Mahmoud Khalil has memorized the license plates of the vehicles that park on his block. He keeps an eye on reflective surfaces — storefront windows, car mirrors — that help him monitor his surroundings. When strangers walk behind him, he stops to let them pass.
A year ago, Mr. Khalil, a graduate of Columbia University and legal permanent resident, was detained and became the face of the White House’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators. And more than 250 days after he was released by a judge, he is still living the life that the Trump administration imposed on him.
The government has accused Mr. Khalil, 31, of spreading antisemitism in the demonstrations that roiled the Columbia campus and, after he was already in detention, of failing to disclose pertinent information on his application for permanent residency. Mr. Khalil has said that criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic and that there was no failure of disclosure.
But the Trump administration has continued its efforts to deport him, leaving Mr. Khalil in a tense limbo, concerned that the courts might tip against him and that, even before that, the administration might arrest him once again, in violation of the law.
“The uncertainty really is like torture,” he said in a recent interview. He added: “I literally cannot plan anything. Whatsoever. A piece of furniture we cannot buy right now because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment on this article. The Justice Department referred to its filings in the case.
Mr. Khalil cannot work a regular job. Few employers are willing to take the risk of drawing attention from the Trump administration. And he will not go out alone with his 11-month-old, Deen, for fear that he will be detained and that the baby, an American citizen, will be taken.
Instead, Mr. Khalil fills his days by writing. He is working on a memoir for Metropolitan Books, an imprint within Macmillan, using his arrest last year as a jumping off point for the story of his life: a Palestinian refugee born in Syria and an heir to a generations-old family tradition of seeking a permanent home.
Mr. Khalil’s case is proceeding along two separate tracks — in federal court and immigration court — and in both venues, he has recently suffered losses. While Michael E. Farbiarz, the federal judge who ordered him released, has a standing order prohibiting the Trump administration from deporting Mr. Khalil, that ruling could be mooted in the coming months.
Mr. Khalil was arrested last year in his Columbia-owned apartment building as his pregnant wife, Noor Abdalla, an American citizen, looked on in horror. He was held for months in a detention center in Louisiana, even as other campus demonstrators were freed. In June, Judge Farbiarz ordered his release.
For a time, Mr. Khalil was winning.
Along with releasing him, Judge Farbiarz said that the legal basis for his original arrest — Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that he must be removed for spreading antisemitism — was unconstitutional.
But in January, a U.S. appeals court said that Judge Farbiarz had not had the authority to free Mr. Khalil or weigh in on the constitutional issues in his case. The proper venue, they said, was immigration court, which is under the control of the Justice Department.
After the January ruling, Mr. Khalil did not leave his apartment for several days, until his lawyers received confirmation from the Justice Department that the administration understood it would be unlawful to seek to detain him again. (Mr. Khalil asked that the location of his apartment not be disclosed, out of concern for his safety.)
Mr. Khalil’s legal team could ask a full panel of judges on the federal appeals court to review the decision. The deadline to make that request is later this month. If the judges decide not to review the case, Mr. Khalil’s next step would most likely be an appeal to the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, his immigration case is proceeding in front of the Board of Immigration appeals, a part of the Trump administration. Though for now, Mr. Rubio’s determination in regard to antisemitism is not a part of the case, an immigration judge has still recommended that Mr. Khalil be deported, determining that he declined to include pertinent information on his 2024 residency application.
His lawyers filed their brief last week, arguing that the immigration judge ignored “the overwhelming weight of evidence showing that Mr. Khalil did not engage in fraud or misrepresentation” on his application, and neglected to consider his argument that his arrest was a clear example of retaliation for his First Amendment protected speech.
The immigration board could also rule as soon as this month. If it upholds the immigration judge’s finding that Mr. Khalil could be deported, Mr. Khalil’s legal team would then ask a different federal appeals court to review that decision.
For the legal team, there is a perfect storm scenario: The Supreme Court decides not to pause his case. The appeals courts, in tandem, throw out any bar on removing him from the country. At that point, which could come in the next several months, he could be deported.
There is a potential lifeline. Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City last month asked President Trump to end Mr. Khalil’s case and that of four other immigrants from the New York-area.
Mr. Khalil said he was grateful for Mr. Mamdani’s support, and that he and Dr. Abdalla hope to raise their son in a New York with Mr. Mamdani as mayor. But he does not feel he can rely on a change of heart from Mr. Trump, who last year called Mr. Khalil a “radical foreign pro-Hamas student.”
Mr. Khalil sees an irony in the fact that his green card application, which brought him a permanent sense of home, is the tool the government is using to try to remove him. When he lived in Syria, he said, he’d had a temporary ID as a Palestinian refugee, and the same was true on his travel documents. “When I got a permanent resident card, that was the first permanent thing that I was able to get all my life,” he said.
In writing his book, Mr. Khalil is relying in part on diary entries he wrote during his months in detention in Louisiana, some contained in a little black notebook, others on loose leaf paper covered in flowing blue Arabic script. He kept the material hidden under a mattress in his cell.
“I felt like I needed to document this moment,” he said. “But at the same time I couldn’t write my thoughts on paper because I feared the government may take these pages at any time.”
He solved the issue by jotting notes on his immediate surroundings. The entries record images from detention: sitting in the yard, watching detainees play soccer and line up for a haircut. A young man asking whether his mother can visit him, terrified that she too will be arrested because she is undocumented.
As he writes, the entries are reminding him of that time, and the emotions are bubbling up.
He recalls sitting on the plane after being detained and sneaking a glance at the phone of one of the immigration agents sitting one seat over. On it there was a message telling the agent not to let Mr. Khalil speak to anyone, under any circumstances.
“Imagine at that moment how nervous I got,” Mr. Khalil said. “Why don’t they want me to have that phone call?”
ICE did not respond when asked about this episode.
Above all, Mr. Khalil sought to emphasize that his was not an isolated experience. His hypervigilance is shared by many, many others. “We see it across the country with immigrants deciding to stay inside, not going out, fearing that ICE will come after them,” he said.
At one point during the interview, he considered whether it would be appropriate to call himself paranoid.
“That was the brief feeling I felt before my detention, ‘Am I paranoid?’” he said. He remembered feeling he was, last March in the moments before he was arrested.
He was approaching his Columbia-owned apartment building, feeling nervous about the way he was being targeted for deportation online by pro-Israel critics and Trump administration supporters. He walked by the familiar bar on the corner and felt relief for a moment.
“I was like: ‘Oh, I was paranoid for nothing. Nothing’s going to happen,’” he recalled. He mounted the stairs of his building. And suddenly, he said, “someone was walking behind me who eventually asked me, ‘Are you Mahmoud Khalil?’”
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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