The brewing legal battle over Mahmoud Khalil’s detention by federal immigration authorities on March 8 is set to be a pivotal moment for the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States, the rights of America’s noncitizens, and the government’s tolerance of political dissent.

Khalil isn’t accused of a crime. Instead, the administration openly admits that its attempt at removing him is a result of his advocacy against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Its legal argument rests on a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 stating that an “alien” is deportable if the secretary of state believes that their presence in the country would have a serious impact on US foreign policy. White House officials told The Free Press that Khalil was “mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the US” and that this framework will be used as a “blueprint” for deporting other students.

Khalil, a permanent legal resident whose eight-month-pregnant wife is an American citizen, was arrested by plainclothes ICE officers at his Columbia university housing. Within hours, he was relocated to a private detention facility in Louisiana, where he currently resides. His swift relocation may have been part of a legal strategy to skirt the jurisdiction of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which covers New York and upheld the right of noncitizens to challenge their deportations as unconstitutional retaliation under the First Amendment in 2019, according to The Intercept.

His legal team includes Amy Greer from Dratel & Lewis, as well as attorneys from the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the CLEAR Project, which is housed at the CUNY School of Law. Shezza Abboushi Dallal, a staff attorney with the CLEAR Project and a member of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal defense team, spoke with me about Mahmoud and his wife’s condition, the status of his case, and the government’s attack on freedom of speech. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Luca GoldMansour

Luca GoldMansour: I heard that the legal team was finally able to have privileged calls with Mahmoud. How has he described his treatment in detention? How is he doing?

Shezza Abboushi Dallal: Thanks to a court order on Wednesday, we were finally able to have had, at this point, three legal calls with Mahmoud. He’s doing as well as can be. He is incredibly resilient and he is in great spirits to fight this. But first and foremost he is, understandably, incredibly concerned for his wife. 

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He has an eight-month-pregnant wife here in New York. She can’t travel because of the advanced stage of her pregnancy. So she can’t visit him and is all of the sudden without her partner and her primary support system in this process, all while he is facing the prospect of indefinite detention in a whole other state. And that all transpired within the course of hours.

So it’s an incredibly overwhelming posture to be in. But Mahmoud is focused. He knows that he’s being targeted for what he stands for and what he has spoken out about. He knows it’s unacceptable. He’s ready to fight. He’s also anticipating and hoping to be able to reunite with his wife here in New York.

LG: At the press conference following Mahmoud’s first court hearing, you read a statement from his wife. How is she doing?

SAD: She’s incredibly supportive of Mahmoud. This whole thing is distressing. It would be distressing for anyone to have their partner detained, let alone on such retaliatory pretenses.

She really wants her husband home. It’s very anxiety-inducing to be facing a due date that’s just next month in the midst of this separation. So she’s doing her best to be there for Mahmoud and to support efforts to have him released as fast as possible, but she’s in need of her husband’s help.

LG: Where do things currently stand with Mahmoud’s case?

SAD: The long and short of it is that we are seeking Mahmoud’s return to New York and his release. Ultimately, we’re seeking to vindicate his constitutional rights in federal court here.

Through his counsel, Mahmoud filed a motion to be released from custody pending the resolution of his case on Friday evening. Contemporaneously, we are seeking a preliminary injunction, which is a legal mechanism to halt the government from proceeding with their retaliatory action against him while the case proceeds.

The crux of what’s at stake here is that Mahmoud is very clearly being targeted for his speech and protest activity for Palestinian rights. That’s in direct contravention of his protections under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. So what the government is doing at the moment will have massive injury and repercussions for both Mahmoud and people around this country who are advocating for Palestinian rights and Palestinian lives, but also the rights and lives of many others.

LG: What has the Trump administration’s response been to those actions?

SAD: It’s important to start with how the administration started. From the get-go, they’ve moved in a breathtaking way: punitively and retaliatorily, while stripping Mahmoud of all of his defenses.

Mahmoud was essentially disappeared in the middle of the night last Saturday. Then he was moved across three states over the course of just a few hours. First, his family was told that he was being taken to ICE headquarters at 26 Federal Plaza. Later that night, and repeatedly, his counsel was able to confirm that he was in New York through the ICE locator.

Then his family and counsel looked at an ICE locator and saw that he was potentially in Elizabeth, New Jersey. That’s in the morning on Sunday. But within a few hours, they had reason to believe that he was being taken to Louisiana, and in fact the government had initiated the process of transferring him to Louisiana covertly.

His counsel moved very quickly to file a habeas corpus petition challenging his unlawful detention in federal court here in the Southern District of New York, where they had every reason to believe he was. It’s important to start there because the first argument that the government made in court is that the Southern District of New York is the wrong court to hear this matter after having deliberately moved him to another state.

LG: Why do you think that the case belongs with the Southern District of New York?

SAD: The case was filed in the Southern District of New York where Mahmoud was detained. They checked the ICE locator just minutes before they filed the habeas petition. He was still showing up in New York. Only after they filed did the locator show that he was supposedly in Elizabeth, New Jersey. And after that the government took the position that he had already been transferred there by the time they filed the petition.

