‘I knew I would prevail': Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil tells CNN about his ‘dehumanizing' experience in ICE detention
In an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Khalil, who is now back with his young family, describes the months languishing in a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, and the pain of being denied permission to be present at his son's birth.
'It was a very, very dehumanizing experience, for someone who was not accused of any crime, whatsoever,' said Khalil, a green card holder who had no formal criminal or civil charges brought against him.
His detention sparked outrage across the US.
On Thursday Khalil's lawyers filed a claim against the Trump administration for $20 million in damages, alleging he was falsely imprisoned, prosecuted and portrayed as antisemitic as the government sought to deport him over his role in campus protests against Israel's war in Gaza. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security in a statement called Khalil's claim 'absurd.'
His arrest outside his apartment on Columbia University's campus in New York City in March, as he returned home from a dinner with his wife, felt like a 'kidnap,' he told Amanpour.
Plainclothes agents had followed him into the lobby of his building, and threatened his wife with arrest if she didn't separate from him, he said. CNN has previously reported that the ICE agents did not have a warrant during Khalil's arrest.
Khalil was among the first in a series of high-profile arrests of pro-Palestinian students as US President Donald Trump's administration moved to crack down on antisemitism on college campuses. The 30-year-old, who was born in a refugee camp in Syria before going on to graduate from Columbia, had played a prominent role negotiating on behalf of pro-Palestinian protesters at the university.
Once taken, he was moved first to New Jersey, then to Texas, and finally to an ICE detention center in Louisiana – more than 1,000 miles away from his wife, a US citizen, who was then eight months pregnant.
'I was literally moved from one place to another, like an object,' he recalled, referring to his transfers to different detention facilities. 'I was shackled all the time,' he said.
But, he said, the days in the detention center never broke his spirit.
'From the moment that I was detained, I knew that I would eventually prevail,' he said.
'What I simply did is protesting a genocide.'
Israel has repeatedly pushed back against claims its war in Gaza is a genocide.
The food in the ICE center in Louisiana was nearly 'inedible,' he said. After being served meat that made him vomit, he switched to vegetarian options, he said.
The center was bitterly cold, but repeated requests for blankets were ignored, he said.
'The moment you enter such ICE facilities, your rights literally stay outside,' he told Amanpour.
CNN has previously reached out to ICE for comment about the conditions at its Louisiana facilities – its policies indicate detention is non-punitive. The GEO Group, the corporation that runs the facility where Khalil was held, has denied allegations of abuse.
The Trump administration has argued that Khalil's actions pose a threat to its foreign policy goal of combatting antisemitism. His lawyers have vehemently pushed back on that assertion.
After accusing him – without evidence – of being a Hamas sympathizer, the Trump administration, who sought Khalil's deportation, said it was justified because he did not reveal connections to two organizations in his application to become a permanent US resident. His attorneys have said that argument is weak.
Khalil told Amanpour the Trump administration's allegations against him were 'absurd.'
'They want to conflate any speech for the rights of Palestinians with speech that's supporting terrorism, which is totally wrong,' he said.
'It's a message that they want to make an example out of me, even if you are a legal resident… that we will find a way to come after you, to punish you, if you speak, against what we want.'
Khalil told the Associated Press that if his claim against the Trump administration is successful, he plans to share any settlement money with others targeted in Trump's 'failed' effort to suppress pro-Palestinian speech. In lieu of a settlement, he would also accept an official apology and changes to the administration's deportation policies.
Amid the inedible food, the cold, and fear he might be deported, one moment stood out as the hardest to bear – immigration officials denying him permission to be present at the birth of his firstborn child.
Attorneys for Khalil in May said officials at the Louisiana center cited a 'blanket no-contact visitation policy' and unspecified security concerns as part of their reason to deny the request.
'Missing the birth of my child. I think that was the most difficult moment in my life… We put so many requests to be able, to attend that that moment,' Khalil said.
'I don't think I would be able to forgive them, for taking that moment away from, from me.'
'The first time I saw my child was literally through thick glass. He was literally in front of me, like, five centimeters away from me… I couldn't hold him.
