The disappeared Columbia student is the start of a surveillance nightmare

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested a former Columbia University student over his involvement in the pro-Palestine protests that swept the campus over the past year, even though he has a green card and was never charged with a crime. Columbia, the site of a monthslong pro-Palestine encampment, became a particular obsession for right-wingers and liberal Zionists alike, who accused the university of turning a blind eye to campus antisemitism even as it sent the New York Police Department to arrest its own students. This latest arrest signals that the Trump administration is similarly determined to punish protesters — and provides a glimpse into the surveillance tools it will exploit to accomplish that.

Mahmoud Khalil, who graduated from the university’s School of International and Public Affairs last December, was picked up by ICE in his university-owned apartment on March 8, his attorney, Amy Greer, told the Associated Press. Khalil’s arrest came just days after Axios reported that the State Department would be using AI to revoke visas for pro-Palestine student protesters. During the arrest, agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division reportedly told Greer — who was on the phone with Khalil and his wife, a US citizen — that they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. After Greer told the agents that Khalil is a permanent resident, and Khalil’s wife showed them his green card, the agents said they were revoking his green card, even though the agency doesn’t have the legal authority to do that. Then the agents threatened to arrest Khalil’s wife despite her US citizenship. She is eight months pregnant.

In an emailed statement to The Verge, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”

The rest of her statement was similarly vague: “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting US national security.”

McLaughlin’s statement and Khalil’s arrest highlight the degree to which the government, often spurred by pro-Israel advocates, has equated protests against Israel’s war on Gaza with both antisemitism and terrorism. While civil rights organizations have called Khalil’s arrest a violation of the First Amendment, other groups that claim to advocate for free speech on college campuses have remained silent.

Greer has called the arrest a clear case of retaliation. “ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud follows the US government’s open repression of student activism and political speech, specifically targeting students at Columbia University for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza,” she told CNN. “The US government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech.”

In a habeas corpus petition filed in the Southern District of New York, Greer asked a federal judge to order Khalil’s release, once again describing his immigration arrest as a violation of his First Amendment right to free speech. “Even the threat of detention and deportation has a chilling effect on speech,” Greer wrote. On Monday evening, Judge Jesse Furman prohibited DHS from deporting Khalil while his case is under judicial review and ordered all parties to meet for a hearing on Wednesday, March 12th in response to Khalil’s habeas petition.

It’s not unheard of for ICE to arrest people with green cards; anyone who’s not a US citizen, including lawful permanent residents, can be put into deportation proceedings for violating immigration law. But the onus is on ICE to prove that someone is “deportable.” Since lawful permanent residents have legal status in the US, those who end up in deportation proceedings often get put on ICE’s radar after being charged with certain criminal offenses. Under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, legal immigrants, including those with green cards, can be deported for having been convicted of a vast array of crimes — months or even years after their conviction. But those deportations have to be ordered by an immigration judge; a person’s green card can’t be revoked without due process.

But there are no reports of Khalil having a criminal record, which raises questions about why ICE detained him — and how they found him. (The NYPD did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.) His arrest raises questions about ICE’s surveillance apparatus and the possibility of government overreach.

To become a permanent resident, Khalil had to register with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the DHS agency that handles legal migration. Under the Privacy Act, USCIS and other agencies must generally safeguard people’s “personally identifiable information” — including their name, address, and biometric identifiers. But there are some exceptions to this. USCIS is allowed to share information with other DHS agencies “as long as there is a mission need in line with the requestor’s official duties.” A DHS policy memo issued in 2007 states that the department “gives the highest priority to the sharing of potential terrorism, homeland security, law enforcement, and related information” and that DHS personnel “must have timely access to all relevant information they need to successfully perform their duties.”

(USCIS links to this memo, hosted by Homeland Security Digital Library, in its policy manual chapter on “privacy and confidentiality.” That link, however, is now dead and leads to the following message: “Content on this platform is being reviewed and removed to align with the President’s executive orders and DoD/DHS priorities. Until that review is complete, site content is not available.” The memo can still be accessed via the Wayback Machine. It is unclear whether DHS has updated its policies.)

When asked whether USCIS shared any of Khalil’s information with HSI, a USCIS spokesperson directed The Verge to DHS. DHS did not comment.

Immigration officers have access to a host of state, local, and federal government databases, some combination of which may have contained Khalil’s address and other personal information. But ICE doesn’t necessarily need to rely on other government agencies for this information, since it has access to most Americans’ data. A 2022 Georgetown Law study found that ICE can locate three out of four adults in the US through their utility records, and it has access to just as many people’s driver’s licenses. Almost all of this information, the report’s authors wrote, can be accessed “warrantlessly and in secret.” ICE has access to so much of our data that it “now operates as a domestic surveillance agency,” the report found.

It’s likely that all ICE needed to find Khalil was his name — which has been publicized a number of times by groups whose sole purpose is to identify and surveil pro-Palestine student activists.

“HSI is a sophisticated investigative section of ICE so they would be capable of locating people’s addresses, perhaps through traditional tools like LexisNexis, if they still contract with ICE,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute’s US immigration program, told The Verge.

