ICE won’t let Mahmoud Khalil hold newborn as Columbia activist remains detained on day of commencement ceremony

On the day he was to attend his commencement ceremony, federal immigration enforcement officials on Wednesday refused to let Mahmoud Khalil hold his newborn son at a Louisiana detention center, where the Columbia University graduate student remains facing deportation for his participation in pro-Palestinian campus protests.

Khalil’s wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, made the 1,400-mile trip from New York City to Jena, La., in the hopes her husband could meet their son for the first time, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials refused the contact visit request, Khalil’s legal team told the Daily News.

It’s been more than two months since Khalil was detained by agents from the Department of Homeland Security at his Columbia-owned apartment after returning home from an iftar dinner with Abdalla, who was then eight months pregnant.

The government has not accused him of breaking the law. Instead, it has cited an obscure provision in a 73-year-old law that empowers the secretary of state to order someone deported if their beliefs oppose “compelling foreign policy” interests, which in Khalil’s case regards the government’s position on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The Trump administration has framed support for Palestinians, which Khalil’s grandparents were, as antisemitic and supportive of Hamas, which the U.S. and other Western nations have designated a terrorist organization.

A day after he was taken into custody, agents transported Khalil to the South with breakneck speed, setting him up to appeal any court orders to some of the most conservative judges in the U.S. An immigration judge in April ordered him deported, which he’s appealing. The student activist’s attorneys are separately defending him in a habeas corpus case challenging the lawfulness of his detention in New Jersey.

“ICE has denied us even this most basic human right,” Abdalla, who gave birth to the couple’s first child last month, said in a statement Wednesday. “This is not just heartless. It is deliberate violence, the calculated cruelty of a government that tears families apart without remorse. And I cannot ignore the echoes of this pain in the stories of Palestinian families, torn apart by Israeli military prisons and bombs, denied dignity, denied life.”

Khalil’s representatives, in a statement, said that ICE’s refusal stood in contrast to the agency’s directives about preserving parental rights and encouraging contact visits. They noted family visits are allowed at the immigration detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., where Khalil’s lawyers say he should be detained rather than in Louisiana.

“The government chose to arrest and detain Mahmoud thousands of miles away in the Louisiana detention gulags to punish him for his support for Palestinian human rights, and is doubling down on their retaliatory punishment by denying him the most elementary human contact with his wife and child,” Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said.

Khalil, who completed his studies at Columbia’s School of International Affairs in December, would have accepted his diploma this week. Since Khalil was taken into custody, the Trump administration has sought to revoke the visas of thousands of international students across the country, not entirely successfully, in many cases citing students’ political beliefs.

Acting Columbia University President Claire Shipman was met with loud boos Wednesday during her commencement speech, in which she acknowledged those mourning Khalil’s absence. Khalil sought protection from Columbia in the days before he was taken into custody but was ignored, The News previously reported.

The Ivy League university has faced criticism for agreeing to substantial oversight demands from the Trump administration — like placing its Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies under supervision and banning masks on campus — after the government pulled $400 million of Columbia’s federal funding. Other universities, including Harvard, have vowed to fight the administration in court.

During the protests, Khalil, 30, served as a negotiator between student protesters and Columbia administrators. He has vehemently pushed back on descriptions of his advocacy as bigoted or supportive of Hamas, and his lawyers have pointed to what he said publicly on the matter long before his arrest, like to CNN in April 2024, including that fighting hatred against Jews and advocating for Palestinians’ right to self-determination are intertwined and an “integral part” of the movement.

According to Reuters, citing figures from the Gaza Health Ministry, which is overseen by Hamas, more than 53,000 Palestinians, a third of them under 18, have been killed by Israeli military bombing in the 18-month war that began after Hamas members stormed Israel’s border and killed roughly 1,200 people, taking around 250 as hostages.

More than half a million people in the besieged region, which is about half the size of New York City, are facing potentially deadly catastrophic hunger as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government limits access to aid, according to the World Health Organization.