Mahmoud Khalil appears at length in a new documentary, ‘The Encampments.’ Image by screenshot/Watermelon Pictures
By Louis Keene
March 27, 2025
Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate detained by ICE for his role in pro-Palestinian protests at the school, acknowledged he could be deported in a new documentary filmed prior to his arrest.
Asked what would happen to him if he were deported, Khalil said, “I will live, I will continue to live. The Palestinian people have been living under occupation, ethnic cleansing, and all sorts of crimes since 1948 and we prevailed. We will prevail no matter what will happen.”
The documentary, Encampments, about the movement that swept college campuses across the country in 2024, features extended footage of Khalil — leading student demonstrations at Columbia, giving interviews to national media, and, in an interview recorded after the protests, describing his family’s expulsion from Israel in 1948.
The remarks provide the closest look at Khalil’s worldview since his arrest on March 8 made him arguably the most famous pro-Palestinian protester in the world. Khalil, a green card holder who has not been charged with a crime, is currently being held in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, though a judge has temporarily blocked his deportation.
President Donald Trump has said Khalil and other foreign students face deportation for “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” The State Department has issued arrest orders for at least nine foreigners who made pro-Palestinian statements, in some cases employing a rarely-used line in a 1952 immigration law that permits the Secretary of State to deport noncitizens whose ongoing presence in the U.S. poses a threat to national security.
In the film, which premiered Thursday in New York, Khalil says the students pushed the university to disclose its investments and divest from Israel to restore its integrity.
“What university in the world wants to invest in weapons manufacturers?” he says. “Why would you do that? You’re concerned with education. We’re literally giving you back the university to be a moral university.”
Co-produced by the rapper-turned-activist Macklemore, Encampments fits into a growing canon of documentary films about Israel/Palestine and the American discourse about the conflict that focus exclusively on one side of it.
While the documentary often references October 7 as a date things changed on campus, it never mentions what happened that day. It never mentions Hamas, or explores why Israel launched the war in Gaza the students are protesting.
Khalil notes, for example, that “before Oct. 7, the university was cracking down on Palestinian activism on campus. They pushed a certain narrative, a narrative that’s supporting Israel, that’s vilifying the Palestinians, and Oct. 7 just gave them more opportunity to crack down more and more on us.”
Khalil lends historical context to the documentary as a Palestinian refugee himself. His grandparents, he says, lived near Tiberias, where they peacefully shared farmland with their Jewish neighbors. In April 1948, after Israeli forces burned a nearby village, he says, they fled 40 miles on foot. His grandmother gave birth on the way.
“My father was born in a tent,” he says.
He was appointed to lead negotiations with Columbia on behalf of the encampment, he says, because of his experience at the U.N. and at the British embassy, where he served in the Syrian office. He is seen in the documentary keeping the students apprised of the negotiations, telling them, “Not at any moment are we trusting the administration, even when they are conceding to our demands.”
But the movie depicts him as conciliatory, not antagonistic. In one clip, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asks Khalil what he would say to Jewish students who feel unsafe on campus in light of their protests.
“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined, they go hand in hand,” Khalil responds. “Antisemitism and any force of racism has no place on this campus and in this movement.”
He says he only shut down negotiations with Columbia after it threatened to arrest the students if they didn’t accept the university’s offer.
“They underestimated the will of the students. They literally feel that these are just kids,” he said. “They would say, ‘Oh, you’re overestimating your power or your influence.’ But then after the fourth day, they were just so silent. Because clearly it’s a global movement.”
Khalil is not the only activist featured in the documentary, nor is he the only one to have been disciplined between its filming and its release. Grant Miner, a student expelled by Columbia earlier this month for his participation in the takeover of Hamilton Hall, explains that joining the protests deepened his Jewish identity. Rabbi Abby Stein, a Columbia alum and trans activist, also appears briefly.
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