The Guardian - Free speech organizations and advocates are expressing outrage after a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, was arrested and detained over the weekend. Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, was taken into custody by federal immigration authorities on Saturday night, who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.
His attorney, Amy Greer, said that Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, was in his university-owned apartment building, just a few blocks from Columbia’s main campus in New York, when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents entered the building on Saturday night and took him into custody.
Greer said the authorities also declined to tell his wife, who is a US citizen and eight months pregnant, why Khalil was being detained. "The US government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech,” Greer said, adding that a habeas corpus petition had been filed on Khalil’s behalf challenging the validity of his arrest and detention.
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