'And when the moment came to hold him, it was by court order, to have one hour… with him.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
2 minutes ago
- The Hill
Bacon: Nebraska GDP down 6 percent under Trump
Rep. Don Bacon (Neb.), a moderate Republican, said he's concerned about the U.S. economy, noting his state saw a 6 percent annual drop in real gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter of 2025. In an interview with CNN's Phil Mattingly, Bacon pointed to the recent jobs data and the latest round of tariffs as reason for his pessimism about the economy. 'From my vantage point here in Nebraska, we're seeing a bit of a troubled economic mess — or, right now, it's a troubled time,' Bacon said. 'In Nebraska, the GDP here has decreased by 6 percent over the last year, and it's all about trade, it's all about getting corn and soybeans out the door,' Bacon continued. 'So, what I hear with, you know, weak jobs numbers, we're sort of seeing that in Nebraska right now.' The Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis released a report in late June showing real GDP in the first quarter of 2025 decreased in 39 states, with Nebraska and Iowa showing the largest decline with annual rates of -6.1 percent. Declines in agriculture contributed most significantly to the drop. Bacon, one of three House Republicans reelected in districts that voted for the former Vice President Harris- Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) ticket in 2024, has criticized President Trump's trade policy in the past. He again expressed his support for free and fair trade, saying, 'Free trade provides the best products at the best price, in the most efficient manner,' while adding that, in circumstances where 'it's not fair trade, the president should try to correct that.' 'But doing tariffs against 80 different countries, I have a hard time accepting that as a sound strategy,' Bacon continued. 'I think in the end the American consumer would be paying a lot more for the price of their goods. And we're already starting to see that because in the end, tariffs are a tax on consumers.' The lawmaker, who is retiring at the end of his term, said he's hearing from Fortune 500 companies and agriculture producers that 'we're losing a share of the market right now,' which he said is going to affect jobs numbers and is already having a small effect on inflation, which Bacon expects to increase. 'But if the president sticks with these numbers, I think over time, these 25 percent tariffs will be represented in the goods we buy from these countries. And so I'm concerned about the strength of our economy,' he said.
Atlantic
3 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Where Have the Proud Boys Gone?
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security debuted a recruitment strategy to expand the ranks of ICE: sign-on bonuses. Thanks to a rush of cash from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the department announced that it's offering up to $50,000 to newly hired federal law-enforcement agents. The offer caught the eye of one group that seemed to be particularly pleased by the government's exciting career opportunity. On Telegram, an account linked to the Toledo, Ohio, chapter of the Proud Boys declared: 'Toledo Boys living high on the hog right now!!' Whether members of the extremist group have pursued job openings at ICE, much less been hired and handed a big check, is unclear. I asked the Toledo chapter whether its members are applying to work for the government, but I didn't hear back. Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said in an email that 'any individual who desires to join ICE will undergo intense background investigations and security clearances—no exception.' But the Toledo Proud Boys' enthusiasm for the work, if nothing else, is telling. The Trump administration is enacting a mass-deportation campaign centered around aggression and cruelty. The Proud Boys are staunchly against undocumented immigrants, and have repeatedly intimidated and physically antagonized their enemies (during the first Trump administration, they often got into fights with left-wing protesters). The group's ideals are being pursued—but by ICE and the government itself. Trump's deportations aren't what they seem There was every reason to believe that the Proud Boys would run wild in Donald Trump's second term. On his first day back in the White House, Trump pardoned everyone who was convicted for crimes related to the insurrection on January 6, 2021—including roughly 100 known members of the Proud Boys and other extremist organizations. They had received some of the harshest sentences tied to the Capitol riot: All 14 people who were still in prison when Trump returned to office were affiliated with either the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers. At the time, a terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations warned that the pardons 'could be catastrophic for public safety,' sending a message to extremist groups that violence in the name of MAGA 'is legal and legitimate.' Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys who himself was pardoned, announced that there would be hell to pay: 'I'm happy that the president is focusing not on retribution, and focusing on success,' he said on Infowars, 'but I will tell you that I'm not gonna play by those rules.' Six months later, though, the Proud Boys have been surprisingly quiet. According to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), a nonprofit that tracks political violence, the Proud Boys have been less active in 2025 than over the preceding several years. Since his release, Tarrio's most prominent action has been helping launch 'ICERAID,' a website that pays people in crypto in exchange for reporting undocumented immigrants. Tarrio, who did not respond to an interview request through a lawyer, also co-hosts frequent livestreams on X. In one episode of a livestream last month, Tarrio nursed a cigarette while a man who identified himself only as 'Patriot Rob' waxed nostalgic about how inescapable the Proud Boys once were. In 2020, members of the militant group showed up at anti-lockdown rallies across the country, clashed with racial-justice protesters, and earned a shout-out from Trump himself during a presidential debate. (The Proud Boys so frequently traveled to Washington, D.C., for various kinds of protests in 2020 that Politico wrote about their favorite bar.) Now, Patriot Rob said on the livestream, 