Columbia protester missed son’s birth after ICE denied release, wife says

Detained Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil missed the birth of his first child after immigration officials denied a request for temporary release to attend, his wife said.

Noor Abdalla said in a statement that she gave birth to a baby boy on Monday without her husband by her side, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined a request to grant Khalil temporary release from the Louisiana detention center where he is being held, so he could travel to New York for the birth.

ICE did not immediately respond to overnight requests for comment.

“This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud and our son suffer,” Abdalla said, adding that her husband, a legal U.S. permanent resident, “remains unjustly detained.”

“ICE and the Trump administration have stolen these precious moments from our family in an attempt to silence Mahmoud’s support for Palestinian freedom,” she said.

Khalil, a graduate student who became a prominent voice during last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, was arrested at his New York apartment on March 8. He has been stripped of his green-card status and moved 1,300 miles away to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena.

Earlier this month, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Khalil was eligible for deportation, saying that he was a threat to U.S. foreign policy due to his involvement in pro-Palestinian activism.

His lawyers said at the time they would appeal if the judge ordered his deportation and that they are pursuing other legal avenues that could keep him in the United States.

Immigration judges are separate from the federal court system and are under the supervision of the Justice Department. Khalil has filed a federal lawsuit in New Jersey, where he was briefly detained before being sent to Louisiana, arguing that his arrest was unconstitutional; Khalil’s legal team says that if that case is successful, his deportation could be blocked.

Khalil was born and raised in a refugee camp in Syria and has Algerian citizenship. He studied at Columbia on a student visa and then became a legal permanent resident. His wife is a U.S. citizen from the Midwest. If he is deported, he could be sent to Syria or Algeria, the Louisiana immigration judge said.

He is one of the most high-profile figures to have been arrested since the Trump administration began detaining, attempting to deport or revoking the visas of international university students and academics. The State Department has cited safeguarding U.S. foreign policy as a reason for revoking some international students’ legal immigration statuses.

Some students, including Khalil, had been involved in campus activism over the war in Gaza. President Donald Trump has pledged to deport international students he alleges are engaging in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American” protests, but civil liberties groups say the legal justifications used by the administration are tenuous and potentially unconstitutional.

Other students arrested include green-card holder Mohsen Mahdawi, a prominent activist in the Columbia University protests who was detained this month as he attended an ICE office for a naturalization interview, a key step on the path to U.S. citizenship.

In another case, ICE agents in March detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar and PhD student at Tufts University who was in the United States on an F-1 student visa. Ozturk does not appear to have been a leading figure in the pro-Palestinian protests at Tufts, according to the Boston Globe. She co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper in March 2024 criticizing the university’s response to the pro-Palestinian movement.

As The Post reported, the State Department determined days before Ozturk’s arrest that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she had engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, the basis of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s decision to revoke her visa and attempt to deport her.