Last year, I was a student at Columbia University, where I covered tense campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war for the college newspaper and for POLITICO. So I’m familiar with Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student who I’ve chatted with in the past and appears to be the first target of the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on student protesters.

Despite being a permanent resident with a green card, Khalil was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday for leading “activities aligned to Hamas.” The arrest has prompted outrage from fellow activists, free speech groups and several Democrats. For now, a judge has halted the deportation of the Palestinian activist, but much about his fate is uncertain.

Here is what we do know — about Khalil, student protesters and the vibe at Columbia.

Khalil was a lead negotiator representing the student protesters to the Columbia administration during the school’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” last spring. The student group behind the encampment — Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD — had two main demands: that Columbia cut all its ties to Israel, including divesting and halting plans to build a “global center” in Tel Aviv, and that the protesters themselves receive amnesty for their actions. During the whole political firestorm, Khalil and administrators, including at least two deans, were literally at the negotiating table day and night, though they never came to an agreement.

Khalil is Palestinian and was born and raised in Syria. At the time of protests in April 2024, he was in the U.S. on an F-1 student visa as a graduate student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, according to Al Jazeera. He took on a role as a negotiator representing CUAD, which also made him relatively public compared with many of the other protesters who were conscious about obscuring their appearances. In May, he told Al Jazeera he was concerned that if he faced disciplinary action by the university, he could lose his student visa.

2

Was deportation a widespread concern among immigrant students participating in the protests?

Absolutely. During the encampment, two friends who were international students told me they wished they could be there but couldn’t risk losing their visas. There was a similar fear among low-income students, who didn’t want to risk their scholarships or lose on-campus housing. Many chose to participate in other ways, like sharing pro-Palestinian content on social media or bringing food and supplies to the encampment.

At Barnard specifically, students who were suspended for protesting were evicted from their dorms almost immediately. That was also a major fear: There’s a big difference between someone who lives near New York or has a robust support system in the U.S., and a student who would be left on the streets of Manhattan because their family lives in another country.

After the first mass arrests, the New York Post ran a front-page article about how student protesters arrested by the NYPD mostly came from privileged backgrounds. Part of that is just Columbia, where the annual cost of attendance is over $93,000 and only about 50 percent of undergraduates qualify for need-based financial aid. But another part of it was self-selection: Students in more precarious situations — the most precarious being the very real risk of deportation — chose to modulate their speech in order to protect themselves.

3

Has there been a vibe shift on campus since Trump’s election?

I graduated in May and moved to Washington to work at POLITICO full-time, but based on my conversations with people who are still there, the answer is that the vibes have shifted less than one might think.

Columbia is surely one of the most progressive college campuses in the country. We call it the “activist Ivy” for a reason, and it has a long history — of which it is quite proud — of political protest dating back to 1968, when anti-war demonstrators occupied Hamilton Hall for about a week. (Columbia’s former President Minouche Shafik waited less than 24 hours before calling on the NYPD to drag out protesters who had taken over the same building in April.) I wouldn’t expect the gains President Donald Trump made among younger voters to be evident at Columbia — and, realistically, even if they do exist, conservative students tend to keep those views to themselves.

Among the pro-Palestinian protest movement, which is extremely active, there was also always a sense that whether it was Donald Trump or Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they all were part of the same oppressive framework. At the end of the day, the people leading these protests believe the system needs to be completely reset — for many of them, it doesn’t stop with a ceasefire. They see the U.S. as “the belly of the beast,” the beast being colonialism, capitalism and essentially all other forces of oppression. I think we’d see similar activity, and a similar vibe, even if Harris had won the election.

4

How had student protesters tried to protect themselves from retaliation until now?

Before now, the biggest fear among most of the protesters was doxxing. There’s a website called Canary Mission that posts the names and images of anyone seen as anti-Israel — including student journalists whose coverage the Canary moderators don’t like. There was also a “doxxing truck” circling Columbia and other campuses with the names and faces of students deemed the school’s “leading antisemites.”

To avoid the threat of doxxing, many of the protesters conceal their appearances, covering their heads in keffiyehs and faces with surgical masks. These head and face coverings aren’t what most people expect Ivy League students to look like, and I think there’s certainly some xenophobia (and Islamophobia) that contributes to the sense of fear about the protesters, who have been largely non-violent.

5

Has the debate surrounding student protests changed at all since 2024? Could Khalil’s arrest change it in any way?

As I wrote Tuesday, many Republicans have hated universities for years (just look at Vice President JD Vance’s 2021 speech “The Universities are the Enemy”). The anti-war protests gave them a reason to punish these institutions for, they say, failing to protect Jewish students. It’s also difficult for Democrats to push back, since it can be politically challenging to differentiate antisemitism from anti-Zionism, the ideology the protesters — some of whom are Jewish — say they have. Plus, pro-Israel forces in the U.S. are extremely powerful. The case of former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who supported the protesters at Columbia and was later primaried by an AIPAC-backed candidate, is enough to chill many other Democrats from speaking out.

But the Khalil case may offer a way in for the party. Trump’s decision to deport a legal immigrant — and a potentially sympathetic one at that, considering he has a pregnant American wife — is unprecedented and obviously deeply concerning for many supporters of the First Amendment. Democrats and Republicans alike have already commented on Khalil’s attempted deportation as a free speech issue, and if Trump does the same thing to more pro-Palestinian student activists, as he has promised, he’s likely to garner more pushback.