Wife of arrested Columbia student says she was naive to believe he was secure
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Ms Noor Abdalla said her husband's focus was supporting his community through advocacy and in more direct ways.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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NEW YORK - Two days before US agents arrested Mr Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and Palestinian activist asked his wife if she knew what to do if immigration agents came to their door.
Ms Noor Abdalla, Mr Khalil’s wife of more than two years, said she was confused. As a legal permanent resident of the US, surely Mr Khalil did not have to worry about that, she recalls telling him.
“I didn’t take him seriously. Clearly, I was naive,” Ms Abdalla, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, told Reuters in her first media interview.
US Department of Homeland Security agents handcuffed her husband on March 8
Earlier on March 12, Ms Abdalla sat in the front row of a Manhattan courtroom as Mr Khalil’s lawyers argued to a federal judge that he had been arrested in retaliation for his outspoken advocacy against Israel’s military assault on Gaza following militant group Hamas’ October 2023 attack. They told the judge that was a violation of Mr Khalil’s right to free speech.
US President Donald Trump has said on social media that Mr Khalil supported Hamas, the Islamist group that governs Gaza. But his administration has said Mr Khalil is not accused of or charged with a crime, and it has not provided evidence of Mr Khalil's alleged support for the militant group.
Mr Khalil is currently being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement jail in Louisiana.
Ms Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist in New York, met Mr Khalil while volunteering in Lebanon in 2016. The two are expecting their first child in late April and she said she hoped he would be free by then. She showed Reuters a picture of a recent sonogram: a boy whose name they have yet to choose.
“I think it would be very devastating for me and for him to meet his first child behind a glass screen,” Ms Abdalla said.
The government has said it has begun proceedings to deport Mr Khalil and is defending his detention in the court proceedings until then.
His detention is one of the first efforts by Mr Trump, a Republican who returned to the White House in January, to fulfil his promise to seek the deportation of some foreign students involved in the pro-Palestinian protest movement, which he has called anti-Semitic.
Ms Noor Abdalla and Mr Mahmoud Khalil are expecting their first child in late April. She said she hoped her husband would be free by then.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Mr Khalil grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and came to the US on a student visa in 2022, getting his US permanent residency green card in 2024. He was a prominent member of Columbia’s student protest movement, demanding that the school end investments of its US$14.8 billion (S$19.7 billion) endowment in weapons-makers and other companies that support the Israeli government.
The Trump administration says pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, including Columbia, have included support for Hamas and ant-Semitic harassment of Jewish students. Student protest organisers say criticism of Israel is being wrongly conflated with anti-Semitism.
Ms Abdalla said her husband’s focus was supporting his community through advocacy and in more direct ways. She has had a few brief phone calls with him from jail, where he told her he had been helping other detained migrants fill out forms written in English legalese.
“Mahmoud is Palestinian and he’s always been interested in Palestinian politics,” she said. “He’s standing up for his people, he’s fighting for his people.”
Ms Abdalla ended the interview abruptly when she saw that Mr Khalil was calling her. REUTERS
