More Than A Dozen Lawmakers Demand ICE Release Activist Mahmoud Khalil

In a letter, 14 progressives join the growing concern over Columbia graduate's unlawful arrest and the greater threat to freedom of speech.

More than a dozen progressive lawmakers have signed on to a letter demanding the Trump administration release Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil from detention, after he was unlawfully taken by agents for helping lead anti-war student protests on Columbia University’s campus last year.

The administration has been facing growing backlash over Khalil’s arrest, which happened Saturday night as he and his wife were coming back to their university-owned apartment. Plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took him without a judicial warrant, threatening to revoke his green card that makes him a permanent legal resident.

Khalil’s wife, who earlier made a public plea for her husband’s release, is a U.S. citizen and eight months pregnant with their first child. At the time of his arrest, ICE agents also threatened to arrest Khalil’s wife if she did not leave him and go up to their apartment. Agents would not give her nor their attorney enough information on the officers’ identities and Khalil’s whereabouts.

“He is a political prisoner, wrongfully and unlawfully detained, who deserves to be at home in New York preparing for the birth of his first child,” said the letter sent to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday. A spokesperson for Noem did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Khalil has still not faced any charges, making the threat of green card revocation that much more extreme. A judge has temporarily ruled that ICE cannot deport him until a petition filed by his attorney is reviewed. As of now, agents are holding him at an ICE detention center in Louisiana, thousands of miles away from his home in New York. His attorney, Amy Greer, is working to get Khalil transferred back to his home state.