Immigration authorities denied an urgent request by Mahmoud Khalil to be temporarily released from detention, under monitoring, so he could attend the birth of his first child. His wife, Noor Abdalla, delivered their son on Monday in New York.
Khalil, who is being held at a remote Louisiana detention center, instead experienced part of the birth through a phone call.
Khalil's legal team wrote to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement official overseeing his detention on Sunday and informed her that his wife had gone into labor in New York that morning, emails obtained by NPR show. They asked her to grant Khalil a two-week conditional release so he could be present for the birth.
"Mr. Khalil would be open to any combination of conditions that would allow furlough from ICE's perspective, including a GPS ankle monitor and/or scheduled check-ins," the lawyers wrote.
A half-hour later, Mellissa Harper, the director of ICE's New Orleans Field Office, denied the request.
Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, was the first student protester that the Trump administration arrested in its crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists. Its attempt to deport him has become a major flashpoint in a growing fight over immigrants' free speech and due process rights in the second Trump term.
Since the Trump administration arrested and began deportation proceedings against Khalil last month, his lawyers had been urgently working to get him released in time for his son's birth. They've asked the federal judge hearing his challenge to his detention on constitutional grounds to release him on bail or at least have him moved back to the New York area. The judge has yet to rule on either request.
Marc Van Der Hout, one of Khalil's attorneys, said in an interview with NPR that for Khalil, his son's birth on Monday was bittersweet.
"He is happy to be a father, but he's extremely disappointed that he couldn't be there to support his wife, be there to hold his first child," Van Der Hout said. "And he had certainly hoped and expected that the government would show some humanity. But they did not."
Both Abdalla and the baby are healthy.
In a statement, Abdalla wrote that the denial of her husband's request "was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer."
She added: "My son and I should not be navigating his first days on earth without Mahmoud. ICE and the Trump administration have stolen these precious moments from our family in an attempt to silence Mahmoud's support for Palestinian freedom."
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this month, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled that Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, can be deported on the basis of a two-page memo that Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote alleging, without evidence, that his pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University was antisemitic. Rubio cited a rarely used statute that gives him wide authority to decide that a noncitizen's presence in the U.S. threatens foreign policy goals — in this case, combating antisemitism worldwide.
But the federal judge hearing Khalil's lawsuit challenging his detention as unconstitutional retaliation for his free speech has ordered the government not to remove him from the country while that case moves forward.
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