Mahmoud Khalil Rebukes Columbia For Targeting Dissent With ‘Repression Playbook’

Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil rebuked what he called the school’s “repression playbook” that has opened the gates for higher education and the federal government to target dissent on campus and abduct students like him for their pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, was taken by federal immigration agents on March 8 for his role in helping lead last year’s antiwar protests on Columbia’s campus. While his court case plays out in New Jersey, Khalil remains held without charge in a Louisiana detention center — where he dictated to his attorney a searing op-ed for the Columbia Spectator that published Friday.

“The situation is oddly reminiscent of when I fled the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and sought refuge in Lebanon,” he said. “The logic used by the federal government to target myself and my peers is a direct extension of Columbia’s repression playbook concerning Palestine.”

Khalil accused the university of suppressing student-led dissent under the guise of combating antisemitism — including by giving Congress student disciplinary records, launching a task force that equates criticism of the state of Israel with hate speech, and creating an office that’s meant to review discrimination reports but “became a mechanism to persecute pro-Palestinian students with no due process.”

Columbia faced public backlash after deciding to acquiesce to the Trump administration, which threatened to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars in funding if universities didn’t implement its restrictive demands that have been widely labeled as a crackdown on academic freedom, student dissent and free speech.

After interim President Katrina Armstrong resigned from the school, Khalil said the board of trustees “opted to set fire to the institution they’re entrusted with” by appointing one of their own to the position meant to be held by academic leadership.

“To members of Columbia’s faculty who pat themselves on the back for their progressive leanings but are content to limit their participation to performative statements: What will it take for you to resist the destruction of your university?” Khalil said. “Are your positions worth more than the lives of your students and the integrity of your work?”

Since Khalil’s abduction, several more international students who support Palestinian freedom have either been abducted or are fighting threats of deportation. Khalil named Yunseo Chung, Ranjani Srinivasan, Leqaa Kordia, Badar Khan Suri and Rümeysa Öztürk — some of whom were students at other universities.

“The movement for Palestinian freedom and justice at Columbia and across the United States has always centered community care,” Khalil said. “Together you organized mutual aid for families in Gaza through bake sales and funding campaigns. You created study spaces, reading circles, and cross-movement solidarity. This movement has always been grassroots. It was led by students — many younger than me — who risked their careers, their degrees and their futures to demand divestment.”

The detained activist stressed in his letter that students must keep fighting the federal government’s efforts to use universities as instruments of state violence, even if they have no personal stake in Palestinian freedom.

“To the students who remain apathetic to Columbia’s disregard for human life and its willingness to discard student safety: As pressure from the federal government intensifies, know that your neutrality on Palestine will not protect you. When the time comes for the federal government to target other causes, it will be your names that Columbia will offer on a silver platter, it will be your pleas that fall on deaf ears, it will be your just causes that are stonewalled.”

“The student movement will continue to carry the mantle of a free Palestine,” he continued. “History will redeem us, while those who were content to wait on the sidelines will be forever remembered for their silence.”