Mahmoud Khalil Shares Letter From ICE Detention: 'I Am A Political Prisoner'

"For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace," the activist said after federal agents arrested him for protesting at Columbia University.

Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil has shared a letter on Tuesday from the immigration detention center that federal agents are currently holding him for protesting in favor of Palestinian rights ― calling himself “a political prisoner” of the United States government.

Dictating his words to family over the phone, Khalil spoke of the injustice he’s faced since agents with Homeland Security abducted him earlier this month without a warrant, despite his having a green card. He described sleeping on the floor without a blanket at immigration court in New York and at a facility in New Jersey, before agents quietly sent him to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana.

In his letter, Khalil did not just speak for himself, but also on behalf of his fellow detainees. The Syrian-born Palestinian said that he has bore witness “to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”

“Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing,” he said. “Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.”

Khalil’s detention is an example of the bipartisan anti-Palestinian racism in the U.S. government, he said, not just since October 2023, but for decades via efforts to oppress Muslims, Palestinians and Arab Americans. More specifically, he said his targeting is a test that serves as the Trump administration’s broader effort to quash political dissent regardless of citizenship status.