Pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil is suing his alma mater, Columbia University, for failing to protect him and other students from harassment over their activism against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Khalil and other former Columbia students filed a lawsuit against the university in federal court Monday, alleging that Columbia’s administrators ignored their pleas for help against repeated threats as part of a pattern of “deliberate indifference” even before the attacks of October 7, 2023, The New York Times reports.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Khalil in March 2025 at his university apartment building despite the fact that he was a legal permanent resident and had not committed any crimes. He was detained for 104 days and missed the birth of his first child.
“I’m not suing Columbia for what ICE did,” Khalil told the Times. “I’m suing Columbia for creating the conditions for ICE to do what it did.”
The lawsuit says that Columbia didn’t do anything about the harassment faced by members of the SIPA Palestine Working Group, which Khalil led while studying at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. The group, formed in 2018 to “encourage a more holistic understanding of Palestine,” hosted discussions and lectures and also sponsored annual study trips to the Palestinian territories.
Allegedly, the lawsuit states, the university did little, if anything at all, to stop Islamophobic or anti-Palestinian rhetoric against the group’s members, and didn’t act when the group’s event flyers were torn down. After October 7, 2023, a pro-Israel organization, Accuracy in Media, acquired photographs and the names of the group’s leaders, which are only accessible to people with Columbia University passwords, and doxxed the students. Their names and faces were plastered on a truck circling campus with the words “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.”
“It felt like they didn’t bother to look or do the bare minimum,” Bhavana Bellamkonda, one of the other students suing the university, said to the Times.
The latest lawsuit comes after Khalil used the KKK Act of 1871 to sue the Trump administration in July, alleging that the White House conspired with right-wing Zionist organizations to intimidate, arrest, and deport pro-Palestine activists including himself. Since then, however, the Trump administration has redoubled its efforts to deport Khalil and other foreign students who disagree with the U.S. government’s stance on Israel and Palestine.
This story has been updated.
