Noor Abdalla on the arrest of her husband, Mahmoud Khalil: "I was terrified"
"My husband was taken away from me in the middle of the night," said Noor Abdalla. "It was one of the most terrifying times of my life. I don't think I've ever experienced anything scarier than that."
Abdalla, a 28-year-old-dentist, born and raised in Michigan, has suddenly found herself in the center of a storm she never saw coming. She and her husband, 30-year-old graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, had been living in Columbia University housing while he completed his master's degree and they awaited the birth of their first child.
"I was so excited," Abdalla said. "We were setting everything up for, like, the nursery and his clothes. And Mahmoud is so excited, too."
That all changed on the evening of March 8, when federal agents arrived at their door. She recalled one man confronting her husband, asking him, "'Are you Mahmoud Khalil?' Mahmoud said yes, and the man said, 'We're with the police. You have to come with us.'"
Abdalla's reaction: "I was scared; I was terrified."
She used her phone to document what happened next: "At this point Mahmoud was like, 'Go, take the keys, grab my green card.' He thought maybe, like, if he shows the green card, you know, we'll be fine."
Abdalla also believed that her husband would be okay once he proved that he is a legal resident. "I was like, this is just a misunderstanding," she said. "They're gonna take him away, they're going to take him to 26 Federal Plaza, and see that he has a green card, he'll be home in a few hours."
She has not seen her husband since.
Protesting Israeli's bombardment of Gaza
Khalil, who has been in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana for two weeks, is one of many international students that the Trump administration says it plans to deport for their alleged actions in student protests on college campuses.
The unrest began in the fall of 2023, following the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. When Israel retaliated with deadly bombings of Gaza, students across the country erupted in protest.
At Columbia University in New York, demonstrations against the war, while mostly peaceful, also led to the occupation and vandalizing of buildings and what many Jewish students described as a threatening antisemitic atmosphere on campus. One student said, "We know now that there are students in our class that simply hate us because we're Jewish."
Abdalla says her husband, Khalil, a Palestinian born in Syria, became the lead negotiator between protesters and the university. To date, CBS News has not found evidence that Khalil has said he supports Hamas.
At a Columbia demonstration last April, Khalil told the press, "This encampment is a minor inconvenience compared to the generational-shaping events taking place now in Gaza."
Abdalla said, "People really, really trusted him to be good in that role, because he's so calm and good under pressure."
But in the days following Khalil's arrest, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt painted a quite different picture, calling Khalil "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."
Abdalla says it is not true that Khalil circulated pro-Hamas fliers. Asked if Khalil is pro-Hamas, Abdalla replied, "These are accusations that the Trump administration keeps pushing on him. I think it's ridiculous. It's disgusting that that's what they're resorting to, that that's the tactic that they're using to make him look like the person that he's not.
"It is just so simple: He just does not want his people to be murdered and killed," she said. "He doesn't want to see little kids' limbs being blown off, you know?"
Khalil has not been charged with any crimes, and the government has showed no evidence he provided material support to terrorist groups. Instead, Khalil's been arrested and detained under a provision of U.S. immigration law that allows the Secretary of State to deport any person whose presence or activities would "have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences" for the U.S.
On March 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan, "The bottom line is this: If you are in this country to promote Hamas, to promote terrorist organizations, to participate in vandalism, to participate in acts of rebellion and riots on campus, we never would have let you in if we had known that … If you violate the terms of your visitation, you are going to leave."
In fact, Khalil was never charged with vandalism on campus.
CBS News asked the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security for comment. We did not receive a response.
"Without precedent"
"There are many things about this that I think are sort of without precedent, or with very little precedent," said Lindsay Nash, an associate professor at Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan, who teaches and practices immigration law. "They haven't said that he's committed a crime that makes him deportable. They haven't said he has committed any kind of crime at all."
What's more, says Nash, the provision that the government relies on was once determined to be too vague and unconstitutional. The federal judge who made that ruling? Judge Maryanne Barry – President Trump's sister – who died in 2023. [Her decision was ultimately overturned on procedural grounds.]
Nash believes the provision that Rubio is leaning on is untested: "I think it is. I think we'll have to see, and courts will have a lot to consider."
So, who is Mahmoud Khalil? Incitor or conciliator? Legal experts say this case is about a lot more than a single man. "The idea that Mahmoud Khalil, one grad student at Columbia, is imperiling the foreign policy of the United States is absurd," said Conor Fitzpatrick, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He believes the true reason that Khalil and other students are being targeted is because of their polarizing viewpoints.
"Freedom of expression is hard," Fitzpatrick said. "It requires listening to, tolerating, and even defending views that you or I might find completely repugnant, that make our blood boil. But the alternative is so much more dangerous.
"The First Amendment and the principles of free speech are designed to protect the unpopular speakers," he said. "There is no such thing as an un-American viewpoint in the eyes of the First Amendment. Sure, if the administration could come forth with new evidence (that they haven't provided so far) showing that Mr. Khalil engaged in vandalism or engaged in conduct that would rise to the level of harassment, we would be having a very, very different conversation."
Ilya Shapiro is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Shapiro, who has called for a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, says this case is not about speech but what he says are illegal actions. "If the government establishes that he is a leader or a representative of a terrorist organization, or advances or espouses their cause, that is grounds for stripping him of his green card and removing him," Shapiro said.
"Nobody is being prosecuted for their speech," Shapiro said. "It's not that American citizens can speak freely, but non-citizens can't; that's not the issue. But with these immigration regulations, if you are a supporter of, if you're organizing together with others to [conspire] to do certain things, those are actions, and it's those actions that put you in askance of the immigration law."
But if Khalil wasn't charged with those crimes at that time, and isn't being accused of them now, should he be deported simply because people think he did it? "You don't have to be charged, let alone convicted of a crime, to be deported," Shapiro said.
Federal court and immigration judges will have the final word. While the case plays out in court, Khalil's attorneys have asked for bail.
Noor Abdalla fears he'll miss the birth of their first child.
Meanwhile, a Rasmussen poll released this past Thursday finds 45 percent of likely U.S. voters believe Khalil should be deported. [Thirty-eight percent disagree.]
His wife, a U.S. citizen, has now taken on a role she never wanted: answering questions she feels are often unfair, trying to change public perception. "It gets offensive when you're constantly having to say, 'I'm not this. I'm not this,'" Abdalla said. "It kind of brought back a lot of things that I experienced growing up in the United States. In New York the other day, me and my husband were walking and someone said, like, called me a terrorist. So, it's like constantly throughout my whole life. I think most Muslims in this country can relate to that. It doesn't matter what I say; that's what they think of me, and that's what they're going to think of me."
For more info:
- Lindsay Nash, associate professor of law, Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
- Conor Fitzpatrick, supervising senior attorney, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
- Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies, Manhattan Institute
Story produced by Sari Aviv and Sara Kugel. Editor: Steven Tyler.
