'I am a political prisoner,' says detained Gaza activist in US
In his first statement from lockup, Columbia University student and activist for Palestinian rights Mahmoud Khalil described himself as a "political prisoner" who was targeted "as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent."
The statement was published exclusively by The Guardian on Tuesday, and in much of it, Khalil refocused attention on Israel's war on Gaza.
He was taken away from his home in New York by plainclothes agents in an unmarked car on 9 March. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally revoked Khalil's green card - his US permanent residency - because his position on Israel-Palestine was seen as "adversarial" to US foreign policy.
“My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” Khalil said. “With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”
“Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”
“Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities,” he added.
Khalil described how he was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which had been displaced from their land during the 1948 Nakba.
“I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention - imprisonment without trial or charge - to strip Palestinians of their rights,” he said.