Wife of detained Palestinian Columbia student says she was naive to believe he was safe from arrest

New York: Two days before US agents arrested 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.

Noor Abdalla, Khalil's wife of more than two years, said she was confused. As a legal permanent resident of the US, surely Khalil did not have to worry about that, she recalls telling him.

"I didn't take him seriously. Clearly I was naive," 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 Saturday in the lobby of their university-owned apartment building in Manhattan. Khalil's arrest is one of the first efforts by President Donald Trump, a Republican who returned to the White House in January, to fulfill his promise to seek deportation of some foreign students involved in the pro-Palestinian protest movement.

Earlier on Wednesday, Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist in New York, sat in the front row of a Manhattan courtroom as 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 the militant group Hamas' October 2023 attack. They told the judge that was a violation of Khalil's constitutional free speech rights.

The judge extended his order blocking Khalil's deportation while he considers whether the arrest was constitutional.

Trump has said, without evidence, that Khalil, 30, has promoted Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that governs Gaza. His administration has said Khalil is not accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump says his presence in the US is "contrary to national and foreign policy interests."

'Kind, Genuine Soul'

On Sunday, the Trump administration transferred Khalil from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement jail in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near Manhattan, to a jail in rural Jena, Louisiana, about 1,200 miles (2,000 km) away.

Abdalla and Khalil met in Lebanon in 2016 when she joined a volunteer program Khalil was overseeing at a non-profit group that provides educational scholarships to Syrian youth. They started as friends before a seven-year long-distance relationship led to their New York wedding in 2023.

"He is the most incredible person who cares so much for other people," she said. "He is the most kind, genuine soul."

The couple are expecting their first child in late April. She said she hoped Khalil 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," Abdalla said, adding that Khalil had insisted on doing all the cooking, laundry and cleaning through her pregnancy. "I've always been so excited to have my first baby with the person I love."

The government has said it has begun proceedings to deport Khalil and is defending his detention in the court proceedings until then.

Trump has called the anti-Israel student protest movement antisemitic and said Khalil's "is the first arrest of many to come."

Advocacy from campus to jail

Khalil was born and raised 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 last year. He completed his studies at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs in December but is yet to receive his master's degree diploma.

He became a high-profile member of the Ivy League university's student protest movement, often speaking to the media as one of the lead negotiators with Columbia administration over the protesters' years-long demands that the school end investments of its $14.8 billion endowment in weapons makers and other companies that support Israel's government.

More than 1,200 people were killed in Israel in the Hamas incursion, in which 251 hostages were taken to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies. Since then, Israel's attacks have killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.

The Trump administration says pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, including Columbia, have included support for Hamas, which the US has designated as a terrorist organization, and antisemitic harassment of Jewish students. Student protest organizers say criticism of Israel is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism.

Jewish faculty at Columbia held a rally and press conference in support of Khalil outside a university building on Monday, holding signs saying "Jews say no to deportations."

But Abdalla said no one from Columbia's administration had contacted her to offer help, which she found frustrating.

She said her husband's focus was on supporting his community through advocacy and in more direct ways. She has had a few brief phone calls with Khalil from jail, where he told her he had been helping other detained migrants with poor English fill out forms written in legalese and donating food to his jail-mates, bought from his commissary account.

"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."

Abdalla ended Wednesday's interview abruptly when she saw Khalil was calling her from jail.