Acting on orders directly from the White House, ICE agents on Saturday detained Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian-born Algerian citizen green card holder, who had acted as a negotiator during last year’s protests at the Ivy League college’s NYC campus, Drop Site reports.
Khalil had last week participated in a sit-in at Milstein Library at Barnard, a college within a college at Columbia, protesting the recent expulsion of three Barnard students over pro-Palestine activism, at which the NYPD arrested nine. Khalil was not among those cuffed, but several MAGA and far right pro-Israel Twitter accounts over the previous few days had been tagging convicted felon President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and dog murderer Kristi Noem in posts identifying Khalil as a protestor. Then on Saturday night, two ICE agents approached Khalil as he was headed into his campus residence with his wife, who is eight months pregnant.
A statement by the pro-Palestine group Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) stated that Khalil was told his (non-existent) student visa was revoked “despite the fact that he has a green card, not a visa, and is a lawful permanent resident” and “abducted and detained without the physical demonstration of a warrant or officially filed charges,” with an ICE database apparently listing Khalil as being held at an ICE detention center in New Jersey under God knows what conditions.
Needless to say this is extremely fucked up and dark. As tempting as it might be to revel at the misfortune at another “Genocide Joe” dead-ender getting theirs (and there’s no info on how deep Khalil was into that shit), just keep in mind that next time it might be a Ukrainian green card holder.