Columbia University protest ringleader Mahmoud Khalil was being investigated as a potential national security threat, a source said Monday — as President Trump warned the anti-Israel agitator’s bust will be the “first arrest of many.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was “presented with intelligence” that determined Khalil — a Syrian-born Palestinian who received his graduate degree from the elite school in December — was a threat to national security, a White House source said.
It wasn’t immediately known what intelligence Rubio was shown. But the source said the Department of Homeland Security has been “gathering intel” on those “actively engaging in supporting Hamas” — not just everyday protesters — since Trump’s executive order cracking down on anti-Israel demonstrators in the US on green cards.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin confirmed this in a statement that also alleged Khalil — who was a driving force behind many of the anti-Israel protests, building takeovers and encampments that have plagued the Ivy League school for more than a year — was involved in activities tied to Hamas.
“On March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” she said.
“ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.”
Trump took to Truth Social Monday afternoon to boast about Khalil’s arrest, and fired a shot across the bow of other colleges where anti-Israel protests have taken place.
“Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University,” he posted.
“This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” he warned.
Khalil, 30, was arrested at his university-owned apartment on Saturday, and is now confined at Jena/LaSalle Detention Facility in Louisiana, according to ICE records and a statement by his attorney, Amy Greer.
“They’re staging this guy for removal, but I don’t know where they’re gonna send him. We don’t have charter flights to send him to Syria,” another source said.
A Manhattan federal judge temporarily halted Khalil’s deportation Monday after the Columbia grad filed a petition with the court alleging that ICE had detained him illegally.
Khalil, who earned his graduate degree at the School of International and Public Affairs, was the lead negotiator for Columbia United Apartheid Divest — a group that sympathizes with terror organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah and calls for the “end of Western civilization” — during last spring’s anti-Israel protests and student encampment at the university.
Despite graduating in December, Khalil’s involvement in disruptive campus protests continued at nearby Columbia-affiliated Barnard College, which was the site of two campus building takeovers in recent weeks.
The unrest was sparked by the expulsion of two students for barging into a class on modern Israel at the exclusive women’s college and tossing stacks of antisemitic literature — including one depicting a burning Israeli flag and another with an army boot stomping on a Star of David.
Videos posted on social media show Khalil standing among the nearly 200 masked students who took over Barnard’s Milstein Library on March 5 — during which pamphlets praising the Hamas terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 were distributed — speaking into a bullhorn and engaged in negotiations with school administrators.
Khalil, in the Monday court filing, made a bid for his freedom and claimed ICE violated his constitutional rights by arresting him.
In the court filing, attorneys for Khalil said he’d been told by the ICE agents who grabbed him that the State Department had revoked his green card and that he would be brought in front of an immigration judge.
The White House source said the secretary of state has the power to revoke green cards, but legal experts raised questions about whether the administration had grounds to do so.
“The people with green cards have the same First Amendment rights as American citizens,” well-known NYC civil rights attorney Ron Kuby told The Post.
He said there are cases where legal residency can be taken away, such as, “if you’re convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude or if you’ve lied when applying for your green card.”
But Kuby said before that can happen, “there is a process that has to be followed where you go before an immigration judge and defend yourself, and the government files a case against you based on a legal violation.”
Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last month it would be paying a visit to 10 university campuses that have experienced antisemitic incidents since October 2023, when Hamas launched its brutal attack against Israel that killed more than 1,200 people and took dozens hostage.
Columbia was first on the Task Force’s list of universities, but also named were George Washington University; Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; New York University; Northwestern University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California.
Trump earlier this month clawed back roughly $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University, citing its noncompliance with anti-discrimination laws.
“The President, Attorney General Pamela Bondi, and the entire Administration are committed to ensuring that no one should feel unsafe or unwelcome on campus because of their religion,” Task Force chief Leo Terrell said in a statement.
“The Task Force’s mandate is to bring the full force of the federal government to bear in our effort to eradicate Anti-Semitism, particularly in schools. These visits are just one of many steps this Administration is taking to deliver on that commitment.”
Greer did not respond to The Post’s request for comment, but released a statement calling Khalil’s arrest “the US government’s open repression of student activism and political speech, specifically targeting students at Columbia University for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza.”
