I found this report by apparently a sympathizer of his.
Khalil is Palestinian and was born and raised in Syria. At the time of protests in April 2024, he was in the U.S. on an F-1 student visa as a graduate student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs,
according to Al Jazeera. He took on a role as a negotiator representing CUAD, which also made him relatively public compared with many of the other protesters who were conscious about obscuring their appearances. In May, he told Al Jazeera he was concerned that if he faced disciplinary action by the university, he could lose his student visa.
Absolutely. During the encampment, two friends who were international students told me they wished they could be there but couldn’t risk losing their visas. There was a similar fear among low-income students, who didn’t want to risk their scholarships or lose on-campus housing. Many chose to participate in other ways, like sharing pro-Palestinian content on social media or bringing food and supplies to the encampment.
Khalil was a lead negotiator representing the student protesters to the Columbia administration during the school’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” last spring. The student group behind the encampment — Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD — had two main demands: that Columbia cut all its ties to Israel, including divesting and halting plans to build a “global center” in Tel Aviv, and that the protesters themselves receive amnesty for their actions. During the whole political firestorm, Khalil and administrators, including at least two deans, were literally at the negotiating table day and night, though they never came to an agreement.
After the first mass arrests, the
New York Post ran a
front-page article about how student protesters arrested by the NYPD mostly came from privileged backgrounds. Part of that is just Columbia, where the annual cost of attendance is over $93,000 and only about 50 percent of undergraduates qualify for need-based financial aid. But another part of it was self-selection: Students in more precarious situations — the most precarious being the very real risk of deportation — chose to modulate their speech in order to protect themselves.
I graduated in May and moved to Washington to work at POLITICO full-time, but based on my conversations with people who are still there, the answer is that the vibes have shifted less than one might think.
Columbia is surely one of the most progressive college campuses in the country. We call it the “activist Ivy” for a reason, and it has a long history — of which it is quite proud — of political protest dating back to 1968, when anti-war demonstrators occupied Hamilton Hall for about a week. (Columbia’s former President Minouche Shafik waited less than 24 hours before calling on the NYPD to drag out protesters who had taken over the same building in April.) I wouldn’t expect the gains President Donald Trump made among younger voters to be evident at Columbia — and, realistically, even if they do exist, conservative students tend to keep those views to themselves.
~S~
