New York (AFP) – Detained pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil missed the birth of his son on Monday after US authorities refused a temporary release, his wife said. A graduate student at New York’s Columbia University who was one of the most visible leaders of nationwide campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, Khalil was arrested by immigration authorities on March 8. He was ordered deported even though he was a permanent US resident through his American citizen wife, Noor Abdalla.
Abdalla said that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) denied a request to release Khalil temporarily for the birth of their child. “This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud and our son suffer,” she said in a statement. “My son and I should not be navigating his first days on earth without Mahmoud. ICE and the Trump administration have stolen these precious moments from our family in an attempt to silence Mahmoud’s support for Palestinian freedom,” she said. She gave birth in New York.
Khalil was transferred to the southern state of Louisiana in an apparent bid to find a judge sympathetic to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Trump’s advisors have accused pro-Palestinian protesters of promoting anti-Semitism and terrorism, charges the activists deny. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invoked a law approved during the 1950s Red Scare that allows the United States to remove foreigners seen as adverse to US foreign policy.
Rubio argues that US constitutional protections of free speech do not apply to foreigners and that he alone can make decisions without judicial review. Hundreds of students have seen their visas revoked, with some saying they were targeted for everything from writing opinion articles to minor arrest records. Immigration authorities last week arrested another Columbia University student active in the protests, Mohsen Mahdawi, as he attended an interview seeking to become a US citizen.
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