Mahmoud Khalil writes to infant son: ‘My absence is not unique’

Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student who has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), wrote to his infant son in an opinion piece for The Guardian published Sunday, saying his “absence is not unique.”

“My heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry, that I could not unfurl your clenched fists or change your first diaper,” Khalil said in the piece.

“I am sorry that I was not there to hold your mother’s hand or to recite the adhan, or call to prayer, in your ear. But my absence is not unique. Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life,” he wrote.

Khalil was recently denied permission to go to his first child’s birth, and his wife said she welcomed the boy into the world by herself.

“This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer,” Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife, said in a previous statement.

In his opinion piece for his child, Khalil said late last month that he “waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world.”

“I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line,” he added. “During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the 70 other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch.”

Khalil had a notable role in recent Columbia protests, backing Palestinians and opposing Israel. In an opinion piece for a Columbia student newspaper last month, he said the school “laid the groundwork for my abduction” and pushed for the school’s students to “not abdicate their responsibility to resist repression.”

“The logic used by the federal government to target myself and my peers is a direct extension of Columbia’s repression playbook concerning Palestine,” Khalil said in an April opinion piece for the Columbia Daily Spectator. “In the 18 months since the genocidal campaign in Gaza began, Columbia has not only refused to acknowledge the lives of Palestinians sacrificed for Zionist settler colonialism, but it has actively reproduced the language used to justify this killing.”