In his new memoir, No Land to Stand On, Mahmoud Khalil provides a chilling look at the intersection of political dissent and the machinery of American immigration enforcement. A graduate student at Columbia University and a lawful permanent resident, Khalil describes the surreal moment in March 2025 when plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers seized him from his New York home. Without criminal charges, he was transported over a thousand miles to a detention center in Louisiana, targeted not for any illegal act, but for his role as an influential voice supporting pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
The book details a harrowing 104-day odyssey through a system Khalil describes as Kafkaesque, noting that he missed the birth of his son while trapped in legal limbo. Using a provision from the McCarthy era, the government attempted to deport him by claiming his presence posed adverse foreign policy consequences. While a federal judge eventually ruled his detention unconstitutional and granted him bail, Khalil uses his platform to highlight the plight of countless other detainees who lack his visibility or legal resources. He paints a grim picture of privatized prisons where inmates are treated as line items on a balance sheet, creating a financial incentive for corporations to keep beds full regardless of the legality of the detentions.
Beyond the prison walls, Khalil turns his critical eye toward Columbia University, depicting it as an ideological real estate empire more concerned with managing crises than addressing genuine grievances. He reflects on how peaceful vigils were branded as security risks while opposing harassment was dismissed as campus discourse. For Khalil, these experiences represent a warping of the American dream; having fled the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria only to find himself imprisoned by another superpower for exercising basic political liberties, he argues that Palestinians remain an exception to every rule regarding freedom and human rights claimed by the West.
