Biding Time in Jena

Editor’s note: On April 29, a U.S. District Court in New Jersey ruled that Mahmoud Khalil could move forward with his lawsuit alleging that he has been unlawfully detained for his political views. Khalil’s legal team also has pending motions before the court to grant a preliminary injunction and compel his release on bail. 

He sat silent for most of the two-hour hearing, in standard-issue navy shirt, navy trousers and rubber slippers, thumbing a short string of beads, asking to speak on the record at the very end, after an immigration judge had already ruled him removable “to Syria or Algeria or somewhere.” Then Mahmoud Khalil delivered a short statement making forcefully the following points: that there had been neither due process rights nor fundamental fairness in his case, that he was sent 1,000 miles away from his family as a specific target of the Trump administration, and that his case was being handled with greater urgency than the hundreds of others awaiting a hearing at the same facility. As a small group of supporters, many known and dear to him, streamed out sniffling loudly and visibly wiping tears, he mouthed to them, smiling reassuringly, “It will be OK.”

After Khalil was abducted by plainclothes ICE agents from the lobby of his Columbia-owned apartment building on March 8, returning from an iftar with his eight-months-pregnant wife, for about 24 hours he was untraceable. Noor, his wife, had gone to Elizabeth, New Jersey, the closest detention facility to Manhattan, and was told he was no longer there. Eventually news trickled in that he had been whisked away to Jena, Louisiana, to the infamous LaSalle detention center.

LaSalle is in the minority of detention facilities with a courtroom adjacent. Because immigration court is an administrative proceeding and not a criminal one, there is no right to counsel, so most hearings have no one in attendance except the respondent. Pro bono immigration services put in an appearance remotely when they can, but funding sources for those are shrinking catastrophically across the board. Frequently, there is a language barrier. The facilities’ locations are remote by design, making it very hard for family to travel to them. Government identification is checked at any number of entry points, ruling out the possibility of visits by undocumented people. In any case, a guard could turn you away with no reason given; I heard stories of people coming from as far as California and not being allowed in. This is a well-oiled system, spanning across administrations, meant to process and deport thousands of people a month.

Countless people were turned away at Khalil’s hearing on April 11. At a hearing earlier in the week, 600 people had tried to log into the court’s remote room. The judge had called it most unusual and denied online court observers. (The only time Khalil had spoken at the earlier hearing had been to request that his wife be allowed to log in.) By Friday, a scrum of reporters local and national, community organizers from New Orleans, faith leaders and friends had arrived on Pinehill Road, flying and driving through many hours of the night and early morning. Cars lined up on a steep, sunbaked bank littered with yellow spring blooms, as folks negotiated who would get in. This time the judge announced that she would be allowing only 22 people into the small courtroom, with no remote access except for some of Khalil’s lawyers.

Coordinators tried to devise an honor system of first-arrived-first-in. People moved from one vehicle to the next, hoping to leap-frog their positions in the final count. Cars revved and skidded to get through the gates, sounding more like a drag race than like witnesses to a somber proceeding to decide a man’s fate. In the end, 22 people sat in the wooden benches before the judge, the front row almost entirely empty, with only reporters allowed to take notes. When proceedings began, the lead immigration counsel tried to enter into the record a petition from the ACLU about court access, but the judge was firm: I am here today only to decide removability.

*   *   *

To anyone who knows Khalil, his brief closing statement is not a surprise. His stoic optimism, his care for others before self, his uncanny ability to identify the source of a problem and unwavering courage to name it, and always his solidarity with more marginalized groups of people — these are the qualities that made him an excellent student mediator on Columbia’s campus. They are also wholly at odds with the claims of the undated two-page memorandum that Secretary of State Marco Rubio submitted, and which Judge Jamee Comans ruled was sufficient grounds for removability under Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (a)(4)(C), claiming Khalil to be adverse to foreign policy interests of the United States. The memo specifically cites Khalil’s role and participation in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.”

