President Donald Trump declared that the arrest of pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at Columbia University, is the “first arrest of many to come.”
Khalil helped lead demonstrations at Columbia University that championed the terrorist group Hamas. The Department of Homeland Security wrote on Sunday night, “On March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. 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 U.S. national security.”
“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
“SHALOM, MAHMOUD. ‘ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of @Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.’ –President Donald J. Trump,” a recent post from the White House read.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the administration’s plan to strip visas or green cards from anyone participating in activities aligned with Hamas, a designated terror organization. “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” he said.
An anti-Israel group that claims to represent “thousands of Columbia students” publicly acknowledged a deeper truth: they are fighting to “eradicate” Western civilization.
Khalil is a member of The Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition — which stated in its list of demands that Columbia University should “[s]ever academic ties with Israel universities” and “Defund Public Safety and disclose and sever all ties with the NYPD” — joined with the university’s Bengali Student Association to post a statement on Instagram, as Campus Reform reported.
“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” they stated. “We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our Intifada is an internationalist one—we are fighting for nothing less than the liberation of all people. We reject every genocidal, eugenicist regime that seeks to undermine the personhood of the colonized.”
On Monday, a federal judge in New York City ordered the deportation temporarily halted until a hearing on Wednesday.
Virginia Kruta contributed to this article.
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