Ten months before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil in the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building, Columbia University suspended the Palestinian graduate student.
The suspension lasted only one day before Columbia — with an apology from the university president’s office, Khalil later said — rescinded the suspension and dropped the disciplinary charges against him.
“After reviewing our records and reviewing evidence with Columbia University Public Safety, it has been determined to rescind your interim suspension,” wrote Claudia Andrade, an associate vice president with the school’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, in an email obtained by The Intercept. “Good luck on finals and hope you have a wonderful summer.”
Obtained by The Intercept
Nearly a year later, the ongoing immigration case against Khalil, a green card holder who earned a master’s degree from Columbia in December, has become a national First Amendment battle with the Trump administration.
The arrest of and attempt to deport of Khalil hinged on casting his protest activity at Columbia as inimical to American interests. The Trump administration cited his role as a negotiator for student protesters as a reason for Khalil’s arrest.
According to documents obtained by The Intercept and a previous interview with Khalil, however, at the height of last year’s protests Khalil had faced disciplinary charges for a single day before being cleared of the allegation, having his interim suspension lifted, and receiving an apology from the school administration. The school, according to the documents, found no fault with Khalil that would merit disciplinary action.
An attorney representing Khalil said the charges and abrupt reversal were a common tactic used against student protesters.
“Emails like this one are one of the many types of psychologically damaging things Columbia does regularly to its students,” Amy Greer, Khalil’s attorney, told The Intercept. “It imposes interim measures and then retracts. It adds students to disciplinary cases and then dismisses.”
The Negotiator
Khalil’s brief suspension came as tensions over Columbia’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza boiled over. Students at the school were at the forefront of a burgeoning movement to erect protest encampments on university grounds. And the Columbia administration was in talks with the students about their demands — particularly divestment from Israel — and how to clear the tent city from campus.
A graduate student active in the protest movement, Khalil served as a lead negotiator in talks over divestment from Israel. While others in the protest movement sometimes covered their faces to conceal their identity, Khalil frequently briefed journalists on the negotiation proceedings without a mask.
On April 29, Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia who later resigned in August, announced that the negotiations had failed and the university would not divest from Israel.
That morning, the university handed protesters disciplinary warnings on Columbia letterhead saying that if they didn’t leave the encampment before 2 p.m., they would be suspended, preventing them from completing the spring 2024 semester.
According to Khalil, the university had provided written and oral confirmation that he would not be disciplined for his involvement in the encampments as a negotiator, but, the day after the negotiations’ failure and the building takeover, he was issued an interim suspension anyway following the demonstration. (A Columbia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Khalil was accused of not leaving Columbia’s spring encampment despite earlier warnings. The school charged him with violations including “disruptive behavior,” activity relating to “tenting,” “failure to comply,” unauthorized “access and egress,” and “vandalism.”
A group of students acting on their own volition then moved to occupy Hamilton Hall, a central academic building later that night.
“You are restricted from all Columbia University campuses, facilities, and property, including but not limited to all academic and recreational spaces,” Khalil’s suspension notice read. “The current unauthorized encampment and disruption on Columbia University is creating an unwelcoming environment for members of our community.”
Similar interim suspension notices with identical language that were reviewed by The Intercept told alleged encampment participants that they could not participate in exams, submit assignments, or “engage in any activities affiliated with Columbia University” during the interim suspensions.
Given the reassurances from the administration, Khalil was “shocked” to receive the suspension notice, he told me in a May 2024 interview conducted for a separate story. The suspension, he thought, was meant “only to intimidate students regardless of their involvement.”
Greer, Khalil’s attorney, told The Intercept that it was possible Mahmoud’s suspension was just a miscommunication.
“It’s either the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing,” she said, “or they thought that they were somehow going to punish him for being a negotiator without anybody caring.”
Immigration Status
Suspensions can have particularly serious effects for international students. According to some immigration law experts, if a suspension prevents an international student from fulfilling a full course load or full-time status, the university may be required to report the student to the Department of Homeland Security within 21 days.
By barring Khalil from campus, his suspension could have qualified him for the DHS notification. At the time, Khalil said he was studying on an F-1 student visa.
The suspension, however, didn’t raise immediate alarms for Khalil about his immigration status.
“I did not worry about my immigration status, to be honest, at that point.”
“I did not worry about my immigration status, to be honest, at that point because there were higher stakes in terms of police coming into campus,” Khalil said in his May interview with me.
His right to be in the country, though, had been more generally hanging over his head.
Before the suspension came down, Khalil had already said he would avoid directly participating in protests because of his visa. The school’s “one-sided statements and inaction” on the Gaza war, he told reporters at a press conference as campus tensions mounted in late April, made him acutely aware of his precarious status in the country.
In May, in the aftermath of the crackdown and his suspension, Khalil told me, “I considered the encampment to be high risk given that the university has threatened to suspend and expel students, which might impact my status here in the States. Not only my immigration but also my university status, my scholarships.”
He added that, though he had earlier expressed reticence about participating, he had nonetheless been “in and out” of the encampment in his capacity as a negotiator.
At some point before his arrest, according to legal filings, he obtained a green card.
