Freed from US jail, Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil seizes his new public platform
NEW YORK (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump's fight with elite American universities was only a few days old when federal immigration agents arrested the Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil at his Columbia University apartment building in New York in March.
Over the more than three months he was held at a jail for immigrants in rural Louisiana, the Trump administration escalated its battle. It arrested other foreign pro-Palestinian students and revoked billions of dollars in research grants to Columbia, Harvard and other private schools whose campuses were roiled by the pro-Palestinian student protest movement, in which Khalil was a prominent figure.
"I absolutely don't regret standing up against a genocide," Khalil, 30, said in an interview at his Manhattan apartment, less than two weeks after U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz ordered him released on bail while he challenges the effort to revoke his U.S. lawful permanent residency green card and deport him. "I don't regret standing up for what's right, which is opposing war, which is calling for the end of violence."
He believes the government is trying to silence him, but has instead given him a bigger platform. Returning to New York after his release, Khalil was welcomed at the airport by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a political foe of Trump; supporters waved Palestinian flags as he reunited with his wife and infant son, whose birth he missed in jail.
Two days later, he was the star of a rally on the steps of a cathedral near Columbia's Manhattan campus, castigating the university's leaders. Last week, he appeared before cheering crowds alongside Zohran Mamdani, the pro-Palestinian state lawmaker who won June's Democratic primary ahead of New York City's 2025 mayoral election.
"I did not choose to be in this position: ICE did," Khalil said, referring to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who arrested him. "And this of course had a great impact on my life. I'm still, honestly, trying to contemplate my new reality."
He missed his May graduation ceremony and emerged from jail unemployed. An international charity withdrew its offer of a job as a policy adviser, he said. The government could win its appeal and jail him again, so Khalil said his priority is spending as much time as possible with his son and wife, a dentist.
Khalil was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria; his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, is a U.S. citizen and he became a U.S. lawful permanent resident last year. Moving to New York in 2022 as a graduate student, he became one of the main student negotiators between Columbia's administration and the protesters, who set up tent encampments on a campus lawn as they demanded that Columbia end investments of its $14 billion endowment in weapons makers and other companies supporting Israel's military.
Khalil is not charged with any crime, but the U.S. government has invoked an obscure immigration statute to argue that Khalil and several other international pro-Palestinian students must be deported because their "otherwise lawful" speech could harm U.S. foreign policy interests. The federal judge overseeing the case has ruled that the Trump administration's main rationale for deporting Khalil is likely an unconstitutional violation of free-speech rights. The government is appealing.
"This is not about 'free speech,'" Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, wrote in response to queries, "this is about individuals who don't have a right to be in the United States siding with Hamas terrorists and organizing group protests that made college campuses unsafe and harassed Jewish students."
URGES UNIVERSITIES TO HEED THEIR STUDENTS
Khalil, in the interview, condemned antisemitism and called Jewish students an "integral part" of the protest movement. He said the government was using antisemitism as a pretext to reshape American higher education, which Trump, a Republican, has said is captured by anti-American, Marxist and "radical left" ideologies.
The Trump administration has told Columbia and other universities that federal grant money, mostly for biomedical research, will not be restored unless the government has greater oversight of who they admit and hire and what they teach, calling for greater "intellectual diversity."
Unlike Harvard, Columbia has not challenged the legality of the government's sudden grant revocations, and agreed to at least some of the Trump administration's demands to tighten rules around protests as a precondition of negotiations over resuming funding.
Khalil called Columbia's response heartbreaking. "Columbia basically gave the institution to the Trump administration, let the administration intervene in every single detail on how higher education institutions should be run," he said. Columbia's administration has said preserving the university's academic autonomy is a "red line" as negotiations continue.
Virginia Lam Abrams, a Columbia spokesperson, said university leaders "strongly dispute" Khalil's characterization.
"Columbia University recognizes the right for students, including Mr. Khalil, to speak out on issues that they deeply believe in," she said in a statement. "But it is also critical for the University to uphold its rules and policies to ensure that every member of our community can participate in a campus community free from discrimination and harassment.'
Khalil urged Columbia and other universities targeted by Trump to heed their students.
