By Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Two days before U.S. agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and Palestinian activist asked his wife if she knew what to do if immigration agents came to their door.
Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife of more than two years, said she was confused. As a legal permanent resident of the U.S., surely Khalil did not have to worry about that, she recalls telling him.
“I didn’t take him seriously. Clearly I was naive,” Abdalla, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant, told Reuters in her first media interview.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents handcuffed her husband on Saturday in the lobby of their university-owned apartment building in Manhattan.
Earlier on Wednesday, Abdalla sat in the front row of a Manhattan courtroom as Khalil’s lawyers argued to a federal judge that he had been arrested in retaliation for his outspoken advocacy against Israel’s military assault on Gaza following militant group Hamas’ October 2023 attack. They told the judge that was a violation of Khalil’s right to free speech.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said on social media that Khalil supported Hamas, the Islamist group that governs Gaza. But his administration has said he is not accused of or charged with a crime and it has not provided evidence of Khalil’s alleged support for the militant group.
Khalil is currently being held at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement jail in Louisiana.
Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist in New York, met Khalil while volunteering in Lebanon in 2016. The two are expecting their first child in late April and she said she hoped Khalil would be free by then. She showed Reuters a picture of a recent sonogram: a boy whose name they have yet to choose.
“I think it would be very devastating for me and for him to meet his first child behind a glass screen,” Abdalla said.
The government has said it has begun proceedings to deport Khalil and is defending his detention in the court proceedings until then.
Khalil’s detention is one of the first efforts by Trump, a Republican who returned to the White House in January, to fulfill his promise to seek deportation of some foreign students involved in the pro-Palestinian protest movement, which he has called antisemitic.
Khalil grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and came to the U.S. on a student visa in 2022, getting his U.S. permanent residency green card last year. He was a prominent member of Columbia’s student protest movement demanding the school end investments of its $14.8 billion endowment in weapons makers and other companies that support Israel’s government.
The Trump administration says pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, including Columbia, have included support for Hamas and antisemitic harassment of Jewish students. Student protest organizers say criticism of Israel is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism.
Abdalla said her husband’s focus was supporting his community through advocacy and in more direct ways. She has had a few brief phone calls with Khalil from the jail, where he told her he had been helping other detained migrants fill out forms written in English legalese.
“Mahmoud is Palestinian and he’s always been interested in Palestinian politics,” she said. “He’s standing up for his people, he’s fighting for his people.”
Abdalla ended Wednesday’s interview abruptly when she saw Khalil was calling her.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Donna Bryson, Paul Thomasch and Bill Berkrot)
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