On the night of 8 March 2025, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University and a lawful permanent resident of the US, was arrested by plainclothes federal agents in the lobby of his New York apartment building, in front of his wife, Noor, who was eight months pregnant. Before he was charged with any crime, he was put on a plane and shipped 1,300 miles to an immigration detention centre in rural Louisiana.

By the time we landed in Alexandria, Louisiana, 12 hours had passed since we left New York. And over 26 hours since my arrest. No food. No phone.

Where was I being taken? Did anyone know where I was? Every conspiracy TV series I had ever watched played in my head. Had they brought me here to disappear? To be killed in a place no one would find me? Would I be interrogated and tortured? My mind kept reaching for a worst case and finding one. Then reaching again and finding another beyond it.

My leg was swollen from the shackles. It throbbed with each heartbeat. I was silent for the entire trip. I asked no questions, passive like someone who has given up their destiny.

After what felt like an hour of driving through the woods, a light appeared in the distance. A compound, lit up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fencing and razor wire and glowing in the darkness like something that wasn't supposed to exist. The car approached some metal gates, but no guards stood outside. We waited for a good five minutes before an officer finally appeared. He looked surprised.

“We didn't know anyone was coming,” he said.

I had travelled for over a day, been passed through half a dozen hands, and yet I had arrived unannounced.

As they led me inside, I could barely walk. My leg dragged behind me, numb and stiff. They unshackled me at the intake desk. The officers here looked bored. Grumpy about a late-night task they had not expected.

They took my plastic bag and handed me a large white mesh bag. Inside: stiff, thin white polyester underwear, three pairs of blue trousers without pockets, three blue T-shirts, and one beige sweater. They directed me to change in a room behind a curtain, to take off everything I was wearing, put my things in an empty bag, and change into what they had given me.

I was trying to figure out where I was. What this place was. Whether this would be the last stop, or whether there were more stops beyond this one that I was not yet able to imagine. The guards indicated I should take a mattress from a pile and I grabbed one. They walked me through a corridor of wires and metal doors, each one buzzing open as I approached. Cicadas were screaming in the darkness, their sound disrupted by the frequent chatter crackling from the guards' radios.

A final door opened onto a large hall and the cold hit me. After the thick humidity outside, the air here was sharp, almost violent. A wave of relief washed over me. There were people here. A lot of them. Most were asleep. Rows of bunk beds stretched across the hall, men curled beneath thin blankets, covered head to toe like mummies. This wasn't an interrogation cell or a place where someone disappears without a trace.

A couple of men jumped from their beds when they saw me arrive. One was young and skinny, with a high Afro. He asked me something in Spanish. I shook my head, turned my palms up. Without another word, the two grabbed my mattress and placed it on an empty top bunk. I watched them, suspicious, certain they would take something in return. My eyes followed their hands as they moved my bag; I waited for one of them to slip something into a pocket. But it didn't happen.

I didn't understand the gesture then. I didn't know the customs yet, the jail etiquette. But I reckon they knew what it meant to turn up in the middle of the night, disoriented, thinking the worst. They knew the relief of being able to stretch out on a bed because they had been there themselves.

I hadn't slept in two days, but I still couldn't sleep. It was too cold. A hard mattress, no pillow and one thin blanket. Fluorescent buzzing above my head. I put the mesh bag under my head as a pillow. It was too uncomfortable, so I used my arm instead.

Lying on the bed, my eyes were fixed on the small white clock above the dorm's entrance as I willed the morning to arrive. But when did morning start here? I was able to count 37 bunks. The dorm was a hangar with high ceilings crossed by massive ventilation pipes that roared through the night. My bunk sat directly beneath the AC. The cold air hit me like a blade.

There were a couple of windows, narrow vertical slits, the glass blurred so you couldn't see outside. You could tell if it was day or night, but nothing else. There was a wall made of reinforced glass, floor to ceiling, so the guards could watch us at all times. Cameras in every corner, blinking red.