"The students presented a clear plan on how this campus can follow human rights, can follow international law, can be inclusive to all students, where everyone feels equal regardless of where they stand on issues," he said. "They prefer to capitulate to political pressure rather than listening to the students."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Why the GOP doesn't want you biking to work but will spend millions on a ‘heroes' sculpture garden
A version of this story appeared in the CNN Business Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. The Republican tax and spending bill is 900 pages of barely readable text full of complicated proposals that would, among many other things, slash the social safety net in America and lavish wealthy households with tax cuts. It is reviled on the left for hurting poor people and reviled on the far-right for not going far enough to cut spending. It's a hard pill to swallow for lawmakers across the political spectrum, which is why it's loaded up with super niche provisions that reflect some of the ideological contradictions within the Trump coalition. Like, killing the $2 billion 'qualified bicycle commuting reimbursement,' a relatively cheap incentive that, at least in theory, would align with the 'Make American Healthy Again' sect of Trump loyalists. The benefit was suspended in Trump's first term, but before then it allowed employers to offer workers a $20 a month tax-free reimbursement for biking to work. (Healthy! Good for the environment!) The GOP package in Congress would eliminate it for good. There's also $40 million earmarked for a 'National Garden of American Heroes' — 250 life-size sculptures that Trump wants completed in the next 12 months ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary. The ambitious project is a longtime Trump vision that, according to Politico, will be almost impossible to pull off in time without the help of foundries in China. Incidentally, the money for the sculpture garden would be directed to the National Endowment for the Humanities, a government agency that Trump has been trying to eliminate since his first term. The NEH recently laid off 2/3 of its staff, canceled more than 1,000 grants and is marshaling its remaining resources to focus on next year's anniversary. These seemingly arbitrary small items are essentially sweeteners to win over lawmakers who might quibble with the broader thrust of the legislation. 'Now that we essentially do policy-making at a large scale, through these huge mega-bills in reconciliation… you have to stuff everything that you possibly can to try to get your entire coalition on board, particularly within the margins,' said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank. 'So that's where you see a lot of these, 'huh, where did that come from?' items.' The clearest example of that is the litany of carve-outs for the state of Alaska and its 740,000 residents, known by some critics as the Kodiak Kickback. (Fun fact: 'Alaska' shows up in the text of the Senate bill more than 20 times; other states, if they're mentioned at all, show up fewer than four times.) The reason for all the Alaska love is simple: As GOP leaders drummed up support, it became clear that Sen. Lisa Murkowski would be a holdout because of the bill's expanded Medicaid work restrictions and changes to federal food assistance programs. Over the weekend, staffers scrambled to rewrite key pieces of the bill to win her support, my CNN colleagues reported. As a result, Murkowski locked in several Alaska-specific breaks, including a tax deduction for meals served on fishing vessels, a special tax exemption for fishing villages in the western part of the state, and a five-fold expansion of a deduction for whaling boat captains. Like the commuter cycling reimbursement that the bill would eliminate, these aren't big-ticket items. But they illustrate the haphazard and at times punitive way government spending decisions get made. On the cycling benefit, Jacquez says it is likely just a target for Republicans who see it as a culture war issue — a 'green' activity that largely benefits people in cities who tend to vote for Democrats. You can see that dynamic play out in other provisions, too. Republicans have tried to shield some of their rural constituencies from the worst effects of the bill, Jacquez notes. There is a rural hospital bailout fund designed to blunt the impact of Medicaid cuts, for example. But that doesn't do anything to help urban hospitals in New York City, where some 4 million residents, nearly half the population, are enrolled in Medicaid. In the grand scheme of a $3.3 trillion spending package, $150 million for America's birthday might seem fine. 'But that's $150 million that's not going to be spent on food assistance,' Jacquez said. 'Or it's a billion dollars that's not going to be spent on Medicaid. When every cent allegedly matters, these things do add up.'