One of these organizations is Canary Mission, a database that has tracked pro-Palestinian student protesters for over a decade. Canary Mission has published the names, photos, and other identifying information of student activists across the country — including Khalil’s. Last October, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, announced its own effort to surveil anti-Israel students, which it dubbed Project Esther. After Trump’s reelection, the right-wing Zionist organization Betar said it was compiling a list of foreign critics of Israel. The organization said it shared the “names of hundreds of terror supporters” with the Trump administration, which it hoped would target those individuals for deportation.

In April 2024, amid protests that had taken over Columbia’s campus, Khalil — who was in the country on a student visa at the time — told reporters the university’s harsh response to the encampments made him worry about his legal status. “That’s why for the past six months, I’ve barely appeared on the media,” Khalil said at a press conference. “That’s why I’m not suspended. I did not participate, fearing that I will be arrested and ultimately deported from this country.”

While other students held down the encampments on Columbia’s lawn, Khalil was among those negotiating with university administrators on the protesters’ behalf. The students’ main demand was divestment: they wanted the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies that support Israel’s war on Gaza.

Khalil’s fears didn’t subside after he became a permanent resident last year. In fact, Zeteo reports that Khalil asked Columbia administrators to protect him from harassment just one day before his arrest. “Since yesterday, I have been subjected to a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai and David Lederer who, among others, have labeled me a security threat and called for my deportation,” Khalil wrote in a March 7 email to Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong. His email cited a January post on X from Betar. “He’s on our deport list!” the group wrote of Khalil.

“I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home,” the email read. “I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”

Davidai, a professor at Columbia Business School, is known for harassing pro-Palestine students on X. The university temporarily suspended him from campus last fall for “repeatedly harassing and intimidating” university employees. Davidai has praised Khalil’s arrest, while Lederer, an engineering student, has accused Khalil of distributing “Hamas propaganda.”

After Khalil was arrested, ICE told his wife and attorney that he was being held at an ICE detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the AP reports. But he wasn’t there when his wife attempted to visit the detention facility on March 9. As of Monday morning, Greer didn’t know where her client was being held. ICE’s detainee locator now says Khalil is being detained at LaSalle detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, a privately owned detention center operated by the GEO Group. Khalil’s whereabouts were first reported by Zeteo.

It’s not uncommon for ICE to transfer the people it has arrested to far-away detention centers. Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director of the Detention Watch Network, said ICE often uses transfers to “target and retaliate against activists speaking up against the immigration and ICE detention system.” The remoteness of these facilities often means that detainees are far from not only their friends and family but also from attorneys and oversight groups. According to the latest Census data, less than 5,000 people live in Jena. Meanwhile, the GEO Group’s detention center there can hold up to 1,160 people.

“The arrest of Khalil and his subsequent detention and transfer is a continuation of that practice,” Ghandehari told The Verge. “ICE is especially prone to transferring people to more rural locations, like Jena, Louisiana, that are not only far away from a person’s support system, but are also hard to access. It’s an isolation tactic designed to punish people and make it harder for them to fight their immigration cases.”

ICE has been accused of going after activists in the past. In 2018, activist Ravi Ragbir sued ICE for targeting him and other noncitizens who criticized its enforcement practices. Ragbir, the executive director of the New York City-based New Sanctuary Coalition, had been arrested during a routine ICE check-in that year. ICE settled the suit with Ragbir in 2022, and the government gave him a three-year reprieve from deportation.

Also in 2018, members of the Vermont-based group Migrant Justice sued DHS, claiming it had retaliated against its members by targeting them for immigration enforcement after they organized a campaign to protect undocumented farmworkers in the state. The group also sued the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles, alleging that the agency systematically passed along immigrants’ private information to ICE for enforcement purposes. Vermont’s DMV settled with Migrant Justice in 2020.

Immigrant advocacy organizations have similarly decried Khalil’s arrest, calling it a clear case of retaliation. To them, Khalil is being punished for exercising his right to free speech in criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

“The unlawful detention of Mr. Khalil reeks of McCarthyism,” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “It’s clear that the Trump administration is selectively punishing Mr. Khalil for expressing views that aren’t MAGA-approved — which is a frightening escalation of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, and an aggressive abuse of immigration law.”

Reports suggest that Khalil is by no means the administration’s only target. The Student Workers of Columbia told Reuters that another student had received an email from the US consulate in their home country saying their US visa had been revoked without giving any reason. A day after the student, who the union declined to name, received the email, three ICE agents entered the student’s building and tried to get into their apartment, representatives from the union told Reuters.

Khalil’s arrest is seemingly at odds with Trump’s recent boasts that he’s “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” But it’s perfectly consistent with his administration’s stance on pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. In fact, just one day before Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration pulled $400 million in funding from Columbia, claiming the university had failed to confront antisemitism on campus. “Freezing the funds is one of the tools we are using to respond to this spike in anti-Semitism,” Leo Terrell, the head of the Justice Department Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, said in a statement. “This is only the beginning.”

Others in the administration put it more bluntly. “SHALOM, MAHMOUD,” the official White House account posted on X. On TruthSocial, Trump promised there would be more: “This is the first arrest of many to come.”