This would be part of the torture: lights round the clock, cameras in four corners, cold air, food at unusual hours, and roll call at least four times per day. But for now, I was reassured. My standards had sunk very low. And it could be worse. I knew the stories from US detention camps in Cuba and Iraq, Israeli prisons in Sde Teiman and Ofer, the Mukhabarat dungeons in the Arab world. This was not that. This was something else. Something bureaucratic and banal – yet cruel in its own way.

My exhausted mind circled the same questions: does Noor know where I am? Is it over? What comes next? What exactly is my crime? I told myself that they had had no case, that there were no legal grounds for my detention, that I would be released soon. But I was trapped in rehearsals of every outcome, from immediate deportation to indefinite detention.

The moment I saw someone approaching the phone booths, I ran over to him. It was now 7:00 AM. I asked about making a call. In Spanish, he managed to communicate that I needed a code. I rushed to the guard, told her I had arrived late at night and wanted to use the phone. She radioed someone and brought me a PIN code. Five digits I would use every time I needed to call someone.I picked up the receiver and entered the PIN. An automated voice spoke: this call is being recorded and monitored. By continuing, you consent to this recording. Then a series of instructions. Press one for this, two for that. The phone rang and every ring felt endless. What if she didn't answer? What if they had gone to the apartment, taken her phone, taken her?

Noor picked up. “Hello?” Her voice was cautious, not recognising the number.

“Habibi. How are you?”

“Mahmoud… ” She exhaled my name like she had been holding her breath for days.

“I'm in Louisiana. Are you okay?” I asked.

“Can you not be so normal?” she said.

Through the faint crackle of the phone, she told me she was okay, that our friends hadn't left her since my arrest, and she had been told I was transferred to Louisiana. In the past two days, I learned, a group of lawyers had come together to represent me pro bono and filed a case challenging the legality of my detention. She confirmed that I was in ICE custody pending deportation, but a federal judge had issued an order preventing the government from carrying it out. A court hearing was set in New York for Wednesday – two days away.

“The lawyers don't know the charges yet, and the government wouldn't let them speak to you,” she said. “Did they hand you any documents?”

I pulled out the crumpled papers from my intake and read to her the charges, verbatim. Serious adverse foreign policy consequences. The words still made no sense to me. She said that the lawyers were trying to set up a call with me as soon as possible.

I asked her not to tell my parents. I would be out soon – a few days. Maybe a week.

She laughed. “Mahmoud, Trump and the White House tweeted about you, and you're all over the news. Every channel is talking about your arrest.”

I couldn't absorb this. The president of the United States had tweeted about me. Me? I was nobody, nothing.

I saw my future unspooling all at once. I'm finished. This is serious. This is more serious than I ever allowed myself to believe. What did they have against me that they hadn't shown anyone? Everything I had worked for – the degree, the job offer, the careful construction of a life in a country that had promised me belonging – all of it had turned to ash. If my case had reached the White House… there must be something they hadn't shown me yet. Something fatal.

“What are they saying?” I asked.

Noor read the notes: “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student. Terrorist sympathizer. National and foreign policy security threat.”

“This is not me,” I said. “Did they show any evidence?”

She paused. “No. Nothing.”

Of course not. There was no evidence because there was nothing to show.

The irony is stunning. I have little patience for Palestinian factions: not Hamas, not the Palestinian Authority, none of them. I have always criticised their failures, their corruption, their inability to unite the Palestinian people behind a liberatory national movement. I have been frustrated by their ideological rigidity, their factionalism, their willingness to sacrifice the national cause for organisational survival and personal gain.

For Palestinians, evidence has never been the point. We are the exception to every rule the ‘free world’ claims to hold sacred. Innocent until proven guilty – unless you are Palestinian. Due process – unless you are Palestinian. Free speech and academic freedom – unless you are Palestinian. The principles dissolve the moment a Palestinian enters the frame.

