Columbia said to warn foreign journalism students to keep low profile on Gaza, Ukraine

Days after US agents arrested recent Columbia University student and anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil, school administrators warned foreign faculty and students of the journalism department to keep a low profile over Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and protests against his arrest, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

According to the report, Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer and adjunct professor, advised non-US citizen students to avoid publishing material on those topics.

“If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East,” he reportedly said.

“Nobody can protect you,” journalism school dean Jelani Cobb reportely said at the meeting. “These are dangerous times.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday the school had refused to help officials identify people “engaged in pro-Hamas activities,” according to the report.

Earlier this week, the US Department of Education sent letters to 60 colleges and universities warning them that they could face consequences if they did not fulfill their responsibility to protect Jewish students.

“We expect all America’s colleges and universities to comply with this administration’s policy,” Leavitt told reporters.

Khalil’s arrest is one of the first efforts by US 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, anti-Israel protest movement over its alleged support for terror groups and antisemitism.

Two days before US agents arrested Khalil, the recent Columbia University student 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 in an interview she was “naive” about the possibility that he could be detained. As a legal permanent resident of the US, surely he 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 Reuters in her first media interview on Wednesday.

Khalil was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and came to the US on a student visa in 2022, getting his US permanent residency green card last year.

US Department of Homeland Security agents handcuffed him on Saturday in the lobby of their university-owned apartment building in Manhattan.

Earlier on Wednesday, Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist in New York, sat in the front row of a Manhattan courtroom as Khalil’s lawyers argued to a federal judge that he had been arrested in retaliation for his outspoken advocacy against Israel’s military action in Gaza amid the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, in which invaders led by the terror group killed 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251.

Noor Abdalla, 28, wife of Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil who was detained by ICE, poses for a portrait after an interview with Reuters in New York City. Photo by @caitochs pic.twitter.com/vIsgETGnt8

— corinne_perkins (@corinne_perkins) March 12, 2025

The lawyers told the judge that was a violation of Khalil’s constitutional free speech rights.

The judge extended his order blocking Khalil’s deportation while he considers whether the arrest was constitutional.

Trump has said, without presenting evidence, that Khalil, 30, has promoted Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist terror group that governs Gaza. His administration has said Khalil is not accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump says his presence in the US is “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.”

Leavitt said Tuesday that Khalil was detained for deportation due to support for the Hamas terror group.

“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers,” Leavitt said.

Khalil was a leading organizer for the Columbia protest movement. Columbia protesters held disruptive demonstrations on campus starting soon after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, that have continued into recent weeks. Protesters have openly endorsed violence and US-designated terror groups, and Jewish and Israeli students and faculty have said the activists created a hostile and discriminatory environment. A university task force reported “crushing” discrimination against Jews and Israelis on campus.

On Sunday, the Trump administration transferred Khalil from a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement jail in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near Manhattan, to a jail in rural Jena, Louisiana, about 1,200 miles (2,000 km) away.

The government has said it has begun proceedings to deport Khalil and is defending his detention in the court proceedings until then.

Trump has called the anti-Israel student protest movement antisemitic and said Khalil’s “is the first arrest of many to come.”

Advocacy from campus to jail

Khalil completed his studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December but is yet to receive his master’s degree diploma.

He became a high-profile member of the Ivy League university’s student protest movement, often speaking to the media as one of the lead negotiators with Columbia administration over the protesters’ years-long demands that the school end investments of its $14.8 billion endowment in weapons makers and other companies that support Israel’s government.

The Trump administration says pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, including Columbia, have included support for Hamas, which the US has designated as a terrorist organization, and antisemitic harassment of Jewish students. Student protest organizers say criticism of Israel is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism.

Some members of Jewish faculty at Columbia held a rally and press conference in support of Khalil outside a university building on Monday, holding signs saying “Jews say no to deportations.”

Federal laws say aliens are inadmissible to the US, or “deportable,” if they engage in terrorist activities, including anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” Green card holders are considered aliens.

Last week, at a protest Khalil attended at Columbia affiliate Barnard College, demonstrators passed out pamphlets from the “Hamas media office,” and photos of the late Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah, according to students at the scene.

Hamas and Hezbollah are US-designated terrorist groups.