre in Louisiana. The 30-year-old international relations specialist was held there for 118 days.
When we meet he has been home for a fortnight, finally reunited with his wife and getting used to life as a new dad. But his sadness at having missed out on the first few weeks of Deen's life is palpable.
'This was absolutely the heaviest moment in my entire life,' he tells me. 'I went through the Syrian War.
"I went through living in a Palestinian refugee camp. I went through so many hardships, but this particular moment was the most heartbreaking.'
He was allowed to phone his wife as she gave birth. The American government says its detention facilities are safe and humane but Mahmoud says he was sharing a dormitory with around 70 other men with no privacy.
'It was after midnight, around one, two, in the morning,' he remembers. 'I was just listening on the phone, trying to send supportive words, not knowing if she actually could hear me or not.'
'I was so worried about that,' he sighs. 'Because I know what this moment meant for her - to have me holding her hand while delivering our baby.'
Khalil's crime had been to lead high-profile protests at Columbia University against Israel's war on Gaza - activities the American government alleged were anti-semitic and aligned him with the terrorist organisation Hamas.
I ask him if he is anti-semitic and he shakes his head.
'It's absurd to say this. I take anti-semitism concerns very seriously and I've privately and publicly denounced anti-semitism and said it has no place in the protest movement.'
I point out that with anti-semitic attacks on the rise, the demonstrations he led left some Jewish students feeling unsafe and uncomfortable; he counters that, as a Palestinian watching the horrors unfold daily in Gaza, he felt a moral duty to protest.
When I ask him whether it's his position to criticise US foreign policy, as a green card holder here at the government's leisure, he doesn't hesitate.
'I pay taxes, I pay my student fees here,' he says. 'I am simply asking them not to use my tax money to support a genocidal state.'
Mahmoud pauses to check on his wife and son who are resting and his worry is evident. They are both American citizens, but in a political climate where President Trump has vowed to end birthright citizenship, even their future feels uncertain.
He says he is not just anxious for Deen, but for every child.
'Because what this administration is trying to do is define what an American should be. Who is American and who is less American? They are coming after everyone who doesn't fit their vision of what an American citizen should be'.
He knows that for defenders of freedom of speech, his release from detention was seen as a win against an increasingly authoritarian government.
But it may be a short-lived victory. Within ten minutes of his release, the Trump administration had filed an appeal against the court ruling preventing his deportation. Mahmoud Khalil is still looking over his shoulder.