by Liam Noble
At 8:27 pm on March 8th, 2025, Mahmoud Khalil was abducted from Columbia University housing by men who refused to disclose their affiliation, saying, “We don’t give our names.”
Filmed by his eight months pregnant wife, Abdalla, Mahmoud was handcuffed and hauled to an unmarked car. As Abdalla tried to get information from the agents about where Mahmoud was being taken, they left her standing in the road saying to her husband’s lawyer over the phone, “I don’t know what to do.”
Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer’s, statement on the events of the arrest:
An agent told Mahmoud to give him the phone and identified himself to me as special agent Elvin Hernandez. Agent Hernandez told me he was an agent with DHS, but I do not recall whether he specified what branch. I asked why DHS was detaining Mahmoud and whether they had a warrant. Agent Hernandez said they had an administrative warrant. I asked the basis of the warrant, and he said the U.S. Department of State revoked Mahmoud’s student visa.
When I told Agent Hernandez that Mahmoud does not have a student visa because he is a green card holder and permanent resident in the U.S., he said DHS revoked the green card, too. I explained to Agent Hernandez that Mahmoud is entitled to due process as a green card holder before his green card can be revoked and he responded that Mahmoud would have the chance to go before an immigration judge. When I began to ask more questions about what grounds they would have to put Mahmoud in immigration proceedings, Agent Hernandez started to grumble at me. I asked him to show me, Mahmoud, or his wife the warrant and he hung up on me.
Who is Khalil?
Mahmoud Khalil is a graduate student at Columbia University and a legal permanent resident. A student activist leader for Palestinian human rights, Mahmoud endured a sustained campaign of harassment, including doxing— leaking of his personal information online to intimidate and silence, calls for him to “be deported,” and accusations of being a “terrorist threat.” The pressure on Khalil became so acute that he wrote to Columbia University’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong asking for support and protection. That was on March 7th. A day later, the men from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) came to abduct him.
Khalil is described by his wife as “the most kind, genuine soul,” known at Columbia as a model protester who abided by the University’s rules and did not wear an identity concealing mask during his activism at the University’s request.
The statement is clear: make an upstanding advocate like Mahmoud Khalil disappear, and all critics of Israeli genocide will disappear. The plain clothed arresting agents did not have a warrant; they were disappearing him just because they didn’t like what he said.
This is a threat against those who speak up on human rights and against the genocide of Palestinians.
Why was he captured?
Despite a whirlwind of Zionist agitators accusing Khalil of everything from “material support for Hamas” to “handing out pamphlets with Hamas’s insignia,” the DHS itself refuted this. There was no warrant issued for his arrest. There was no crime but thought-crime.
This speaks to an authority that is insecure in its position, desperate to bludgeon dissent at any cost. Ham-fisted and reactionary, the arrest and disappearance of Khalil to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana is a threat towards all students, conscious persons, and working professionals, anyone who is courageous enough to speak their moral voice.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who authorized the raid, offered a nonsensical answer in his defense, saying “This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.” Calling this rationale paper-thin is an insult to paper. The detention was unlawful, full stop.
Where does one get disappeared to?
When Mahmoud was disappeared into the ICE system, his wife and lawyer lost his location for about 36 hours. Originally he was to be held in New Jersey, but the facility is overrun by bedbugs and he was only kept there briefly before being moved to Central Louisiana ICE Processing Facility (CLIPC) in Jena, LA. The facility is operated by GEO Group, a private-prison corporation. Human rights activists describe GEO Group’s private prisons as an inhumane, exploitative business that routinely threatens solitary confinement to coerce unpaid labor, and fails in provision for minimum standards of food and medicine to save cost.
Between 2016 and 2023, “at least four detainees died under questionable circumstances.” Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center faces allegations of severe sexual misconduct and failed on five counts to meet standards of the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Prison staff deployed chemical pepper spray on inmates to suppress protests at their miserable conditions. Contaminated food and drinking water are routine complaints.
Tania Wolf, an advocacy manager at the National Immigration project, called CLIPC a “Detention center with a long and haunting record of abuse and mistreatment.”
The largest investors in GEO Group, a publicly traded C corporation, are Vanguard and BlackRock. Neoliberal fascism has outsourced even its detention centers to these lumpish, vampiric, and rent-seeking chambers of profit-maxing, proving as ever that finance capital is the abstract medium through which power expresses itself.
So, who was the Rat?
Claiming responsibility for the disappearance of Mahmoud Khalil is the proudly-fascist American-Zionist group Betar US, labeled right-wing and extremist even by the standards of the ADL. Betar US has already submitted thousands of names for the same treatment. Columbia Business School assistant professor Shai Davidai identified Khalil at protests, and ‘tagged him’ and Marco Rubio in social media posts, urging deportation.
Betar US and Davidai’s targets are anyone opposing the genocide of Palestinians, to terrify them into silence through sustained and vicious online and in-person harassment campaigns, such as that Khalil and others experienced.
Betar US, who said in a now-deleted post, “We demand blood in Gaza,” called Khalil’s disappearance a “victory against terror,” and vowed to step up their campaign. This was well-received by the Trump/Rubio clique, who claim that Rubio has the right to deport any non-citizen, and reconsider the status of naturalized-citizens based on their presence having “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” or “supporting terror.”
The natural mission-creep of that definition implies that any dissent is subject to state-kidnapping, and that free political expression is a clear and present danger to the Empire.
The only answer is to be fearless in the face of repression. The state is testing its muscle, and Americans must meet the moment with determination; a rose has thorns, and that most beautiful flower does not shy from drawing blood when challenged.
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Contact your elected officials now and demand that they do everything in their power to secure Khalil’s release and protect student activists and immigrants. (https://masspeace.us/free-mahmoud-khali)
Liam Noble is a student at the University of Massachusetts – Boston