'there's very few of us left.' It's unclear how many Proud Boy chapters there are today, but some seem to be defunct: Those in Philadelphia and Michigan have let their websites turn into dead links and stopped posting on Telegram, the social platform of choice for most Proud Boys. I reached out to 10 Proud Boy chapters and requested interviews. None was willing to speak with me. After I told a Miami chapter that I had spoken with experts on the current state of the Proud Boys, someone who identified himself only as 'Alex' responded: 'Experts' lol Experts at what? Sucking cock Y'all can go fuck yourselves!' The East Tennessee Chapter, perhaps mistaking my name for a woman's, replied by saying, 'We're going to request some nudes in order to confirm your identity 👌.' The Proud Boys have not disappeared. They have been spotted at a 'Tesla Takedown' event in Salem, Oregon; marched with anti-abortion activists in San Francisco; and confronted protesters outside of the 'Alligator Alcatraz' ICE facility. Other right-wing groups have been more active. After the Texas floods last month, a leader of the Patriot Front claimed that the extremist group was involved in recovery efforts to help ' European peoples.' Patriot Front, which has also held several marches across the country since the start of Trump's second term, remains a small organization. Estimates put its membership at 200 to 300 people, compared with the thousands that researchers believe are, or at least were, in the Proud Boys. On the whole, militia groups are 'keeping it low-key,' Amy Cooter, the deputy director and a co-founder of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, told me. Since the start of the year, ACLED has recorded 108 extremist protests nationwide—not even half as many as at this point in 2022. This is not entirely unexpected. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has reported, in the 1990s, a surge of militia activity and white nationalism appeared to die down after the Oklahoma City bombing—but those movements never disappeared; they simply moved underground. Today, part of the reason for the apparent decline is that even after Trump's pardons, far-right groups are still dealing with the hangover of January 6. Militia groups have always been relatively splintered, but the insurrection exacerbated the fissures. Some Oath Keeper groups are divided on whether their leader, Stewart Rhodes, went too far on January 6, when he rallied Oath Keepers to breach the Capitol, Cooter said. Some members have been vocal about leaving the organization, citing Rhodes's leadership. In 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded five active Oath Keepers chapters, down from 70 in 2020. (The number of current chapters is not clear.) Meanwhile, the Proud Boys fractured in 2021, after Reuters uncovered court records indicating that Tarrio had served as an informant to local and federal law enforcement before the group was founded. ('I don't recall any of this,' Tarrio told Reuters at the time.) Many Proud Boys chapters disavowed him, including part of his own in Miami. The city now has two separate chapters, an anti-Tarrio and a pro-Tarrio one. In January, I emailed the Toledo Proud Boys chapter to ask about Tarrio. I received an unattributed reply expressing disappointment that Tarrio had 'turned his back and squealed on brothers.' I reached back out this week, and received a similar response: 'Tarrio is a rat, punk, and low life!' The respondent also said this: 'You breland, are exactly what President Trump said. .fake news! I'm sure you preferred the last potatoe!' (I asked if by 'the last potato,' the account meant Joe Biden. 'Ahhh yes. .SMH,' the respondent said. 'You know. .the illegitimate one! The stolen election one! The one who wandered around aimlessly!') The bigger reason that these far-right groups remain underground is that the Trump administration's aggressive agenda has left them with little to do. One of the motivating issues for the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other extremist groups is strong opposition to undocumented immigrants. After the presidential election, a leader of the Texas chapter of the Three Percenters, a militia group, reportedly wrote to Trump to offer manpower in enacting mass deportations. But ICE and other federal agencies are engaging in forceful action against immigrants backed by the state in a way that surpasses what the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys could ever do. ICE agents, not far-right militias, are the ones who have smashed through car windows, thrown people into unmarked vans, and detained them indefinitely. Even apart from immigration, 'groups are taking a hands-off approach right now because their interests are often aligned with the government,' Freddy Cruz, a researcher at the Western States Center, a nonprofit that tracks extremism, told me. The Proud Boys was started in 2016 in part to double down on traditional gender norms. Gavin McInnes, the group's founder, has described the Proud Boys as a 'pro-Western fraternity' for men who 'long for the days when girls were girls and men were men.' The Proud Boys' extreme pro-male views are less distinct than they once were, as MAGA has embraced Andrew Tate and other openly misogynistic figures of the so-called manosphere. As a result, the Proud Boys have one less point to rally around. Still, the Proud Boys and other right-wing militias might not stay underground forever. Under the right conditions, they could surge once again. 'These groups are really responsive to news cycles,' Cooter said. They have specific flash points—immigration, the Second Amendment, and supposed 'election integrity'—that can mobilize them in certain contexts, she explained. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other established far-right groups still have infrastructure, a durable brand name, and the precedent that Trump might pardon them if things go awry. In May, Tarrio was reportedly invited to Mar-a-Lago, where he briefly spoke with Trump. Newer groups continue to organize. Patriot Front, for example, has teamed up with 'Active Clubs,' a loose network of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who run their own mixed-martial-arts fight clubs. Together, all of this could help give extremist groups a head start that they didn't have in the first Trump administration, when the Proud Boys and many other militia groups began to find their footing. The pieces are there, even if the moment isn't yet.
Atlantic
3 minutes ago
- Atlantic
The ‘Blood Libel' Libel
Whatever quarrels one might have with Senator Bernie Sanders, his thinking would seem to be immune from medieval anti-Semitic influence. Yet last month, after Sanders denounced 'the Netanyahu government's extermination of Gaza,' the pro-Israel group AIPAC attacked Sanders's statement as a 'hate-filled rant' and 'despicable blood libel.' Extraordinary claims—such as the charge that the Jewish senator from Vermont is anti-Semitic to the point of spreading ancient slanders against his own people—require extraordinary evidence. Yet large segments of the conservative and even centrist wings of the American pro-Israel movement have whipped themselves into such a frenzy of paranoia that they are making accusations like this without much effort at justification. Conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism is not new, but it has exploded in the post–October 7 era, in which the rising menace of genuine Jew-hatred on left and right alike has been accompanied by a growing chorus of hyperbolic, bad-faith accusations. This dynamic might seem paradoxical, but the two phenomena exist in a natural symbiosis. Anti-Semites often insist they are being targeted merely for criticizing Israel; their defense becomes more effective when many people are, in fact, being called anti-Semitic merely for criticizing Israel. Yair Rosenberg: America's anti-Jewish assassins are making the case for Zionism The hallmark of this style of politics is that, although it does not explicitly state that all criticism of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic, it acts as though that were true. Consider another recent episode. Late last month, The New York Times ran a photo of a child in Gaza, who the accompanying article said was 'born a healthy child' but had recently been 'diagnosed with severe malnutrition.' Later, it added an editor's note clarifying that he 'also had pre-existing health problems,' which should have been noted in the photo caption. Newspapers make errors from time to time, especially while covering wars, when verifying facts is more dangerous and difficult. Yet some conservatives immediately determined not only that the error reflected an institutional bias against Israel—hardly an indisputable premise, given the anger that the Times has generated on the left for its reporting on such topics as sexual violence by Hamas—but that this bias in turn reflected animus against Jews. 'The media were so eager to produce a story about Jews behaving amorally that they dropped all skepticism in the face of a sensationalistic claim from a terrorist group with a known history of lying,' wrote the National Review editor Philip Klein. Noah Pollak, a Trump appointee at the U.S. Department of Education, did not even grant that the error was inadvertent, charging on X that the paper had deliberately published a falsehood: 'This is a really strange way of saying 'We ran a front page blood libel claiming Israel is starving a baby to death, but it's not true and we actually knew it wasn't true at the time, but it promoted hatred of Jews so we ran it anyway.'' Likewise, Seth Mandel, writing in Commentary, treated the error as an act of anti-Semitic malice: 'Pointing to a suffering child and saying 'the Jews did this' when in fact the Jews did no such thing is an intentional act.' As with the Sanders episode, none of these critics offered any explanation as to why the Times— a newspaper whose executive editor, along with many staffers, is Jewish—would be institutionally committed to whipping up anti-Semitic animus. The proliferation of the term blood libel as a rhetorical tic is especially revealing. The blood libel is a medieval conspiracy theory that posits that Jews murder Christian children in order to use their blood in religious ceremonies. It was used for centuries to incite murder against Jews. My wife's grandmother once told me that her mother had a vivid memory of being a child in 19th-century Russia, hiding under a bed and watching a Cossack plant a dead child in her family's home to blame on the Jews. To claim that Israel murders Arab children for religious ends would be a blood libel. And because anti-Semitic ideas mutate over time, some forms of obsessive hatred of Israel assign the Jewish state an almost demonic place in the imagination. Anti-Semitism can express itself as an inability to process Israel's actions, whether good or bad, in the terms one would use for other nations. But to the extent that the outrage over civilian deaths in Gaza is not categorically different from that surrounding, say, the American counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Israel's critics are treating it as a normal state. Some elements of the contemporary pro-Israel right have refused to accept that. They have, instead, repurposed the phrase blood libel to cast almost any complaint about the Israeli war effort as anti-Semitic. Because arguments about the scope of war inherently revolve around the propriety of violence, this tactic has limitless application. This rhetorical move is striking in its resemblance to the style of the illiberal left. If you identify your own political position with a vulnerable group, you can accuse anybody who disagrees of opposing the group, thus circumventing the need to defend