As chants of “No ICE, No KKK, No Fascist USA!” echoed through downtown Manhattan on March 10, I spoke to Richard who had been marching just ahead of me. He declined to give his last name but was eager to speak his piece.
“We need to be out in the streets and say ‘This will not fly. This will not happen on our watch’”, he said.
The state kidnapping and imminent deportation of recently graduated Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil had brought both Richard and me out into those streets.
Khalil was detained by the United States government on March 8, at his university-owned residence after returning from an Iftar dinner with his wife, who is a US citizen and eight months pregnant. According to information from the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), Khalil was being held in a detention centre in Jena, Louisiana, as of March 11.
The Palestinian student, born in 1995, was a visible participant throughout 2024 in the Columbia students’ protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As a result, US president Donald Trump has accused Khalil of “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity” on social media.
A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s indecency until at least March 12, but Khalil’s future in the US beyond that is uncertain.
“We need to remember what Mahmoud was harassed by Zionists and then arrested by [the Department of Homeland Security] for. It was for protesting Israel's genocide of his own people, of the Palestinian people,” Miriam Osman, an organiser with Palestinian Youth Movement, told Al Jazeera. The Department of Homeland Security is the cabinet-level body in the US that houses ICE.
Khalil’s arrest comes amidst an alarming rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the US that many link to the US president’s words and actions and land sales in the West Bank by Zionist organisations targeting US citizens.
The Trump administration is attempting to deport Khalil, who graduated from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in December 2024. This is despite the fact that Khalil holds permanent residence in the US.
According to anonymous government sources cited by the New York Times, he is accused of “presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” an obscure provision in the primary US immigration law that practitioners have not seen used to justify a deportation in living memory.
An hour before the march, framed by the austere government buildings that surround downtown New York City’s Federal Plaza, about 1000 people gathered for a demonstration.
The numbers in Federal Plaza were not massive by the standard set by the past two years of Palestine protests in the city. But those assembled represented a much larger group of people; more than 2 million have signed a petition as of March 11 to “demand the immediate release of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil from [immigration] detention and a reversal to Columbia University's protocol permitting [immigration enforcement agents] on campus without a warrant.”
Moreover, the protest brought out a wider swathe of community and movement organisations than many pro-Palestine protests in the NYC area, ranging from anti-Zionist organisations like Palestinian Youth Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace to political groups like ANSWER Coalition and Democratic Socialists of America, to local immigrant rights bodies. These groups have been active in the protests that began in October 2023 against the genocide in Gaza. Khalil was part of those protests.
“The Trump regime … is endangering Jewish people and using the guise of fighting antisemitism to dismantle our Constitutionally protected rights to free speech and dissent,” said Jewish Voice for Peace in a statement on its website.
Numerous speakers at the rally emphasised the need to organise against Zionism and against Trump in daily life. One protester was already living that; she declined to be formally interviewed but said that she had been on her way home from a doctor’s appointment when she learned of the demonstration and felt compelled to attend.
[This article was produced by Globetrotter. Saurav Sarkar is an editor at Globetrotter and a freelance movement writer and editor living in Long Island, New York.]