Mahmoud Khalil met with Democratic lawmakers Tuesday on Capitol Hill on the one-month anniversary of his release from immigration detention.
His three months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody wasn’t the primary focus of Khalil’s visit, however.
Khalil and his team met with eight lawmakers Tuesday, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Summer Lee to advocate for ending U.S. aid to Israel, according to Khalil’s spokesperson. Rep. Rashida Tlaib also met with Khalil, according to reporters.
In an interview with NOTUS, Khalil called his meetings a “step forward” in his quest to continue advocating for Palestinians. But he also said that the outcomes of his meetings were “not entirely the way that I wanted them to be.”
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“Some of them are brilliant, just not all of them,” he said of the lawmakers he met with and the responses they offered him. All of the lawmakers that his spokesperson named have been vocal in supporting Palestinians and in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
He said he also asked lawmakers to hold the Trump administration and Columbia University accountable for their crackdown on immigrants and student protestors.
“I want to explore every avenue of accountability, every avenue of advocacy, so that change happens, so that the weapons stop flowing into Israel, so that this administration is held accountable,” he said.
Progressives and Palestinian rights activists have criticized multiple lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — one of Congress’s most vocal critics of Israel — and other Democrats more generally, this week for failing to vote against providing U.S. funding for Israel’s missile-defense systems. Protestors vandalized Ocasio-Cortez’s New York office after she voted against an amendment in a defense spending bill that would have stripped federal funding for Israel’s Iron Dome.
Ocasio-Cortez, who was with Khalil when he was released from ICE custody, explained her vote on X, saying that the amendment — put forward by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — only “cut off defensive Iron Dome capabilities.”
“I remain focused on cutting the flow of US munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide in Gaza,” she wrote.
Khalil said he did not meet with any Republican lawmakers on Tuesday, adding that he wanted to focus on a small group of members but hopes to meet with more lawmakers from both parties during potential future visits to the Capitol.
While Khalil’s Washington visit was focused on the U.S.’s support for Israel, he has continued to raise awareness about his time in immigration detention. Khalil filed a lawsuit earlier this month against the Trump administration for false imprisonment.
He also told NOTUS that even a month after his release — and after multiple other formerly detained migrants have come forward about their experiences in ICE custody — he does not think there is enough awareness about the conditions in federal detention centers.
Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States who was involved in Palestinian rights protests as a graduate student at Columbia University, in March was detained by ICE and held for 104 days at an ICE facility in Jena, Louisiana. He was released last month and returned home to New York City after a federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration could not hold him.
“I was in Louisiana, 1,400 miles away from my home, in a very isolated detention center, because such centers are designed to be hidden,” he said. “They’re designed to be black holes that no one would visit, no one would look at these conditions, to keep them just as isolated as possible.”
He added that the “level of dehumanization” he saw while in ICE custody shocked him.
Conversations about immigration detention conditions and ICE are prevalent in Congress, especially among Democrats. In floor speeches, committee hearings and statements, lawmakers have decried the reported conditions at detention centers and criticized ICE’s decision to deny attempted oversight visits.
Khalil said he wants lawmakers to continue talking about those topics, and that he also plans to continue his advocacy despite threats of retaliation and the Trump administration’s continued deportation case against him.
“The retaliation is already happening. It’s not like if I remain silent, or if I hid my face, that wouldn’t stop the retaliation,” he told NOTUS.
“This is why I would continue to speak up, so that there is accountability, so that this administration wouldn’t get away with their wrongdoing, with their overreach, with their unconstitutional arrest against me,” he continued. “It’s imperative to me to continue speaking up for the rights of my people.”
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