Palestinian activist Khalil seizes his new public platform

US President Donald Trump's fight with elite American universities was only a few days old when federal immigration agents arrested the Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil at his Columbia University apartment building in New York in March.

- JONATHAN ALLEN

Over the more than three months he was held at a jail for immigrants in rural Louisiana, the Trump administration escalated its battle. It arrested other foreign pro-Palestinian students and revoked billions of dollars in research grants to Columbia, Harvard and other private schools whose campuses were roiled by the pro-Palestinian student protest movement, in which Mr Khalil was a prominent figure.

"I absolutely don’t regret standing up against a genocide," Mr Khalil, 30, said in an interview at his Manhattan apartment, less than two weeks after US District Judge Michael Farbiarz ordered him released on bail while he challenges the effort to revoke his US lawful permanent residency green card and deport him. "I don't regret standing up for what's right, which is opposing war, which is calling for the end of violence."

He believes the government is trying to silence him, but has instead given him a bigger platform. Returning to New York after his release, Mr Khalil was welcomed at the airport by US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a political foe of Mr Trump's; supporters waved Palestinian flags as he reunited with his wife and infant son, whose birth he missed in jail.