Two days after being released from immigration detention, Mahmoud Khalil participates in anti-Israel protest in New York City in which participants chant “Palestine will live forever”.
Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student who was released on Friday after previously having faced deportation, took part on Sunday in an anti-Israel protest in New York City.
Footage posted to social media showed Khalil during the protest, which included chants of “Palestine will live forever” and “from the river to the sea”.
The protest comes two days after a federal judge ordered the release on bail of Khalil, who had been in custody since March.
Khalil’s arrest on March 8 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents transformed him into a symbol of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb antisemitic protests on US campuses, which have been on the increase since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel.
At the time of his arrest, Khalil was a highly visible figure in the nationwide campus protests against the war in Gaza. Following his detention, US authorities transferred Khalil from his New York home to a detention center in Louisiana, where he awaited deportation proceedings.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had invoked a law, approved during the 1950s Red Scare, which permits the United States to remove foreign nationals deemed adverse to US foreign policy.
However, the judge ruled last week that the government could not detain or deport Khalil based on Rubio’s assertions that his presence on US soil constituted a national security threat.
The government specifically accuses Khalil of failing to disclose on his residency application what it described as his “membership” in the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA.
Khalil has rejected the allegations and framed his detention as retaliation for his political views.
