Over the last three days, Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs, has been kidnapped from his University housing and subjected to political imprisonment despite his permanent residency status. His face was used in a mugshot-like social media graphic posted by the White House X account as a means of threatening every “terrorist sympathizer” college student with the same fate. At the same time, his name has been dragged and muddied by several major right-wing outlets. One need only look at the New York Post’s recent headline: “Who is Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University agitator detained by ICE for deportation?”

As someone who has known Mahmoud for over a year and a half, let me tell you who he really is. He is a Palestinian, a husband, a father-to-be, a dear friend, and a man abducted by the U.S. government for opposing genocide. But Columbia, too, is complicit in what happened to him.

At around the one-year anniversary of the onset of the genocide, I wrote a personal piece about the visceral reaction I had to listening to the names and ages of Palestinians in Gaza killed by Israel. The vigil was held for nearly a whole month. As time passed, the group of students sitting under the sun all day often dwindled down to almost exclusively us: Palestinian students. It bothered me that reporters would seemingly flock the minute there was a sensational protest headline, but nobody seemed to pay attention to the pain of Palestinians. Not even Spectator bothered to report on it. I felt compelled to document my feelings when reading out the names of people whose fate I could have easily shared had I not been born in the United States. My writing includes the following excerpts:

“It took thirty minutes to read three double-sided pages out of a heavy and incomplete stack, to feel the weight of each corpse on my tongue. The blood drained from my face when we reached someone with the last name ‘Alwan.’ My throat tightened and I couldn’t look down. I was certain I would see a pool of crimson at my feet.”

“I was sitting next to Mahmoud Khalil. The speakers said his first or last name, once, three times, ten times—and then I lost count. He didn’t seem to notice the flood of crimson that I saw staining his white Adidas shoes and dripping down the steps. Then, when he took the microphone, his own name rolled off his tongue and he did not flinch. Eventually, I stopped reacting to the sound of mine, too.”

“I quickly learned that every recognizable name was common. I heard the name of every Palestinian on the steps multiple times, and then I heard the names of some of their loved ones who really were on that list.”

Mahmoud never flinches. Now, as his name has been picked from a different kind of list—a deportation list created by Columbia affiliates—I wonder if he is still as fearless as he was during the time that I knew him.

Mahmoud had comforted me during countless panic attacks, from those induced by pro-Israel protesters aggressively yelling that we were terrorists, to those caused by the increasingly normalized scenes of police violence on our campus. He always made me feel safer when I spotted his smiling face amid a sea of masks and keffiyehs. The comfort of his crinkling eyes inspired me to rip off my own mask in front of a crowd of students at the Sundial in November 2023. If I had to describe his demeanor in simple terms, it would be that of a teddy bear. In fact, I imagine him laughing while reading this characterization.

The University was familiar with his perpetual kindness, too. Mahmoud sacrificed himself to negotiate for divestment with the administration. But they punished him for having the bravery to face a hostile environment head-on. On April 30, 2024, he was suspended in a failed intimidation tactic. They revoked his suspension within the span of a day, endangering him before he got his green card. In an interview with BBC following this scare, Mahmoud downplayed the risk of losing his visa because of his empathy for the victims in Gaza: “But for Mahmoud, the ends justify the means. He says as a Palestinian, he is one of ‘the lucky ones’ and it’s ‘nothing compared to what people in Gaza are facing.’” Never once did he mention that he was born as a Palestinian refugee in Syria, and was forced to flee again due to war.

Like all my friends, Mahmoud would always remind me to take care of myself and to stop inundating myself with updates about the atrocities in Gaza. Never did I think that I would one day have to scour the news about him instead. When I Google his name, I see myself standing to the left of him at a press conference. The day of that conference, we joked about how my hot pink basketball shorts matched his light pink shirt by accident. I look through my camera roll, finding old videos of a birthday cake in his living room and a dance circle—that he led, as per usual—at a Maison Française event. The world doesn’t have our selfies behind the scenes of media circuses. All that the public has is a distorted image of him, blurred by the lens of anti-Palestinian racism coming from two strongholds of increasingly authoritarian tendencies: Columbia and the White House.

Whenever anything traumatizing happened to the Palestinian community on campus, my first impulse has been to write: op-eds, unfinished drafts of op-eds, and frequent impassioned emails to the administration. It feels futile to write now, as I sit and worry about the whereabouts and safety of my friend. But all I have are my words. And words, I have come to learn, are powerful. After all, words prompted the federal government to target Mahmoud for standing against the genocide of his people.

The University has yet to condemn the fact that the U.S. government is actively attempting to deprive Mahmoud’s future child from meeting their extraordinary father. But of course, this is the same institution that has yet to explicitly condemn a single act of violence or discrimination against Palestinians since October 7, 2023. With this context in mind, the sudden campaign against Mahmoud is not nearly as unprecedented as it seems.