It did not matter that I had never endorsed Hamas. It did not matter that I argued for a democratic vision of Palestinian liberation where everyone enjoys peace, dignity, justice, and prosperity. It did not matter that my politics were, by any honest measure, focused on equality, accountability, international law, and human rights. None of it mattered. The moment they decided I was dangerous, I became dangerous. The moment they called me a terrorist, I was one.

I tried not to cry while listening to Noor tell me about the outpouring of support, the protests in the streets, and the messages she had been receiving nonstop. By the time I hung up, I felt as if the whole world were behind me.

I learned where we were: a detention centre for undocumented immigrants called La Salle. Over 1,000 detainees were held here. Our dorm was called Eagle Delta. Even this prison was wrapped in patriotic symbols. This is American hypocrisy: locking people away beneath the image of freedom, caging the desperate under the wings of liberty.

The vast majority of the inmates were Spanish-speaking, with a few Russian speakers from Russia and the ex-Soviet countries. A handful of people were from India, Nepal, and other parts of the world. The Muslims were from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan – and there were two from Senegal. They were excited to learn I spoke Arabic and asked for help reciting the Quran. They also asked me to lead the Isha prayer. I hesitated. I hadn't memorised much of the Quran, and leading prayer felt like a responsibility I wasn't qualified for. But in a place like this, you do what is needed.

One of the Senegalese men, Niang, was the dorm leader. He and his countryman Hassan had been detained for over a year, picked up after crossing the border from Mexico. I would practise my French with them. Niang had ended up with the position the way most dorm leaders did – by being there long enough and by being someone the guards trusted to keep things calm.

Later that night, as I was trying to sleep, I heard loud cheers. A few men approached my bed, calling for me to look at the TV screen. It was split: me and Trump.

They were shocked. I was shocked. What I had heard on the phone from Noor was now right there, on the television, broadcast to a room full of strangers who suddenly began looking at me differently. I didn't hear what was being said, but I could see the words “protesta” and “terrorista” next to my name. An avalanche of questions in different languages followed. I tried to explain, but I myself had no idea what I had done.

Four days after my arrest I had the first call with my lawyers. I had so many questions. They tumbled out of me, one after another, the accumulation of four days of confusion and dread. How could they do this? What were the charges? How is any of this legal? When will I be out? When will I be returned to New York?

They had no conclusive answers, only mostly legal terminology that obscured as much as it revealed. They explained that they had filed something called a habeas corpus petition on my behalf. Baher, one of the lawyers, was generous enough to explain that the Latin phrase dated back to the Magna Carta, to the thirteenth century, when kings could make people disappear and the barons had to invent a mechanism to find them. Habeas corpus was a demand: produce the body. Show us the prisoner. Justify his detention, or let him go.

I was the body in question, shipped over 1,300 miles from New York to Jena, Louisiana.

The petition had been filed in federal court in New York, along with two requests or motions, one for release on bail while the case continued and another to compel my return to New York. Federal court was different from immigration court, I learned.

“Immigration court is not a real court,” one of the lawyers said. It is an administrative system run by the Department of Justice. The judges are government employees, appointed by the attorney general, who is appointed by the president – the same president who had tweeted about me. In immigration court, there is no presumption of innocence, no jury, and no real independence. The process is designed for efficiency, not justice.

The government had concealed my whereabouts in those first crucial hours, the lawyers said. No one knew where I was. New York? Elsewhere? They had even tried tracking flights to Guantánamo. They had filed an emergency petition at 4:38 AM to prevent my deportation, but by that point I had already been moved to New Jersey. By the time everyone figured out I was in Louisiana, the government was arguing that any legal challenge should be heard there, not in New York.

The battle, then, was over two things: which court system would hear my case, immigration or federal? And which venue, New York or Louisiana? Our argument was simple: I resided and was arrested in New York. This wasn't really an immigration case. I wasn't detained for violating immigration law. I was detained for what I said. For protesting and speaking out about Palestine. That made it a constitutional case, one where the First Amendment was crucial. Constitutional questions belong in federal court.

