After more than three months of detention, Mahmoud Khalil, a key figure in Pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Campus of the University of Columbia, was launched this Friday, June 29 with an American judge.
“Trump and his administration have chosen the bad person,” said Mahmoud Khalil, with a Palestinian Keffieh, when he left the immigrants center for Jena, Louisiana, whom he described as “a museum that testified to racist policies in the United States.” “No one should be imprisoned to report a genocide,” he added.
Since his arrest in New York on March 8, for his role as spokesman for the challenge against the war in Gaza on the New York campus, Mahmoud Khalil has become the symbol of the will of US President Donald Trump to yawn of this student movement.
After his arrest by the Federal Immigration Police (ICE), Mahmoud Khalil, born in Syria of Palestinian parents, head of a green resident card, had been transferred almost 2,000 kilometers to this center in Louisiana.
Justice accused of “National Security Mina”
Last week, Judge Michael Farbiarz of the Federal Court of New Jersey, near New York, had declared that the government could not keep Mahmoud Khalil based on the statements of Secretary of State Framework Rubio.
According to the latter, his presence in the American soil raised “potentially serious consequences for American foreign policy.”
But the Ministry of Justice had responded that it would not be “illegal” to have Mahmoud Khalil based on another reason for the accusation, which had led the judge to follow his release.
In a new turn of this legal-political-universitaire saga, Judge Farbiar ordered the release of Mahmoud Khalil on Friday. A decision punished by the Trump administration, which accused “the Judiciary to undermine national security.”
Under these conditions of liberation, Mahmoud Khalil will not be authorized to leave the US territory, except in the case of a “self -examination” approach, and will have to limit their trips to some states, including that of New York, where it resides and Michigan’s, where he is his wife, who gave birth to his son, Deen, while he was arrested.
Trump’s position against universities
“After more than three months, we can finally boost a sigh of relief and know that Mahmoud is on the way back, with me and Deen, who should never have been separated from his father,” he reacted to his wife Noor Noor Abdalla, accusing Trump’s government to “try to silence” those who “denounce Israeli genocide in the Palestinians.”
“This is a victory, but it should never have been arrested in the first place,” said Elora Mukherjee, law professor at Columbia University, to the AFP for whom the “dark” measurement mentioned to collapse Mahmoud Khalil “never” never “had never been used before, according to her research, on the head of a residence permit.
Emblematic, the case of Mahmoud Khalil is part of a Trump government position against universities that accuses not having sufficiently protected from Jewish students during students’ demonstrations against the devastating Israel War in the Gaza Strip.
And more generally against an ideology known as “alarm”, a term used pejoratively by conservatives to denounce what they perceive as an excess of activism in favor of minorities.
Mahmoud Khalil’s friend, Mohsen Mahdawi, co -founder of a group of Palestinian students in Columbia, was arrested on April 14 by ICE agents before being released under conditions two weeks later by a judicial decision.
And at the beginning of May, a judge had ordered the release of Rumeysa Ozturb, a Turkish doctoral student from the University of Toft in Massachusetts, arrested by ice agents by an article that had signed in his university newspaper criticizing the way in which his establishment handled the protest movement against the war released by Israel in the strip of Gaza.
During the graduation ceremony at the end of May in Columbia, the president of the university had been copiously hooked by students who reproached her for not having defended Mahmoud Khalil, arrested in a residence of the university and to give in to Trump’s pressure. In the opposite sense, the president of Harvard University had received a monstrous ovation from his students for defending freedom of expression and academic against this Washington offensive.
Source: BFM TV
