International students at Columbia University said they were afraid to leave their dormitories after immigration authorities arrested a Palestinian graduate student for his involvement in protests against the Gaza war.
Agents with the Department of Homeland Security detained Mahmoud Khalil, who graduated in December from the university’s School of International and Public Affairs, at his university-owned residence on Saturday evening.
Khalil has not been charged with any crime, but President Donald Trump said that his presence in the U.S. was “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.”
Federal immigration authorities also reportedly visited another international student at the university over the weekend and attempted to take her into custody, but were denied entry to her apartment.
“Given the magnitude of statements made by the president and his administration, I feel I am not safe knowing they’re around campus,” one international student told The Independent.
“I’ve heard and read a lot about indiscriminate arrests of people post 9/11 so I am afraid they may do the same thing, especially after saying Mahmoud’s arrest is not the first nor the last,” they added.
Internal message boards were flooded with posts from international Columbia students on Monday expressing fears over further arrests.
Ava Lyon-Sereno, a third-year Columbia student who was involved in the anti-Gaza war protests at Columbia last summer, said the mood on campus was “tense and fearful.”
“International students that haven’t been involved in protests at all are scared and anxious, and the university isn’t taking any sort of hard stance about not cooperating with ICE,” she told The Independent, referring to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“People are really afraid that the university won’t protect them, especially when you consider how much weaker their response to the Trump administration and ICE is now versus compared to the last time he was president,” she added.
Other students expressed anger at the university for failing to protect their peers from immigration authorities.
Khalil’s arrest comes just days after Columbia issued new rules for how students and school staff should respond to ICE agents trying to access university property. On Thursday, the school issued a memo that said ICE agents should be allowed to enter university property without a warrant in “exigent circumstances,” without elaborating.
“We feel that the university is not keeping us safe. The campus is no longer just hostile, it’s escalated to one that’s not conducive to learning,” said Bonnie, a Columbia student who gave only her first name, because she feared repercussions.
Bonnie noted that over 50 percent of students at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, where Khalil studied, are from other countries.
“So you have international students wondering, can I come to school? Can I leave my apartment complex? There is fear even about coming to class,” she added.
Carly, another student who gave only her first name, said international students were already feeling unsafe before this arrest.
“This incident was essentially the icing on the cake of this university blatantly disregarding international students,” she charged. “I think it’s very important to acknowledge that Mahmoud’s detainment happened on university property. This was in graduate student housing, so it’s impossible to claim Columbia University had no hand in it,” she added.
Columbia University did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The arrest is the first publicly known effort by Donald Trump’s administration to deport an international student for taking part in protests against the Gaza war, a promise he made during his campaign.
It comes just days after the Trump administration said it had canceled some $400 million in federal funding and grants awarded to Columbia University due to antisemitic harassment “on and near” the campus.
President Trump celebrated the arrest in a social media post on Monday.
“This is the first arrest of many to come,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again,” he added.
The Trump administration has provided no evidence that Khalil supported Hamas or engaged in antisemitism. Some 48 hours after his arrest, neither the Trump administration or the DHS have revealed the law under which Khalil was arrested.
Khalil is a permanent legal resident and his wife, who is eight months pregnant, is a U.S. citizen. DHS said he had been arrested because he had “led activities aligned to Hamas,” without elaborating.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a news report of Khalil’s arrest on social media on Sunday, adding the comment: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union called the arrest “a frightening escalation of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, and an aggressive abuse of immigration law.”
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also spoke out against the move.
“If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“Anyone – left, right, or center – who has highlighted the importance of constitutional rights + free speech should be sounding the alarm now.”
Columbia University’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, said in a statement released on Monday that it “remains the long-standing practice of the University, and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, that law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including residential University buildings.”
“We will follow the law, as has always been the case, and rumors suggesting that any member of Columbia leadership requested the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on or near campus are false,” she added in the statement.
Khalil was a key figure in the protests that broke out at Columbia in response to Israel’s war in Gaza, which spread to other university campuses across the country.
Students set up a tent encampment on the campus lawn for two weeks and occupied an academic building for several hours before Columbia called in police to remove them. Khalil acted as a negotiator for the occupying students, but did not enter the building himself.
The protesters called for Columbia to end investments in weapons manufacturers and companies that support Israel’s government and military in response to the devastating war in the Gaza Strip, sparked by a surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Gaza’s health ministry says it has confirmed more than 48,000 Palestinians have been killed, but the true number of dead is believed to be much higher as bodies are left undiscovered underneath the rubble.
Some Jewish and Israeli students said they felt intimidated by the protests last summer, while Trump and Republicans have called for stronger action to stop them.
Upon taking office for his second term, Trump signed an executive order that promised to use “all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”
Lyon-Sereno, who is Jewish, said the arrest has troubling implications for free speech.
“The situation with Mahmoud is so terrifying because it shows the DHS and ICE are willing to take whatever extralegal steps they want to and retroactively approve them to stamp out dissent,” she said.
“If they can essentially kidnap a legal resident, where does it stop?”