It didn’t matter that immigration attorney Marc Van Der Hout argued that this statute had been written for the removal of the Shah of Iran from the United States. Nor did it matter that Rubio had failed to meet the standard set by the 1999 Ruiz-Massieu judgment, according to which the Department of Homeland Security had to prove “by clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence that the Secretary of State has made a facially reasonable and bona fide determination that an alien’s presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” It certainly didn’t matter that most of the community members in the courtroom in Jena were Jewish, and had travelled over 1,000 miles to be present for their friend. Now a legal permanent resident can be deemed “antisemitic,” and therefore deportable, simply because the secretary of state says so.

Khalil was the first of a current spate of ICE kidnappings of students — escalated and abetted by an administration that appears to be increasingly comfortable with extrajudicial proceedings. The ICE agents who apprehended him thought he was on an F1 visa to the United States; when told he was a legal permanent resident, they were flummoxed enough mid-operation to call their supervisor. The agents were instructed to pick him up anyway. At the hearing, amongst the many motions, Khalil’s legal team filed for termination of detention based on his wrongful detention. (DHS, they argued, had produced a warrant to justify the arrest, but that warrant was signed five hours after Khalil had been detained.) Comans was unmoved. She read her judgment, after the long hearing, from a pre-typed statement. He was removable.¹

*   *   *

Louisiana has nine ICE detention facilities, eight of which are privately run, making it the second-largest detention state in the country. The GEO Group owns four of them, including LaSalle. On Nov. 8, 2024, after news of Donald Trump’s presidential win, the company’s stocks increased by 41 percent; days before that, a top ICE official had left his government job and started working for the GEO Group, according to an ethics complaint. In February, the group signed a deal worth $1 billion to reopen a detention center near New York. There are talks of its ability to scale its monitoring from 175,000 migrants to 7 million under the administration’s projected deportation plans.

At the press conference after the hearing, representatives of the Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition addressed the detention industry’s extensive presence in Louisiana:

Today and every day we call for to the abolition of this country’s inhumane detention system starting with the eleven centers in our region, the majority of which are run by for-profit prison corporations. We denounce the conversion of the Louisiana prisons, like the one behind us, into ICE jails, continuing a legacy of racialized control and dehumanization in this state. We know that these southern prisons, built specifically for the enslavement and torture of black people were valiantly shut down by organizers in black liberation struggle in order to end mass incarceration. Not to become a cage for other bodies.

They added:

We stand in solidarity with Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, Alireza Doroudi, and all others trapped in this system. They are political prisoners among many others fighting the struggle to be free while isolated far from legal support, family, and community. Our struggles are deeply interconnected. The tools of border militarization used against immigrants here were first tested on Palestinians abroad. And long before the ICE detention industry came to us, the first detention center in Louisiana popped up an hour and a half away from here in Oakdale, Louisiana, out of a plan to detain Arab and Muslim non-citizens in secret. A plan that was exposed during the LA Eight trials of Palestinian student protestors in 1987.

Over 1,000 students are known to have had their visas revoked in the past month. Unprecedentedly, some of those have been revoked through DHS, which has manually terminated students’ legal status in the United States without notifying the students or their universities. (On April 22, a federal judge ordered the reinstatement of 133 canceled visas for international students.)

Ozturk, Suri and Doroudi were three of the early cases and were all taken into ICE detention through what lawyers have called “late-night hopscotch” to get students to the South’s “detention alley.” Suri is being held in Texas. Ozturk is nearby in Basile, Louisiana, at an all-women’s facility also run by GEO, where she has had at least three asthma attacks with no access to medication. Doroudi is said to be in LaSalle, though Khalil has not met him yet.²

Three days after Khalil’s hearing, on April 14, another Palestinian Columbia SIPA student, Mohsen Mahdawi, was detained by ICE. This time it was at a USCIS facility in Vermont, where Mahdawi had gone for a naturalization appointment. He had lived in the United States for 10 years and was also a legal permanent resident. That he could be apprehended, on the brink of his citizenship, in broad daylight shows how emboldened the Trump-Rubio deportation plan has become. His lawyers, having learned from Khalil’s case, filed a case against him being moved across state lines fast enough. Khalil’s detention was the stress test for the administration instrumentalizing its immigration policy to come after pro-Palestinian students.

Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., visited Mahdawi in detention on April 21. On April 22, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Massachusetts representatives Ayanna Pressley and Jim McGovern visited Khalil and Ozturk in detention. As of this writing, no politicians from New York have visited their constituent.

*   *   *

At LaSalle, every entry point is marked by tall double gates. One set must audibly click shut before the second is buzzed open. As the press conference unfolded outside, some of us waited for visitation with Khalil.

A wooden bench outside the entrance to the facility’s visitation center was emblazoned with the slogan Brilliant @ the basics. Inside, we saw framed posters — Outdoor Recreation, Legal Resources, Library, Phone System — illustrated with stock images. Past the double doors, there were several plaques for employee of the month and an array of pamphlets with information about retirement and investment planning. I was reminded of a public school hallway, with its spirit of forced cheer — except here, the morale in question was that of employees in a detention center. Employees entered and left the facility with clear plastic backpacks and purses, their contents visible to the world. Some wore maroon T-shirts illustrated with large, gray handcuffs and the slogan “The only three certainties in life are 1. Death 2. Taxes 3. Count Time.”

It was after 5 p.m., and a woman waiting with us went up to quietly talk to the receptionist at the main desk. She had been waiting several hours already. How much longer would it take, since she had to get back to work? “You work tonight?” the receptionist asked. “Yes, my shift starts at 10 p.m.” She had driven in from New Orleans, nearly five hours away. Later, I saw her inside, talking to her son through the plexiglass, each holding old-school pay phone-style telephones. He looked very young, maybe 16.

As we waited, a young child came out, dazed and dragging her feet. She looked crestfallen. Next to me I heard convulsing sobs. Khalil’s friend, who had held it together for so long, was now shaking. “I was thinking this will be like Mahmoud’s child now, born and not knowing his father in the first months of his life,” she confided later.

This is the everyday pace of a detention center — indignities big and small for everyone. When we were at last let in to see Khalil, he was gracious and wanted to meet everyone — people had come from so far away! But the reality was that the extended visitations meant he would miss his yard time. It’s OK, he tried to reassure us, it’s getting so hot nowadays. I thought back to his first statement from detention and his descriptions of being made to sleep on the floor, being denied a blanket even when he was freezing. In that the same statement he wrote that “justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.”

Between calls with his lawyers, Khalil brushed aside worries about his meals. He had eaten a bagel right before the hearing, he said. He did miss fruit. They got about an apple a week. There was TV, and a tablet for news, although you could only look at the stories loaded on it and not search for anything. You could watch a movie, too, or take a PlayStation to your room. His cheerful bluffing belied the steep prison economy where the smallest privilege costs money. The GEO Group, worth billions, had just been in the news for fighting to pay its detainees as little as $1 for a day’s work.

Khalil said he tried to write a little each day. He was able to receive letters and books sent directly from the publisher or Amazon. He was reading two that Noor had sent him. He wanted to talk about arrangements for Noor as she inched closer to her due date. For this was the immutable reality behind the verdict of the day: even as appeals were scheduled and heard, even as the more important habeas case moved through federal court in New Jersey under Judge Michael Farbiarz, who ruled that his court has jurisdiction to hear the case even though the writ was filed in a Manhattan court, even as immigration lawyers and others mounted challenges to Trump’s immigration policies — Khalil would now miss the birth of his first child.

*   *   *

DHS submitted dozens of pages of evidence that included reports in what his lawyers described as “tabloids.” Most were third-person accounts in the New York Post. Comans paused to clarify that hearsay was permissible in immigration court. To which Johnny Sinodis, a member of Khalil’s legal team, retorted, “only if it is probative and fundamentally fair.”³

As proof of Khalil’s disruptive antisemitic campus activities, the federal government’s attorney said that “he participated in dance circles wearing a scarf.” Khalil cracked a small smile at this accusation. Marc Van Der Hout objected first chance he got. “Frankly the reference to a wearing a scarf is disgusting and racist, your honor,” he said. “I am Jewish. Does that mean I cannot …” Comans was not interested in the substance of the accusations against him.

