Mahmoud Khalil is in federal custody, likely in Louisiana. On Saturday, plainclothes agents raided his student apartment, put him in handcuffs, and took him away.
"This is the first of many arrests. We will find, arrest, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country – to never return", wrote Donald Trump on social media and accused Khalil of being anti-Semitic and a "radical Hamas supporter".
The White House also claims that Hamas propaganda was distributed at protests organized by Khalil. No evidence for either accusation has been presented.
Back home in New York after the arrest, his wife Noor Abdalla, eight months pregnant, was left alone, waiting for some kind of news about her husband, reported CNN last week.
Vague grounds
Khalil has become a pawn in the Trump administration's plans for mass deportations, according to the 30-year-old's lawyers.
"He was chosen to set an example for stifling completely legal expressions of opinion, in violation of the Constitution", said lawyer Amy Greer last week.
Mahmoud Khalil, raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, has a residence permit in the USA. During last year's pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, he acted as an intermediary between activists and the university management. Now, according to the White House, he is to be deported.
The legal grounds are extremely vague, writes The Washington Post. Khalil has not been accused of any crime. So far, the government has given only one reason for deporting Khalil: that his presence in the USA may have "potentially serious, adverse consequences for foreign policy".
"Legally protected"
This is not enough to deport someone, according to several legal experts. At least not without clear evidence.
If he has done nothing but condemn the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, accuse Israel of genocide, and demand a ceasefire – is that harmful to the USA's foreign policy? Not in my opinion. In my opinion, that constitutes legally protected freedom of speech, says Bill Hing, professor of law and migration at the University of San Francisco, to The Guardian.
In a CNN interview last spring, when protests against Israel raged at several universities in the USA, Khalil said that "anti-Semitism has no place" among the demonstrators.
As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian and Jewish peoples is intertwined. They go hand in hand, you cannot achieve one without the other.
Several demonstrations have been organized in support of Khalil. On Thursday, the group Jewish Voice for Peace occupied the lobby of Trump Tower on Manhattan in New York as a protest against the arrest.
Last spring, during large protests, demonstrators at several American universities, including several Ivy League schools, demanded that the universities cut their economic ties with Israel and with companies supporting Israel's warfare in Gaza.
The demands originated in the pro-Palestinian movement Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) (boycott, divestment, and sanctions), which started in 2005. The movement is controversial and is seen by some as legitimate opinion-forming, while others view it as anti-Semitic.
More than 3,000 demonstrators were arrested at various universities in the USA. In addition to students, teachers and other university employees were among those arrested, as well as people with no connection to the schools in question.
The demonstrations were largely peaceful, but occasionally turned violent, and there were reports of anti-Semitism at several locations.
The protest wave spread across the world. Large student protests were held at universities in the Netherlands, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, and Canada.