Charges Dropped
Things were moving fast on Columbia’s campus. The same evening that Khalil received his suspension notice, Columbia moved to clear the occupation of Hamilton Hall, along with the protest camp.
It would become a harbinger of a deepening crackdown on the nationwide student protest movement, with the university inviting New York City Police Department officers in riot gear onto campus. By midnight on April 30, 109 pro-Palestinian protesters had been arrested.
The next day, on May 1, Khalil received the notice that his disciplinary charges had been dropped. Khalil said in May that the school administration reached out to him unprompted.
“They called — the president’s office — to apologize, saying, ‘This shouldn’t have happened,’” Khalil said, recounting the interaction. “They dropped it on their own. Other students — they appealed and got it revoked. I did not have to do anything.”
“They called — the president’s office — to apologize, saying, ‘This shouldn’t have happened.’”
Though there were, Khalil said, no additional disciplinary actions against him pending, the rescinded suspension notice said the university reserved the right to add harassment charges or violations of the university’s nondiscrimination policies if he was found to have “contributed to the unwelcome and hostile environment.”
After Khalil’s disciplinary case was dropped by the Center for Student Success, he later came under scrutiny from a controversial new body formed by the university in August: the Office of Institutional Equity. In Khalil’s case and others, his attorney Greer said, the Office of Institutional Equity, has used spurious allegations of discrimination to target pro-Palestinian students making constitutionally protected speech.
Aside from the scrutiny from the Office of Institutional Equity, which Greer said was for protected speech related to social media posts, and the brief suspension, she knows of no other charges against Khalil.
ICE Target
In December, Khalil completed his studies for a master’s degree at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and planned to walk in graduation this May.
In March, though, ICE came for him. During the arrest, captured in a harrowing video taken by Khalil’s eight-months-pregnant wife, shows officers in plain clothes arresting, handcuffing, and whisking Khalil away — refusing to answer questions about their own identities, agency, and reasons for the arrest.
The arrest raised concerns among civil liberties advocates. The government, most prominently Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asserted without citing any evidence that Khalil is a supporter of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip and fought the 18-month war with Israel.
Asked on CBS News if Khalil has any ties to terrorism, Rubio cited only protest activities on Columbia’s campus — referring several times to vandalization, a disciplinary charge that Khalil had specifically been cleared of, and his role as a negotiator for student protesters.
“This specific individual was the negotiator,” Rubio said. “Negotiating on behalf of people that took over a campus? That vandalized buildings? Negotiating over what? That’s a crime in and of itself, that they’re involved in being the negotiator, the spokesperson, this that the other.”
Rubio continued: “The bottom line is this: If you are in this country, to promote Hamas, to promote terrorist organizations, to participate in vandalism, to participate in acts of rebellion and riots on campus. We never would have let you in if we had known that and now that we know it, you’re going to leave.”
He cited no evidence tying Khalil to any acts of vandalism or other crimes, including any terrorism charges.
In a statement released Tuesday through attorneys, Khalil said he was a “political prisoner.”
“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” he wrote. “Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”
Disciplinary Records
It is unclear whether the suspension charge was completely removed from Khalil’s disciplinary record. Those records have become the subject of a civil lawsuit filed last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations against Columbia University administrators and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Khalil is the only named plaintiff in the lawsuit, which alleges the Republican-led House committee attempted to chill speech by commanding Columbia to produce student disciplinary records and other private information on multiple occasions.
The lawsuit says that the plaintiffs’ disciplinary records were handed over to Congress, though the scope of the records is unclear. On August 1, according to the lawsuit, the committee accused the university of not complying with their order to share “more detailed information on disciplinary actions relating to the encampment.”
“An immense number of student records were turned over, as well as faculty and staff,” Greer told The Intercept, adding that records belonging to individuals who may not have had active open cases or known that they were being investigated were also included. It is unclear whether any record of Khalil’s suspension was turned over to Congress.
“An immense number of student records were turned over, as well as faculty and staff.”
By fall, the committee published a 325-page report titled “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” which published redacted incident student records, including disciplinary documents, without university or student consent.
Greer said the information, though parts were redacted, could be used to identify students, including Khalil. The plaintiffs’ sensitive information appeared in the report and led to increased doxxing and safety threats, Greer said.
“The broad-based surveillance the university is undertaking with Mahmoud, but also hundreds of other students, makes us concerned about the breadth of materials that fall under the purview of these letters and subpoenas,” she said.
Last month, the committee demanded the university produce “all disciplinary records,” including “past disciplinary charges” of students implicated in 11 campus incidents after April 30.
Throughout the protests, Khalil had sought to keep things on campus in perspective. The day in April that negotiations failed, he compared the university’s distribution of printed suspension warnings to Israel’s dropping of leaflets on Gaza before an attack.
“The people of Gaza are under occupation, and here, we are under disciplinary charges,” Khalil told students under a threat of suspension. “That’s the difference.”
With disciplinary charges against him dropped, the threat of suspension against Khalil himself never fully materialized. He now finds himself nonetheless under attack from the highest echelons of the American government for his actions on campus.