In just the week leading up to Mahmoud’s abduction, Palestinian students have had to deal with Columbia/Barnard Hillel and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs dean welcoming former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who played a hand in the massacre of over 100 Lebanese civilians and said that Palestinian children are terrorists who should be shot. We have had to deal with leaked messages from the very Columbia affiliates who claim to need protesters like Mahmoud deported in order to feel safe, saying, “We need the powers that be to squash them like roaches. Ignoring roaches in one’s house is possible but who wants to live that way?” We have had to deal with fresh trauma from a potentially fabricated bomb threat and police brutality on our campus. And now, we are dealing with the unimaginable: an invaluable member of our community ripped away after a systematic pro-deportation doxxing campaign.

On March 7, the day before Mahmoud was taken, I wrote on my private Instagram story, “Zionists are priming to manufacture consent to the targeting of Mahmoud” because of how much Canary Mission—an illegitimate doxxing database that has become an anti-Palestinian hit list—and other faculty, student, and alumni-based doxxing accounts were posting about him. There were at least 12 separate coordinated posts from Business School assistant professor Shai Davidai and Victor Muslin, SEAS ’82, who are associated with the Columbia-specific hit list of “Documenting Jew Hatred.” In these repeated calls for Mahmoud’s deportation, the posters tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who, according to an X post made by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, later personally signed off on revoking Mahmoud’s green card for allegedly threatening American foreign policy interests. These same Columbia faculty members began priming the public to associate the name “Mahmoud Khalil” with “agitator,” “foreign,” and “pro-Hamas”—the exact same terminology used in President Trump’s Monday statement.

While writing this op-ed, I found out that this flood of online harassment directly caused Mahmoud to have an instinctual feeling of being in imminent danger. He emailed interim University President Katrina Armstrong for help after Public Safety singled him out to remove him from campus on March 6. She ignored his final plea: “If I’m unwelcome on Columbia campus, please let me know through the right channels.”

Columbia never once stood up for us, the very students it chose to admit and who once dreamed of coming here. It never sanctioned Davidai beyond a suspension from the Morningside campus, despite his daily and systematic maligning of pro-Palestinian students since October 2023—or anyone else, for that matter. Instead, they doubled down on slandering the fight for our people to live as antisemitic. The administration put Mahmoud under threat by withholding his transcript in an Office of Institutional Equity investigation without individualized evidence, paving the way for his targeting by the federal government.

On March 10, The Forward reported that Ross Glick, the former executive director of Betar—a group that openly threatens and commits violence against Palestinians in the United States—fed Mahmoud’s name directly to the government, with Glick claiming that Columbia’s board of trustees did the same. The guise of “combating antisemitism” on college campuses has revealed itself to be the oil in the gears of harming and expelling Palestinians—of systemic bigotry. Disingenuously “feeling unsafe” due to protests—while paradoxically showing up to all of them in order to record and harass protesters—is engendering racist fascism.

The battle over the narrative of Zionism in the United States has now officially reached a breaking point for our own constitutional rights. Right-wing news outlets have already contributed to smearing Mahmoud with anti-Palestinian racism, citing the fact that he worked for the United Nations and that he has been seen “taking part in dance circles,” interviewing “completely in Arabic,” or “draped in a keffiyeh head scarf.” This symbol of Palestinian identity is regularly defiled by Zionist students and faculty. Meanwhile, these same pro-Israel affiliates amplify doxxing databases that are proudly taking credit for dictating Mahmoud’s fate with their lies—and even filing affidavits against him in court. In the meantime, they are already beginning to seek out new targets.

Manufacturing consent to genocide has officially led to manufacturing consent to violence against dissenting students. When we normalized daily scenes of indiscriminate bombardment in Gaza, we also inherently normalized the sight of dozens of militarized riot cops in our learning environment. When we normalized daily scenes of forced displacement and administrative detention in the West Bank, we likewise normalized the indefinite abduction of legal permanent residents on the basis of Palestinian identity and political opinion.

The one person who could calm me down at the height of this stress is Mahmoud himself. But he is all the way in a notoriously abusive Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, alone. I can only imagine what he is experiencing in prolonged federal confinement right now.

As Columbia students who know and love Mahmoud, it is our duty to ensure that his suffering is not in vain. Libelous doxxing and arbitrary disciplinary targeting do not just cause psychological harm—they are physically dangerous. The engines of repression from Low Library, to Congress, to the White House, are actively attempting to manufacture consent for the detention and potential deportation of Mahmoud. It is up to the entire student body to stop them. It is up to us to humanize him again. And it is up to us to humanize the Palestinian people as a whole, the way he would want.

I want to be able to see my friend again. I want to have dinner at his apartment, the way I was supposed to before he was taken. I want to watch him become the incredible father I know he will be next month. And I want all of us to be able to tell him that we overcame our fear to fight for him, the way he always did for everyone around him. When he comes back, he needs to know: In trying to tear him down, Columbia and the U.S. government have only made him a historic legend in the struggle not only for Palestinian rights, but for the rights of all.