But for the rest of us, especially those on campuses that have erupted with protests over the past 18 months, the material weight of those allegations has reoriented our world. Some will argue that they have fundamentally reconfigured the university, and at Columbia at least seem to be precipitating its demise. After the past year and a half, it is unsurprising that among the demands the Trump administration presented to Columbia was a push to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Columbia’s preemptive capitulation to these demands — including, in a move gutting academic freedom, offering up oversight of the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department, Middle East Institute and the Center for Palestinian Studies — led my colleague Rashid Khalidi to refer to the university as Vichy on the Hudson. (Columbia has not named Khalil or Mahdawi in any of their communications.)

No doubt antisemitism is on the rise in the United States and on our campuses, aided in large part by right-wing, neo-Nazi ideologues, including the richest man on earth’s ghastly public flirtation with a Nazi salute. But task forces, congressional hearings, executive orders and all manner of policy have pinned the blame on campus protesters marching against the world’s most mediatized genocide. These students have been labeled terrorist sympathizers and prima facie antisemites — the result of months’ long, well-coordinated campaign, both within the university and outside it. Relentless harassment, doxing, cyberbullying: since Trump’s inauguration, these strategies have been extended to their logical conclusion — deportation lists and denaturalization lists aggregated by the likes of Canary Mission and Betar.

My institution, Barnard College, plays a particular role in Khalil’s detention. On March 5, there was a sit-in in the lobby of Milstein Hall, which houses Barnard’s library, archives, and teaching and learning centers. A similar sit-in had taken place a week earlier, in protest of three recent student expulsions. (Barnard hadn’t expelled a student for political protest since 1968, when Liz LeClair was kicked out for living with her boyfriend off-campus.) At the first sit-in, at Milbank Hall, students dispersed after being promised a meeting with the dean of the college. But after the sides could not agree on the conditions for those meetings, the student protesters returned. (Crucially, one of the preconditions of the meeting set by the college was that the students be unmasked. After a year of the college administration disciplining, unhousing, suspending and expelling students through a contentious disciplinary process, protesters were wary of this provision.)

I had class in the first floor of the Milstein that day, and after three shelter-in-place orders, emerged from the classroom to see if my students could find safe ways to leave. The lobby was engulfed in chaos. Khalil was there, notably unmasked, once again mediating between the student protesters and the administration. A one-time executive of Betar happened to be on Capitol Hill that day watching live-streamed images of the sit-in and recognized the only unmasked face in the crowd as the lead negotiator for the Gaza Solidarity encampments a year prior. “The guy is making it too easy for us,” he told the Forward. Khalil intuited the gravity of the escalating online campaign against him well enough to write to Columbia two days later, on Friday. He was worried for his safety, he said. ICE agents showed up on his doorstep the next day.

*   *   *

I think about Khalil smiling at the mention of the dance circles. The government attorney was referring, of course, to the dabke, the line dance which is a staple of any Palestinian celebration. I have seen Khalil dancing the dabke, including most recently at an event I convened in February called Records of Presence, which included presentations on archives of Palestinian photography, art and music. At the end of the evening, as a DJ played lost and recovered songs, Khalil linked arms with his fellow students and circumambulated the room, dancing. For me, the dabke serves as a capacious metaphor for what makes Khalil a leader — skill, exuberance, rhythm, the willingness to take artistic risk at the front of the line, to lead by holding hands with other joyful dancers. In the proliferation of public art and images of Khalil around campus and New York City, I saw a sticker that said “Dabke to Free All Political Prisoners.” In it was a line of dancers dancing the dabke, with a likeness of Khalil at the center, and a building that looked like Columbia in the background.

