New York (AP) -In a recent afternoon, Mahmoud Khalil sat in her Manhattan apartment, cradling her 10-week son while thinking in the hours before dawn by spending a frigid immigration jail in Louisiana, waiting for news of the child’s birth in New York.
For a moment, the open Palestinian activist was unusually without words.
“I can’t describe the pain of that night,” Khalil said finally, looking down while the baby, he was lulled in his arms. “This is something that I will never forgive.”
Now, weeks after recovering his freedom, Khalil is looking for restitution. On Thursday, their lawyers filed a claim for $ 20 million in damages against the Trump administration, claiming that Khalil was falsely imprisoned, processed maliciously and stained as an anti -Semitic while the government sought to deport it on its prominent role in the protests of the campus.
The presentation, a precursor of a lawsuit under the Federal Law of Claims of TORT, appoints the Department of National Security, the Immigration and Customs Control of the United States and the State Department.
It occurs when the case of deportation against Khalil, a recent 30 -year -old graduate student at Columbia University, continues to advance through the immigration court system.
The goal, said Khalil, is to send a message that he will not be intimidated in silence.
“They are abusing their power because they think they are untouchable,” Khalil said. “Unless they feel that there is some kind of responsibility, it will continue without control.”
Khalil plans to share any money according to others directed in Trump’s “failed” effort to suppress the pro-palestinian discourse. Instead of an agreement, he said that he would also accept an official apology and changes in administration’s deportation policies.
In a statement sent by email, Tricia McLaughlin, spokesman for the Department of National Security, described Khalil’s claim as “absurd”, accusing him of “hateful and rhetorical behavior” that threatened Jewish students.
A state department spokesman said that his actions to Khalil were fully supported by law. White House consultations and ice were not returned immediately.
Hard conditions and an ‘absurd’ accusation
The presentation accuses President Donald Trump and other officials to set up a casual and illegal campaign to “terrorize him and his family”, beginning with the arrest of March 8 of Khalil.
That night, he said he was returning to dinner home with his wife, Noor Abdalla, when he was “effectively kidnapped” by federal civil agents, who refused to provide a court order and seemed surprised to know that he was a legal permanent resident of the United States.
Then he was taken during the night to an immigration prison in Jena, Louisiana, a remote place that was deliberately hidden “from his family and lawyers, according to the presentation.
Inside, Khalil said he was denied his medicine by ulcer, forced to sleep in hard fluorescent lights and fed with “almost harmful” food, which made him lose 15 pounds (7 kilograms). “I don’t remember a night when I did not go to sleep hungry,” Khalil recalled.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration publicly celebrated the arrest, promising to deport him and others whose protests against Israel called “prisemitic and anti -American activity.”
Khalil, who has condemned anti -Semitism before and since his arrest, was not accused of a crime and has not been linked to Hamas or any other terrorist group. “At some point, it becomes reality shows,” Khalil said about accusations. “It’s very absurd.”
Deported for beliefs
A few weeks after his imprisonment, Khalil was awakened by a detained partner, who enthusiastically pointed his face on a television screen in jail. A new memorandum signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that Khalil had not violated the law, but argued that it should be deported by beliefs that could undermine the interests of the foreign policy of the United States.
“My beliefs do not want my tax money or registration to be allocated to investments in weapons manufacturers for a genocide,” Khalil said. “It’s as simple as that.”
By then, Khalil had become a celebrity in the blockade of 1,200 people. When he did not deal with his own case, he organized “office hours” for immigrants detainees, relying on his past experience working at a British embassy in Beirut to help others organize the paperwork and find translators for their cases.
“I am quite good in the bureaucracy,” Khalil said.
At night, they played Russian and Mexican card games, while Khalil listened to “a story after another of people who did not understand what was happening to them.”
“This was one of the most heartbreaking moments,” he said. “People inside do not know if they have any right.”
Lost time
On June 20, after 104 days of custody, Khalil was ordered by a federal judge, who determined that government efforts to eliminate it for foreign policy reasons were probably unconstitutional.
Now face new accusations of misrepresenting personal data on your green card application. In a motion presented on Wednesday night, Khalil’s lawyers described those charges as unfounded and reprisals, urging a judge to dismiss them.
The weeks since his release, said Khalil, have brought moments of happiness and intense personal anguish.
Fearing harassment or possible arrest, he leaves the house less frequently, avoiding large crowds or night walks. But he lit while remembering having seen Deen take his first swim at the beginning of the week. “It wasn’t very nice for him,” Khalil said, smiling.
“I am trying to compensate for time with my son and my wife,” he added. “In addition to thinking about my future and trying to understand this new reality.”
Part of that reality, he said, will continue his efforts to advocate the Israel War in Gaza, which has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to the Ministry of Health of Gaza. The day after his arrest, he directed a march through Manhattan, wrapped in a Palestinian flag and flanked by security.
While poured Deen’s milk in a bottle, Khalil considered whether she could have done something different if she had known the personal cost of her activism.
“We could have communicated better. We could have built more bridges with more people,” he said. “But the central thing about opposing a genocide, I don’t think you can do that differently. This is your moral imperative when you are watching your people be killed per minute.”
