Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian political prisoner, and he is not the first in the U.S.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University, was forcibly abducted on March 8, by undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who stalked him on his way home to university housing. Khalil was targeted for his activism and involvement in Columbia’s student encampments protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. His detention is not just an injustice—it is a blatant act of vengeance for going against U.S. and Israeli coordinated crimes. 

The Trump Administration called for his deportation by name and set forth a dangerous and targeted campaign against the nation’s university system with the ultimatum that student pro-Palestinian activism is grounds for deportation. 

By all accounts, Khalil’s abduction and detainment make him a political prisoner. However, we must not fall into the trap of what Mohammed El Kurd, in his new book Perfect Victims, calls, “singularity.” 

“Singular stories, especially when told recklessly, tend to isolate the individual from the group, sanctifying the former and demonizing the latter. Singular stories tend to situate man-made atrocities outside of politics reinventing them as inexplicable natural disasters.” 

By treating each case as an exception, the machinery of suppression continues unchallenged. Khalil’s ordeal is not about a single student; it is about a state’s ongoing efforts to silence those who dare to resist.

In fact, Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction is not an anomaly, but part of a long-standing pattern of state persecution against Palestinians who dare challenge state hegemony. By isolating his case from the broader history of criminalizing Palestinian activism, the narrative becomes watered down and stripped of its political relevance and the historical state-sanctioned violence that ensued. It misrepresents Khalil’s situation instead, making it an individual misfortune or a freak incident. 

Khalil’s detention follows decades of targeted harassment, imprisonment, and deportation of Palestinian students, scholars, and community leaders in the U.S. From the Holy Land Foundation Five to Dr. Sami Al-Arian, the playbook remains the same: fabricate charges, apply excessive force, and erase the political motivations behind the repression. When viewed in this context Khalil’s case is not the exception, but rather the rule. 

Take the case of Dr. Sami Al Arian, a Palestinian U.S. permanent resident and professor at the University of Florida who was arrested in February 2003 on faux charges of conspiring to aid Palestinian terrorism. Dr. Al Arian was imprisoned and subjugated to continuous months of solitary confinement and abuse which lasted 3 years when a Florida jury failed to return a single guilty verdict of any of the 17 charges against him. However, prosecutors refiled the charges, and Dr. Al Arian chose instead to plead guilty and take jail time rather than face a re-trial. 

In an interview with Democracy Now, Dr. Al Arian stated that his unjust imprisonment was a “retaliatory action against any activist” and was a time of extreme “intolerance, exclusionary political and hegemony [taking] center stage, where rational people were no longer able to advance any kind of dialogue.” 

Then there is the case of the Holy Land Foundation Five (HLF), where Palestinian American philanthropists who once ran the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. were shut down by the Bush administration as designated as a terrorist group. According to Human Rights Watch, the defendants in the HLF case were never accused of directly funding terrorist groups or attacks, yet they were still prosecuted under U.S. “material support” legislation. Their leaders are serving upwards of 65 years in federal prison. 

And for some of them, their conditions in prison are only worsening. Shukri Abu Baker is serving a 65-year sentence and currently facing new types of abuse by correctional officers. During the holy month of Ramadan, Shukri Abu Baker is not allowed to sleep after 5 a.m. His daughter Nida Abu Baker tells me that “for a full week straight, they’d take my dad to the cafeteria from 4 a.m. and he would stand there for hours. He was required to stop all the Muslim inmates from taking extra food back to their cells. He had to do the job of a correctional officer and he had to do this 3 times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner all while fasting as a 66-year-old man with aching bones.” 

Nida says when she looks at what is currently taking place across the country, she can’t help but feel deja vu. “The FBI went knocking on the doors of hundreds of Palestinian families after the HLF indictments. Some of whom were deported after being detained by ICE, and I specifically remember a family had their green cards revoked.” 

“So everything that’s happening is not new, and I am not surprised it all started decades ago on U.S soil when the government went after students and professionals who were giving back to their community.” 

