The movement to free Mahmoud Khalil.
With less than a day’s notice several thousand people rallied in New York City’s Federal Plaza, also known as Foley Square, to demand the release of Palestinian recent graduate student at Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil.
I was there.
On Saturday ICE agents kidnapped Mahmoud from his dorm room and are holding him for deportation in Louisiana.
ICE originally claimed he was in violation of his student visa.
But Mahmoud is in the United States on a Green Card.
ICE then changed their story and said his Green Card status was revoked.
Mahmoud is not charged with any crime.
Donald Trump has made clear what the real reason for Mahmoud’s kidnapping.
Mahmoud Khalil was one of the leaders and participants in the anti-war encampments at Columbia University last Spring.
The encampments at Columbia sparked a nationwide movement on over 500 campuses protesting Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank.
Columbia University’s response was despicable.
The build-up to Khalil’s arrest began last month, when Barnard College—a women’s liberal arts college that operates under the banner of and on Columbia’s campus—expelled three students for pro-Palestine activism. The Nation reportsthose were the first protest-related expulsions at Columbia since 1968, when students took a dean hostage in protest against the Vietnam War, and include the first for nonviolent political protest since 1936, when a student named Robert Burke was expelled for leading a demonstration against the Columbia administration’s support for Nazi Germany.
Those expulsions were only the latest actions taken against pro-Palestine and antiwar activists by Columbia administrators, who have done everything possible to cave to McCarthyite trolling on the right, only to be rewarded at every turn with further punishment. Just ask Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s president at the height of the protests, who sicced the NYPD on her students, then went to Washington to grovel before Republicans in Congress, only be forced to resign anyway.
Meanwhile the kidnapping by the Trump administration of Mahmoud Khalil has galvanized a movement.
Over two million people have signed a petition to free Mahmoud.
A judge has temporarily halted any deportation efforts.
The case of Mahmoud Khalil has become an issue in the New York City mayoral election.
Most mayoral challengers slammed the move on Monday. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams called it “blatant authoritarianism,” Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani called it an “assault on the First Amendment” and Comptroller Brad Lander said that “no one will be safer” with a precedent for deporting individuals based on ideology.
Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo was the exception — declining to answer a question from the Daily News at a campaign event on Monday.
One leading candidate and my personal choice, Zohan Mamdani, posted yesterday:
