UPSIDE DOWN

Magluba, in Arabic, means “upside down.” It’s also the name of a pilaf dish popular in the Levant: a pot of rice, vegetables, meat, and potatoes, coagulated and flipped into a stout cylinder.

- -Dan Greene

Mahmoud Khalil

Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate whom the Trump Administration has spent months trying to deport, makes it using his mother’s recipe. “Hers just tastes, I don't know ... better?” Khalil said the other day. “Every time I cook it, it tastes a little different.”

Khalil, wearing a T-shirt reading “FOR LAND & LIBERATION,” stood barefoot while paring an eggplant in the kitchen of the Brooklyn apartment he moved into last month. His previous relocations made headlines: in March, plainclothes federal agents arrested him in his Morningside Heights building and shipped him to Louisiana in hopes of expelling him from the country. Citing an obscure provision of a 1952 law, the government accused Khalil, a legal permanent U.S. resident, of undermining American foreign policy through his criticism of the war in Gaza. He was confined for a hundred and four days, until a judge ordered his release on bail. (Last week, an immigration judge ordered that his deportation go through; Khalil plans to appeal.) During that time, Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, gave birth to their son, Deen. Khalil could only listen on the phone.