your position on the merits. The most common fallacy associated with this form of backward reasoning is to assume that any argument a bigot might use is bigoted. Because racists oppose affirmative action, its defenders sometimes assume all opponents of affirmative action are racist; likewise, because anti-Semites hate Israel, some of its defenders treat opposition to Israel as presumptively anti-Semitic. In some cases, the homage is explicit. Some campus activists have demanded that pro-Israel Jews receive the kind of protective treatment that university administrators have previously extended to students from, or speaking on behalf of, other marginalized groups. (Others have merely asked that schools fairly apply content-neutral rules to activists who seize common spaces or shout down pro-Israel speakers.) This would be a logical demand if you believe that illiberal discourse norms have benefited minority students and fostered tolerance. But if you believe that they've generated resentment without helping their supposed beneficiaries, as members of the pro-Israel right generally do, then it is a strange racket to try to get in on. The Trump administration has turned these illiberal concepts into official government policy. Its higher-education agenda revolves around the use of pretextual charges of anti-Semitism to withhold funding and subject universities to political interference. It has detained immigrant students for criticizing Israel and worked with right-wing activists to target protesters and issue draconian demands for 'reform.' How could a movement prone to hair-trigger charges of anti-Semitism identify itself so closely with this administration? President Donald Trump has welcomed an anti-Semitic and even Nazi-curious faction into his coalition, normalizing rhetoric that not long ago would have been disqualifying in a Republican administration. (Kingsley Wilson, a Defense Department spokesperson, has dabbled in anti-Semitic memes, including attacking the memory of Leo Frank, perhaps the most famous victim of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history.) Trump himself has routinely discussed Jews in crude terms, as money-obsessed and primarily loyal to Israel. In fact, the alliance has a certain logic to it. The pro-Israel right is not so much expanding the definition of what constitutes anti-Semitism as shifting it, so that it covers far more criticism of Israel and far less behavior that would traditionally have fit the bill. After Trump criticized unethical bankers as 'shylocks'—drawing a wrist-slap from the Anti-Defamation League, which has otherwise supported his campus crackdown—the Commentary editor John Podhoretz wrote on X, 'Trump bombed Iran. He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever as far as I'm concerned.' Here Podhoretz is following in the tradition of his father, Norman, who preceded John as editor of Commentary, once an esteemed journal of Jewish thought. Thirty years ago, after Pat Robertson published a conspiratorial book arguing that a tiny sect of 'European bankers' had controlled world affairs for decades, Norman Podhoretz defended Robertson from charges of anti-Semitism in a lengthy essay. 'In my view,' he wrote, 'Robertson's support for Israel trumps the anti-Semitic pedigree of his ideas about the secret history of the dream of a new world order.' Michael Powell: The double standard in the human-rights world At the time, Robertson's crankish views may have seemed marginal enough that his allies could pretend they were tolerable. The door that Podhoretz cracked open for one nutty televangelist has since swung wide open for hordes of obsessive anti-globalists, Nazi-meme appreciators, and other enemies of the Jews. Building a coalition united by its total indifference to Palestinian human rights requires teaming with some people who may lack a certain moral refinement when it comes to the Jews. But you go to political war with the coalition you have, not the coalition you wish you had. This alliance harms the Jews in two obvious ways. First, it provides cover for the legitimization of a strain of far-right anti-Semitism that had been frozen out of mainstream political influence since the demise of the America First movement at the start of World War II. Second, it weakens the fight against left-wing anti-Semitism by diluting the charge through overuse. Flooding the public square with counterfeit accusations devalues the currency. And allowing the cause to be turned into cover for a crackdown on the left that is at best loosely related to defending Jews inevitably subjects the idea of opposing anti-Semitism to cynicism. The pro-Israel right's response to that critique is, of course, to label it as anti-Semitic. 'Jews are being threatened with consequences for being seen as exercising undue influence over campus life,' writes the Manhattan Institute legal-policy fellow Tal Fortgang. American culture has passed through an era in which elements of the social-justice left sought to shut down opposition to their agenda by branding disagreement as bigotry. Members of the pro-Israel right, who gained power in part by riding the backlash against the excesses of left-wing illiberalism, have now decided to borrow its techniques. Can they truly not imagine that they will generate a backlash of their own?