So there’s a lot of factual contention here between what the government says and the rest of the record. But ultimately there are shenanigans afoot. Mahmoud’s counsel and Mahmoud are trying to challenge his detention in the federal court where he was arrested and where they believed him to be, and the government is trying to move him in order to evade that.

LG: The Trump administration is relying on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952–Section 237(A)(4)(C)(i). It states that an “alien” is rendered deportable if the secretary of state believes there are “reasonable grounds” that their presence in the United States would have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States. Has the Trump administration demonstrated in court what these “reasonable grounds” are? Or what the foreign policy consequences are?

SAD: They have unearthed an incredibly obscure, seldom used provision of immigration law to essentially punish Mahmoud for his speech. The few times that this has ever been used, it has mainly targeted officials of foreign countries. It’s certainly never been used to target a human rights activist. And that’s for good reason, given the fact that that it is in contravention of the First Amendment. 

The second thing to say here is no immigration provision or any other law in the book trumps the First Amendment. So that’s really the heart of this case. You cannot use an immigration provision to target somebody for their First Amendment protected activity in their speech. And that’s exactly what’s happening here.

To your question about whether they’ve put forward any evidentiary basis in court for this determination: No, they have not. Yet virtually every top-line official in the government has made sweeping statements about Mahmoud, flaunting his detention, flaunting the administration’s actions, and wielding defamatory and completely unsubstantiated accusations. But they are also making it very clear that the heart of their action is targeting his organizing for Palestinian rights.

LG: Why do you think that the Trump administration targeted Mahmoud for this first case in their attack on freedom of speech?

SAD: Mahmoud is a very committed advocate for his people and for human rights. He rose to prominence as a mediator for the student protesters at the Columbia encampments because of his natural affinity for that type of bridge building and his commitment to Palestinian lives and human rights. This administration is—by their own admission—trying to see how far they can take punishment of people who dissent.

You have members of the administration saying that this is a blueprint case. They’re trying to see how far they can take this, and they’re targeting a beloved, fierce, and effective advocate.

The movement for Palestinian rights and the movement criticizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza has faced massive repression over the course of the last year and a half of Israel’s actions in Gaza. That’s not new. That was true under the Biden administration and under the local administrations of many cities and states.

But we’re entering a chapter with an administration that is undoubtedly fascistic. We have a fascist administration that’s enacting the most repressive version of every policy that one could imagine. We see Mahmoud’s case as their “blueprint” for the kind of treatment of political dissidence that we can expect. If we don’t mount a strong pushback, we’re all going to suffer.

LG: Could you outline how bipartisan decision-making over the years has enabled this escalation? What role has Columbia played in facilitating this repression and Mahmoud’s detention?

SAD: It really is important to situate this moment in the longer history of repression of movements for social justice and racial liberation in this country. We saw in the first Trump administration and through the Biden administration, moments of massive repression of movements for social justice, like in the summer of 2020 and the uprisings for Black Lives, and certainly over the course of this past two-year stretch of massive mobilizations against the genocide in Gaza.

All of that lays a foundation for the treatment of Mahmoud today. At its worst, this repression prepares people to normalize this type of punishment of First Amendment–protected activity. That’s unacceptable. We need to fight back against that. We need to fight for our right to disagree with the US government and to advocate for our most vulnerable communities. That’s really what this is about, and it’s not unique to this administration.

This moment shows us that universities really have a choice in how they orient themselves towards the government’s repressive agendas and towards their students, staff, faculty, and the communities that they reside in.

They can either be collaborators in this repressive agenda or they can actually be in service to their communities as educational institutions. We have seen Columbia, not just over the course of the past week, but over the course of the past year and a half—arguably longer—take the ill-advised course of collaboration in very material ways. We saw this in their inviting law enforcement onto their campus to arrest students more than once. We have seen this in robust information sharing, and currently we’re seeing very punitive actions taken against students and threatened against a much broader swath of their campus.

We’re not seeing the type of rigorous mobilization of defense of their students and of their community that we should be seeing. They should be held to account for that. Other universities who are reading these threats by the Trump administration should take note and prepare to stand by their students, by their faculty, by their staff, because that is who they serve, not the repressive agendas of this Trump administration.

LG: Are you or any of the legal team experiencing any sort of intimidation or harassment from the Trump administration or its supporters?

SAD: Even before he was detained, Mahmoud was facing an extreme doxing and intimidation campaign. So much so that just before his detention he had actually sent a correspondence to the interim president at Columbia asking for help and expressing how fearful he was about this.

And that has continued towards him and his wife and both of their families. The vitriol, the targeting is extreme. Of course, some of that certainly extends to everybody standing in his court. But these are intimidation tactics, and just as he has persevered in his commitment to speak out for his people, we will persevere in mounting the best defense to what is completely unlawful activity by the government.

So much of it is at stake for so many students, advocates, and organizers around the country. Like we’ve said multiple times, by the government’s own admission, it is their blueprint—and we need to treat it as such.