NEW YORK CITY—On Saturday night, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents entered a student residential building at Columbia University in uptown New York and detained Mahmoud Khalil, one of the lead negotiators on behalf of pro-Palestine protesters at 2024’s Gaza solidarity encampment. In a sweeping attack on the First Amendment, the Trump administration said this week it would begin revoking visas of “Hamas sympathizers,” specifically citing Columbia University students. The detention followed a two-day targeted online campaign against Khalil by pro-Israel groups and individuals, including Columbia’s high-profile pro-Israel professor, Shai Davidai. Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian origin and an American green-card holder, was detained by DHS officials around half past eight as he was entering the Columbia residential building he lives in. He was returning from an iftar, breaking the day-long fast observed by many Muslims during the month of Ramadan.
Khalil’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, was with him at the time. A statement by the pro-Palestine group Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) stated that he was “abducted and detained without the physical demonstration of a warrant or officially filed charges.” At the time of writing, Khalil is still being detained at a DHS facility in New Jersey, according to a database for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
According to WAWOG, the DHS agents told Khalil that the U.S. Department of State had revoked his student visa. The group said this was “despite the fact that he has a green card, not a visa, and is a lawful permanent resident.” Khalil’s wife was unlocking the door to the building when “two plainclothes DHS agents forced their way in behind them.” They initially refused to identify themselves, she reported, but then threatened Khalil’s wife that if she remained with him, she would be detained too.
On Wednesday, Khalil was among the protesters at a sit-in at Milstein Library in Columbia University’s Barnard College, protesting the recent expulsion of three Barnard students over pro-Palestine activism. New York Police Department officers later arrested nine individuals from the same protest—the third round of arrests of pro-Palestine demonstrators on Columbia’s campuses in the past year.
Over the course of Thursday and Friday, several prominent pro-Israel groups and individuals published a series of tweets targeting Khalil, mentioning his presence at the sit-in on Wednesday and his history as a lead negotiator with Columbia in April 2024, and demanded that the Trump administration act strongly against him by revoking his visa and deporting him. They tagged President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and US Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Shai Davidai, a professor at Columbia Business School, who was suspended from entering Columbia’s Morningside campus in 2024 following allegations of misconduct against students and staff of the university, tweeted, “Illegally taking over a college in which you are not even enrolled and distributing terrorist propaganda should be a deportable offense, no? Because that’s what Mahmoud Khalil from @ColumbiaSJP did yesterday at @BarnardCollege”.
“Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U”—an account on X with more than 20,000 followers—tweeted, “Secretary Rubio (@SecRubio), please revoke Mahmoud Khalil's visa!” On March 6, Rubio had tweeted that “those who support designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, threaten our national security” and that such “violators of U.S law—including international students—face visa denial or revocation, and deportation.”
A pro-Israel student protester at Columbia shared that Khalil was “known to have been on a foreign visa last year” before stating that he “recently helped illegally take over a library building”. Canary Mission posted against Khalil on their social media profiles with the caption “SUSPECTED FOREIGN NATIONAL ALERT”.
A post on Instagram by “Documenting Jew Hatred On Campus” and another account, “Jews In School,” referred to Khalil as a “foreign student agitator at Columbia University” and “the poster child for demonstrating that the Trump administration is serious about revoking visas of foreign students who support terrorism, foment hatred, and harass Jews.”
Saturday’s actions against Khalil also took place against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s decision to cancel around $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. The White House has claimed that Columbia’s “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment” was the reason for this move.
Columbia University recently set up an office that is secretly investigating its students for political statements about Israel, Drop Site News reported this week, and is requiring students to sign non-disclosure agreements to view the evidence being brought against them. On Friday evening, Columbia University’s Interim President Katrina Armstrong said that the university has reworked leadership structures to “more swiftly respond to incidents of antisemitism and discrimination on campus.”
Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, had previously stated that he was accused by the university’s office of misconduct just weeks before his graduation in December 2024. “I have around 13 allegations against me, most of them are social media posts that I had nothing to do with,” he told the Associated Press in an article published on March 6.
After refusing to sign the nondisclosure agreement, Khalil reportedly said the university put a hold on his transcript and threatened to block him from graduating. But when he appealed the decision through a lawyer, he said, they eventually backed down.
There are a few ways to shut off the engine without touching the fuel switches, if this happened it should have been logged, but they haven’t released the raw data.
At this point in the flight the pilot flying should have both hands on the yoke, and the other pilot is responsible for raising the gear, flaps, making radio calls etc. Definitely neither pilot should have their hands anywhere near the fuel switches, but fatigue has been demonstrated to make massive mistakes possible. Raising the gear level is vaguely similar (you have to pull it out of a detente and flip it over a notch). Of course the gear lever is nowhere near the fuel switches, but that goes back to my point about fatigue. It’s extremely rare, but the safety mechanism for the switches has failed before, if this happened it would make accidentally flipping them an easier thing to do.
But as I’ve said, intent is a very hard thing to prove. The only times pilot suicide has unambiguously been proven is when they a)locked the other pilot out, or b) were recorded ranting and raving in the cockpit. Hopefully the AAIB can determine if there was a mechanical fault. But if they determine that the switches are the reason, I would guess the final report would say the cause is “due to activation of the fuel cutoff switches for unknown reasons”, or some variation of that.
Take Air France 447, for example. The first officer pulled the nose up while in a stall and held it in that position despite every pilot learning on day one to do the exact opposite. He continued to do so even when the captain told him to push the nose down. Was that pilot suicide? A possibility, yes, but something that’s unprovable.