Mahmoud Khalil felt as though he was being kidnapped when he was handcuffed and shackled and rushed from New York to immigration detention in Louisiana last weekend, his lawyers wrote in an updated lawsuit demanding that the Columbia University graduate be released from custody immediately.
The activist has told his lawyers that agents who arrested him at his university housing last Saturday night, in front of his eight-month pregnant wife, never identified themselves.
Video of his detention – released on Friday – showed several plainclothes agents arresting Khalil in what appeared to be a residential building.
In the footage, which was taken by Khalil’s wife, Noor, the agents refused to share their names, speak with the family’s attorney or specify for which agency they worked.
At one point in the video, one of the agents raises his voice to Khalil and repeatedly says: “Turn around, turn around.”
“We have you,” someone can be heard saying in the video. “You’re going to have to come with us.” Khalil is then shown being escorted by the agents across the street and into a car.
As Noor asked for the agents’ names, one asked: “Go back please. Go over there.” Another person can be heard saying: “We don’t give our names.”
In response to the video, Esha Bhandari, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said: “What we witnessed in this video should disturb every American. The government is ripping a person away from his eight months’ pregnant wife and locking him up, all because it disagreed with what he had to say.” Referring to the constitutional right to free speech, she added: “This action makes a mockery of the first amendment and due process.”
Once in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention in Louisiana, Khalil was left to sleep in a bunker with no pillow or blanket, as top Trump administration officials cheered the effort to deport a man his lawyers say sometimes became the “public face” of student protests on Columbia’s campus last year against Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
The filing late on Thursday in Manhattan federal court was the result of a federal judge’s Wednesday order that the lawyers finally be allowed to speak with Khalil.
The Trump administration has not accused the activist of any criminal behavior but has said he is aligned with Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza and is designated as a terrorist organization by the US. It has invoked an obscure legal provision to try to deport him.
One of his lawyers, Donna Lieberman, told CNN on Friday in a TV interview: “This is a targeted, retaliatory and extreme attack on the right of free expression” and said Khalil was being detained “for having ideas”.
“They’re not claiming he did anything illegal they just don’t like what he has said,” she added, warning: “It’s an attempt to bully students, faculty and the rest of us … this move to quell free speech is absolutely terrifying.”
In a press conference on Friday, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York and one of Khalil’s attorneys, said: “The thing to highlight here is that the Trump administration plainly intends to punish, penalize, silence and suppress speech that it dislikes – and right now it happens to be pro-Palestinian speech of the sort that Mahmoud espoused.”
Kassem added: “The plan is to start with what the Trump administration believes is the low-hanging fruit of Palestinian activists, and then to apply that template to other issues, other forms of speech that they happen to dislike because of their own political viewpoints, whether it’s speech in support of our LGBTQ friends and relatives, whether it’s speech that supports reproductive rights.”
Kassem also said that despite the Trump administration’s claims that Khalil distributed Hamas propaganda flyers, “they have not introduced any flyers in court. That just seems to be something they’re talking about vaguely outside of court.
“The reality is that Mr Khalil completely and vehemently denies doing anything like that, distributing any flyers like that. He has absolutely no connections to Hamas whatsoever.”
The lawyers said in their filing that his treatment by federal authorities from Saturday, when he was first arrested, to Monday reminded Khalil of when he left Syria shortly after the forced disappearance of his friends there during a period of arbitrary detention in 2013.
“Throughout this process, Mr Khalil felt as though he was being kidnapped,” the lawyers wrote.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump heralded Khalil’s arrest as the first “of many to come”, vowing on social media to deport students he alleged engage in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity”.
In court papers, federal justice department lawyers said Khalil was detained under a law allowing Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, to remove someone from the country if he has reasonable grounds to believe their presence or activities would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences. Trump and Rubio were added as defendants in the civil lawsuit seeking to free Khalil.
After Khalil, who is a US green card holder, or permanent resident, and a Palestinian, was arrested on Saturday night he was held for some hours then at some point early on Sunday was taken to the Elizabeth detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a privately run facility where he spent the rest of the night in a cold waiting room for processing, his request for a blanket denied, the lawsuit said.
He was flown to Louisiana and arrived at 1am on Monday and a police car took him to an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana.
He worries about his wife and is “also very concerned about missing the birth of his first child”, the lawsuit said.
He was denied release during a federal court hearing in New York on Wednesday and his arrest has sparked protests. The government is trying to move his case to Louisiana, where courts are more conservative. Khalil has previously worked for the British government.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
