I was naive to believe Khalil was safe from arrest: Wife

He is the most incredible person who cares so much for other people. He is the most kind, genuine soul, says Noor Abdalla, wife of detained Palestinian Columbia student

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Two days before U.S. 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 reporters 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.