NEW YORK — On a recent afternoon, Mahmoud Khalil sat in his Manhattan apartment, cradling his 10-week-old son as he thought back to the pre-dawn hours spent pacing a frigid immigration jail in Louisiana, awaiting news of the child’s birth in New York.
For a moment, the outspoken Palestinian activist found himself uncharacteristically speechless.
“I cannot describe the pain of that night,” Khalil said finally, gazing down as the baby, Deen, cooed in his arms. “This is something I will never forgive.”
Now, weeks after regaining his freedom, Khalil is seeking restitution. On Thursday, his lawyers filed a claim for $20 million in damages against the Trump administration, alleging Khalil was falsely imprisoned, maliciously prosecuted and smeared as an antisemite as the government sought to deport him over his prominent role in campus protests.
The filing — a precursor to a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act — names the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the State Department.
It comes as the deportation case against Khalil, a 30-year-old recent graduate student at Columbia University, continues to wind its way through the immigration court system.
The goal, Khalil said, is to send a message that he won’t be intimidated into silence.
“They are abusing their power because they think they are untouchable,” Khalil said. “Unless they feel there is some sort of accountability, it will continue to go unchecked.”
Khalil plans to share any settlement money with others targeted in Trump’s “failed” effort to suppress pro-Palestinian speech. In lieu of a settlement, he said he would also accept an official apology and changes to the administration’s deportation policies.
In an emailed statement, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, called Khalil’s claim “absurd,” accusing him of “hateful behavior and rhetoric” that threatened Jewish students.
A State Department spokesperson said its actions toward Khalil were fully supported by the law. Inquiries to the White House and ICE were not immediately returned.
The filing accuses President Donald Trump and other officials of mounting a haphazard and illegal campaign to “terrorize him and his family,” beginning with Khalil’s March 8 arrest.
On that night, he said he was returning home from dinner with his wife, Noor Abdalla, when he was “effectively kidnapped” by plainclothes federal agents, who refused to provide a warrant and appeared surprised to learn he was a legal U.S. permanent resident.
He was then whisked overnight to an immigration jail in Jena, Louisiana, a remote location that was “deliberately concealed” from his family and attorneys, according to the filing.
Inside, Khalil said he was denied his ulcer medication, forced to sleep under harsh fluorescent lights and fed “nearly inedible” food, causing him to lose 15 pounds (7 kilograms). “I cannot remember a night when I didn’t go to sleep hungry,” Khalil recalled.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration publicly celebrated the arrest, promising to deport him and others whose protests against Israel it dubbed “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”
Khalil, who has condemned antisemitism before and since his arrest, was not accused of a crime and has not been linked to Hamas or any other terror group. “At some point, it becomes like reality TV,” Khalil said of the allegations. “It’s very absurd.”
A few weeks into his incarceration, Khalil was awoken by a fellow detainee, who pointed excitedly to his face on a jailhouse TV screen. A new memo signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged Khalil hadn’t broken the law, but argued he should be deported for beliefs that could undermine U.S. foreign policy interests.
“My beliefs are not wanting my tax money or tuition going toward investments in weapons manufacturers for a genocide,” Khalil said. “It’s as simple as that.”
By then, Khalil had become something of a celebrity in the 1,200-person lock-up. When not dealing with his own case, he hosted “office hours” for fellow immigrant detainees, leaning on his past experience working at a British embassy in Beirut to help others organize paperwork and find translators for their cases.
“I’m pretty good at bureaucracy,” Khalil said.
At night, they played Russian and Mexican card games, as Khalil listened to “one story after another from people who didn’t understand what’s happening to them.”
“This was one of the most heartbreaking moments,” he said. “People on the inside don’t know if they have any rights.”
On June 20, after 104 days in custody, Khalil was ordered released by a federal judge, who found the government’s efforts to remove him on foreign policy grounds were likely unconstitutional.
He now faces new allegations of misrepresenting personal details on his green card application. In a motion filed late Wednesday, attorneys for Khalil described those charges as baseless and retaliatory, urging a judge to dismiss them.
The weeks since his release, Khalil said, have brought moments of bliss and intense personal anguish.
Fearing harassment or possible arrest, he leaves the house less frequently, avoiding large crowds or late-night walks. But he lit up as he remembered watching Deen taking his first swim earlier in the week. “It was not very pleasant for him,” Khalil said, smiling.
“I’m trying as much as possible to make up for the time with my son and my wife,” he added. “As well thinking about my future and trying to comprehend this new reality.”
Part of that reality, he said, will be continuing his efforts to advocate against Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. On the day after his arrest, he led a march through Manhattan, draped in a Palestinian flag — and flanked by security.
As he poured Deen’s milk into a bottle, Khalil considered whether he might’ve done anything differently had he known the personal cost of his activism.
“We could’ve communicated better. We could’ve built more bridges with more people,” he said. “But the core thing of opposing a genocide, I don’t think you can do that any differently. This is your moral imperative when you’re watching your people be slaughtered by the minute.”