At a December 2024 gathering of Palestinian writers convened to remember Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, killed in an airstrike in 2023, Khalil read the words of Hiba Abu Nada, a diarist, who wrote movingly of her final days, and the steep toll of war on human lives, family and friendship around her. He read the diary entries in their original Arabic, while another student read the English translation. Khalil’s rendition was haunting, and even though majority in the room did not understand the words he was speaking, they intuitively grasped the controlled emotion and immense loss behind his words. The day before Abu Nada died, she wrote: “My friend list is shrinking, turning into little coffins scattered here and there. I cannot catch my friends after the missiles, as they fly off, I cannot bring them back again nor can I pay my condolences nor can I cry, I don’t know what to do. Every day it shrinks further, these are not just names, these are us only with different faces, different names.”

The same websites and social media accounts that have taken aim at Khalil have named thousands of others, including me. While they provide no evidence of hate speech or antisemitism or inciting violence in anything I’ve done, written or said, I was intrigued to find the following complaints against my work: it turns “Palestinian nationalism into a work of art”; “Who knew performance studies was just another term for radical propaganda?” The parallels between this logic and the one presented at court are clear — cultural expression and analysis itself are the problem.

After a long day, people staggered into a local restaurant in Jena called Lisa’s Louisiana Cuisine. Waves of people had come from the courthouse to eat here. Some Jewish students said the reporters who came in after them took photos of them dining, too. As we ate our gumbo and étoufée, the owner came by to chat.

“I know why you all are here. It’s not right that they have him in there,” he said. “He did nothing wrong. If they can get him, they can get any of us.” The owner knows Jena well, having lived there most of his life. “It will take generations to undo, what is being done now,” he said. His wife, closing up for the day, handed us jars upon jars of pickled watermelon and satsuma and mayhaws, and refused payment for them all.

We keep each other safe. Students say this to one another all the time, at rallies and protests. Despite the distance between rural Louisiana and New York, we found a bit of community at that restaurant a few minutes’ drive from the prison. We told the owner and his wife that we would tell Khalil about them, that they were there just outside the gates.

Khalil, for all his trials, has found deep community inside the gates too. When we heard the early anecdotes about him helping his peers fill out forms and access legal help, we had to laugh. Of course he is! That’s who he is. One can only imagine the intricate barter of care and camaraderie behind those doubled gates. In a facility that prides itself on the basics of bare life, people bide their time each in their own way. When we went to see him, he was wearing a slender, bright, blue-beaded bracelet that said Noor, which another detainee had made for him.

On April 21, Noor delivered her son alone, after another Louisiana immigration judge denied Khalil’s appeal for monitored release an hour after his lawyers filed a request, when Noor had already gone into labor. Khalil was able to speak to her briefly during labor and delivery. Perhaps he was thumbing the tasbih, or prayer beads, he held at his hearing. After all, those were made for him, too. With toothpaste and bread, shaped as perfect beads in the microwave.

1. Comans did not rule on the 212(a)(6)(C)(i) also brought against Khalil for improperly filling out his legal residency form as grounds for deportation. Here co-counsel Johnny Sinodis argued the state’s allegations easily fell apart under scrutiny — Khalil was on a Columbia-sanctioned internship with UNWRA and not in fact employed by them, the dates he was employed by the British Embassy in Beirut were confirmed by a letter from the embassy, and he had been a mediator in the Columbia encampment in April 2024, after he had filled his paperwork in March of that year. ↩︎
2. See “Inside the Black Hole,” a 2024 report on human rights abuses in Louisiana’s ICE facilities. ↩︎
3. Also cited was an article from the Times of India, filed by its world desk, inaccurately reporting Khalil’s work history. We don’t know whether this inaccuracy in factual reporting was an error or a misdirection. But it’s worth reflecting on the resonances between Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s agendas, which make Indian sources just serviceable enough to be used by the state in immigration courts in Louisiana. After all, it was not so long ago that the Modi government was trying to pass the Citizenship Amendment Bill and word spread of the construction of large-scale detention facilities being built in Assam. Gulfisha Fatima, Umar Khalid and other Muslim student leaders have been detained five years without trial in Indian jails. ↩︎