The wife of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist who was detained by ICE agents over his role in student protests at Columbia University’s campus against Israel’s war in Gaza last year, on Wednesday said she was wrong to dismiss his earlier concerns about becoming a target for immigration agents.
Khalil and his wife, who through her attorney said she prefers media outlets not use her name, were returning to their university-owned apartment on Saturday night when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained him without a warrant, threatening to revoke his green card. ICE agents threatened to arrest his wife, a U.S. citizen, if she didn’t cooperate by leaving Khalil behind and heading up to their apartment.
In an interview with Reuters, his wife, who is eight months pregnant, said she had dismissed Khalil’s concerns about ICE agents potentially confronting him two days before they showed up at the couple’s apartment building.
“I didn’t take him seriously,” she told the news agency. “Clearly I was naive.”
His wife, who is due to give birth in late April, said she hopes Khalil will be released ahead of their child’s birth.
“I think it would be very devastating for me and for him to meet his first child behind a glass screen,” she told Reuters.
Khalil has been transported to a Louisiana ICE detention facility. He is not currently facing criminal charges.
During a Wednesday court hearing for their emergency petition to return Khalil to New York City, where the case over his arrest’s validity is pending, Ramzi Kassem, one of his attorneys, described what happened to his client as “unacceptable.”
Khalil’s lawyers also asked Judge Jesse Furman to enable them to communicate with him.
“We literally have not been able to confer with our client once since he was taken off the streets of New York City,” Kassem said.
Furman allowed one privileged call on Wednesday between Khalil and his attorneys, and another one on Thursday. Earlier this week, the judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Khalil until his habeas corpus petition is reviewed.
Khalil’s wife, who attended Wednesday’s proceeding, said she has been able to speak to him a few times since his detention.
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In a separate statement read by attorney Shezza Abboushi Dallal outside the court, his wife decried the Trump administration’s treatment of her husband.
“My husband was kidnapped from our home, and it’s shameful that the United States government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people,” she said.
Trump on Monday falsely labeled Khalil “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student, calling his detention “the first arrest of many to come.”