Politico
14 minutes ago
- Politico
In Today's GOP, There Is No Choice at All
The so-called Big Beautiful Bill was always destined to pass, and it's instructive to realize why: for Republican lawmakers, this was an up-or-down vote on President Donald Trump. The sprawling measure — which at its core was really one big, beautiful tax extender — was never about those tax rates or Medicaid or the deficit. The underlying legislation was no bill at all, but a referendum on Trump. And that left congressional Republicans a binary choice that also had nothing to do with the policy therein: They could salute the president and vote yes and or vote no and risk their careers in a primary. It doesn't take a political science PhD to realize where today's GOP would land. Don't believe me, just ask the senior senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis. Yes — to be sure alert! — there was much juggling between the two chambers of Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate GOP Leader John Thune and their lieutenants deserve credit for the creativity and flexibility they demonstrated by pacifying lawmakers uneasy about state and local tax deductions, rural hospitals and even the fate of Alaska Native whaling captains (somewhere, Don Young and Ted Stevens are smiling). But, folks, the alternative was no alternative at all. Without acting, Republican lawmakers would have risked breaching the debt ceiling this summer, tempted an across-the-board tax hike when the 2017 rates expired at the end of the year and torpedoed their president's sole legislative initiative. The last of these merits more attention. Perhaps the most remarkable story sitting in plain view in today's Washington is the gap between Trump's political and media dominance and the paucity of his legislative agenda. The president has been happy to spend the first six months of his second term signing executive orders, wielding tariffs as economic weapons and rampaging through news cycles with all manner of provocations, outbursts and threats. He's less a traditional president than the old Kool-Aid man bursting through walls. Which works quite well for somebody who measures success by attention and is mainly interested in the perception of winning than an LBJ-style collection of pens and parchment from bills signed. The second-term, free-range Trump has not even pretended to be interested in the details of lawmaking and is even less interested in forging bipartisan coalitions with people he sees criticizing him on the television shows he consumes by the hours. Also, he's mostly animated by immigration crackdowns and playing department store owner or price- fixer-in-chief, which he can mostly do on his own and battle out in the courts without consulting Congress. Recognizing as much, and that their narrow margins in both chambers would limit their ambitions, a group of GOP lawmakers wisely decided to stuff every measure they could into one reconciliation bill they could ram through the House and Senate with bare majorities. Yes, there was more money for immigration and defense, but the most significant policy changes, except for Medicaid, were modest changes to deductions on tips, overtime and auto purchases that helped Trump fulfill campaign trail promises. Those sweeteners helped keep Trump's attention, relatively speaking, and let him portray the bill in which-side-are-you-on terms that rendered the language less relevant than the stakes. The hard truth for small-government conservatives in Congress to swallow is that their primary voters care more about fidelity to Trump than reducing the size of the federal government. Any overly loud critiques by lawmakers — no matter if rooted in principle or sound politics — were angrily dismissed by Trump as so much 'grandstanding' by malcontents. He had scant interest in bill language because signing a bill is the point. Victory is in the action not the particulars. Plus, there's only room for one grandstander in today's Republican Party, as Tillis, Rep. Thomas Massie and Elon Musk (twice) have now learned. Every other actor is merely toiling in the engine room of the USS MAGA. It's fitting that this Trump-era fact of political life is most difficult for Republicans on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum to grasp. What unites Senators Rand Paul and Susan Collins, a goldbug curious libertarian and old-school New England moderate? Neither is willing to accept a purely tribal politics in which substance is secondary to a cult of personality. In fairness to Trump, he's matured enough politically to recognize the difference between hectoring Massie, Paul and Tillis and haranguing Collins. The first cohort represents states the president carried three times and, with the important exception of Tillis, can easily be replaced by another Republican. But the Mainer is the GOP version of Joe Manchin: Once she's gone, the replacement will be a conventional Democrat, not a more loyal Republican. Speaking of Manchin, he and other Democratic veterans of the last administration's legislative wars are all too familiar with the hangover that may await today's jubilant Republicans after the beautiful black ink on the bill is dry and the fireworks have all gone off. Joe Biden hardly commanded a cult of personality, but the tug of tribalism was almost as strong on congressional Democrats like Manchin, who were told to fall in line and back Biden's pricey agenda. The West Virginian eventually did so, the main legislation did little to alleviate inflation despite its name and most voters at the polls last year pointed a finger at Democrats and not global supply chains for higher costs. So Trump may not care about the details, but Democratic ad-makers in next year's midterm will — and they'll bet that the Medicaid cuts the president swore he'd never enact will do more to move voters than their tax bracket remaining the same.
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump floats hosting UFC fight on White House grounds
President Trump on Thursday floated the idea of hosting an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House next year as part of celebrations of the country's 250th anniversary. Trump told supporters at a 'Salute to America' event in Iowa that there would be a youth sporting event called the 'Patriot Games' to mark the year-long celebration. Advertisement He also said national parks and historic sites, including the White House, would host special events to mark the 250th anniversary of the country's founding. 'We're going to have a UFC fight, think of this, on the grounds of the White House. We have a lot of land there. We're going to build a little — we're not, Dana's going to do it. Dana's great. One of a kind,' Trump said, referring to UFC president Dana White. Trump suggested the event would be a full 'championship fight' and could host up to 25,000 people. Such an event would likely require various permit approvals to take place at or near the White House. Trump has become something of a regular at UFC fights. The president has a years-long friendship with White. Many of the fighters who compete at UFC events have publicly expressed support for Trump, including in the Octagon. Advertisement Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