The government's argument was equally simple: you're an immigrant, now detained in Louisiana. This is an immigration matter. Stay in your lane.

As the lawyers talked, I began to understand the scope of what I was facing. This was not a mistake. It was not overzealous enforcement. This was deliberate and planned at the highest levels of government. The president had tweeted my picture. The secretary of state had invoked obscure powers. Multiple agencies had worked together to snatch me from my home and transport me across the country in less than a day.

By the end of the call, one thing was clear: the lawyers were as shocked as I was. These were experienced attorneys; some had worked on landmark Guantánamo cases. They had seen government abuse and overreach, but this was of a different order. The speed, the secrecy, the coordination. The invocation of powers they had never seen used before. They compared it to the Red Scare.

“This provision the secretary of state used,” – the Rubio Determination – “we're not aware of it ever being applied in a case like this,” one of the lawyers said. “It's unprecedented.” So I was not just a case, I was an experiment. The government was probing the limits of what it could get away with, using me as the “blueprint,” as the White House would later boast.

If they succeeded with me, a permanent resident with no criminal history, imagine what they could do to others. To the men sleeping in bunks around me, who had no lawyers, no press, no one watching. We would later learn, from the government's own court filings, that this law had never before been used against anyone with my status.

My case was the blueprint they wanted to create, and the one we had to tear up.

This was the turning point, the moment when I grasped that this was bigger than me. It was bigger than my case, my green card, my deportation. I had not been detained for a crime. They knew I never committed a crime. I was detained for what I represent, for saying something the king and his courtiers didn't like.

The king wanted to send a message, and I was the messenger, sent to everyone who might consider speaking out. Every student who might join a protest would get the message, every person who might dare to criticise Israel or question American policy, domestic or foreign. The message was simple: this could be you. Your rights will not protect you. Your innocence will not protect you. We can take you in the night, and there is nothing you can do about it.

If I chose not to fight the case, I could “self-deport,” the lawyers explained, and leave “voluntarily”.

On my bunk that night, my eyes wrapped in a makeshift blindfold of socks, I knew I couldn't walk away. If I left, they would call it a victory. They would say I must have been guilty of something. My departure would confirm their accusations without requiring them to prove anything. Every lie they told about me would be validated by my departure. The smear campaign would become the official record. And it wouldn't end with me.

If I self-deported, I would be handing them the road map for silencing dissent. Immigrants joining a protest would remember that green cards offer no protection, that years of building a life in this country can be erased if the government doesn't like their speech. Everyone would understand the new rules: speak up, and we will find a way to make you disappear.

The Palestine solidarity movement in America was already under siege when I was abducted. Students had been doxxed, smeared, suspended, expelled. Others had lost their jobs for signing letters or joining a protest. During his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to donors furious at the student uprising that he would crush the pro-Palestine protests and “set that movement back 25 or 30 years”. My case was meant to be the capstone, proof that they could go further than suspensions and firings.

I thought about the students I had met at Columbia, the ones who had risked their careers to pitch tents on the lawn, to demand that the university divest from companies profiting from occupation. If I fled now, what message would that send to them? That the fight wasn't worth it? That when the pressure got real, even the people who told them to speak up would run?

I thought about the Palestinians who had been waging this struggle for decades, long before it was fashionable, before celebrities posted about it on Instagram or walked red carpets with pins on their lapels. They had faced worse than arbitrary detention. They had faced ethnic cleansing, daily humiliation, dehumanisation, imprisonment – the loss of everything. Who was I to give up at the first serious test?

I thought of the people in Gaza buried beneath rubble while the world debated the justifications for their deaths. About farmers in the West Bank facing Israeli settlers who burned their villages with impunity. About the millions of refugees, scattered across the world, still holding keys for homes to which they could not return. They couldn't self-deport from their suffering. They couldn't sign a paper to make it stop.

I was the test case. And I refused to comply.