Pro-Palestine activist at risk of deportation speaks out against conditions in detention

In his first public remarks since being detained by US federal immigration authorities, the Palestinian activist and recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil spoke out on Tuesday against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted for attempted deportation by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.

- Anna Betts

"I am a political prisoner," he said in a statement to the Guardian. "I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices under way against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law."

Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia's pro-Palestine protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.

The administration, he said, "is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent". He warned that "visa holders, green-card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs".

The statement, which Khalil dictated to his friends and family by phone from a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, highlighted the treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel's renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University's surrender to federal pressure to punish students.