In 2022, I wrote about how Shukri nearly died after inhaling fumes from tear gas thrown at inmates, and at the time he told me he did not want to advocate for his condition in prison to change: “I don’t wish this incident to become the focal point of my struggles. I am not trying to improve the conditions of my incarceration, rather I am challenging the very premise of my presence here.” 

“The prosecutors wanted to make sure my family and I pay heavily for not toeing the line of bigotry against the Palestinians who were in dire need for humanitarian aid.”

Given this history, it is essential that we heed Mohammed El-Kurd’s words and not sanctify one case while completely ignoring another, as it’s clear the target is Palestine and the Palestinian movement for liberation in total. The dangerous results of this can already be seen in several other cases that have not received nearly the same level of attention as Khalil’s. 

Swiftly after Khalil’s abduction, ICE detained a foreign student, Ranjani Srinivasan for participating in “activities supporting Hamas.” Srinivasan chose to flee the country to Canada on March 11 before she could be deported. 

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country. I am glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers use the CBP Home app to self-deport,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said. 

Srinivasan’s visa revocation and flight from the country did not make international news nor garner calls advocating for a student’s right to freedom of expression in the same way Khalil’s case did. The obvious reason could be the injustice that Khalil has permanent residency and is married to a U.S. citizen, while Srinivasan was in a more vulnerable position on a student visa and made the tough decision to leave her place of study behind and save herself from U.S. persecution. 

It is understandable to find the absurdity of Khalil’s case, especially when we try to highlight his supposedly secure legal status when trying to advocate on his behalf. However, we in the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement are setting ourselves up for failure if we accept these arbitrary distinctions. By being keen on highlighting Khalil’s legal status, we are inadvertently justifying the deportations of thousands of people on student visas who dare fight against the United States’ genocidal crimes. 

We are already seeing the danger of our actions. This weekend, Brown University professor and doctor Rasha Alawieh, who specializes in kidney transplants, was deported to Lebanon upon her arrival at Boston airport. The Department of Justice justified the deportation after “finding sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures in the deleted items folder” of Alawieh’s cell phone. 

Even if Khalil supported Hamas, and Alawieh supported Hezbollah, they have not committed a crime that would justify their abductions and deportations. 

Instead of highlighting this fundamental right, Khalil’s lawyer Amy Greer spoke to NBC News about Khalil’s case asserting that supporting Hamas “is not what he stands for. That would be completely opposite to his values.” Greer had an opportunity to push back, and to protect the rights of all students, and all people that have an even more vulnerable status than Khalil. The fundamental basis of a deportation cannot and should not ever be justified due to one’s political beliefs. Greer should have reaffirmed that even if he did support Hamas, he has not committed a crime, Alawieh has not committed a crime and neither has any other student or professional demanding the liberation of the Palestinian people. 

By attempting to distance Khalil from any accusations of political alignment rather than challenging the legitimacy of such accusations altogether, Greer reinforced the very framework that allows for the criminalization of Palestinian activism. The issue is not whether Khalil or any other individual meets an arbitrary threshold of acceptability in the eyes of the state, but rather that no one should face deportation, imprisonment, or retaliation for their political beliefs.

This failure to challenge the state’s power to police political thought does not just abandon Khalil, it abandons every student, professor, journalist, and activist who has been, or will be targeted for their advocacy. It leaves the door open for the next arrest, the next deportation, the next political prisoner.

To protect only those deemed “acceptable” within the limits of state-sanctioned discourse is to concede the broader fight for fundamental rights. The defense of political speech must be absolute, without exceptions or qualifiers.

And finally, and most importantly, in our efforts to fight for Khalil we must always re-center Palestine, the assault on the West Bank, the genocide and starvation campaign in Gaza. Khalil’s abduction was meant to intimidate and ultimately stifle the movement from acting on its greater goal to end our complicity in the crimes against the Palestinian people. His abduction was meant to destroy our morale and scare us into silence. It was also meant to give institutions more power to censor and repress pro-Palestinian students, faculty, and professionals from being loud. We can’t let them win- it is our imperative, now more than ever, that we do not concede to the fascistic attempts to silence us.