On April 21, Dr. Noor Abdalla, the wife of detained Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, gave birth to their first child while her husband remains imprisoned in an ICE detention center over 1,000 miles away in Louisiana.
“I welcomed our son into the world earlier today without Mahmoud by my side,” Abdalla wrote in a statement. “Despite our request for ICE to allow Mahmoud to attend the birth, they denied his temporary release to meet our son. This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer.”
The impending birth of Khalil’s first child had been a key element in the struggle for his release, which had expanded the movement in solidarity with Palestine to include the fight for immigrant rights within the US. Khalil was arrested by plainclothes ICE agents outside of their home in front of Abdalla, who was eight months pregnant at the time.
“ICE and the Trump administration have stolen these precious moments from our family in an attempt to silence Mahmoud’s support for Palestinian freedom,” said Abdalla in her statement.
Since Khalil’s arrest by ICE agents on March 8 from his residence at Columbia University, the Trump administration has only escalated its attack on students, free speech, and the movement in solidarity with Palestine.
Rumeysa Ozturk was forced into a vehicle by masked federal agents and taken into ICE custody, where she remains, stemming from an op-ed she authored urging her institution of Tufts University to divest from Israel. Ozturk was also taken to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, however, recently a federal court judge ruled that Ozturk should be transferred to Vermont.
Khalil’s fellow Palestinian Columbia student activist Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested by ICE on April 14 as he attended an interview as part of his application for US citizenship in Vermont.
The administration’s crackdown has extended far beyond students who have stood in solidarity with Palestine, however, using the increasingly broad accusation of “anti-semitism” and “support for terrorism” as an excuse to detain others including Georgetown researcher Badar Khan Suri, who is married to a Palestine, an Alireza Doroudi Iranian international student at the University of Alabama. The Trump administration has also revoked student visas en masse, with over 1,500 visas revoked thus far, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio citing participating in campus protests as a reason to revoke said visas.
