The New York Times Quotes Adam Guillette on AIM’s Columbia Accountability Campaign
September 14, 2026
Mahmoud Khalil Says Columbia Failed to Protect Pro-Palestinian Students
By Sharon Otterman | Sept. 14, 2026 Updated 3:11 p.m. ET
A group of pro-Palestinian former student activists, including Mahmoud Khalil, sued Columbia University in federal court on Monday, accusing the institution of failing to address the persistent and severe harassment they said they encountered as a result of their advocacy.
Mr. Khalil, 31, became the face of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement on March 8, 2025, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested him at his Columbia University apartment building, even though he was a legal permanent resident and not accused of a crime. He spent 104 days in detention, missing the birth of his first child.
In the weeks and months before his arrest, he had repeatedly asked Columbia administrators to help protect him against the escalating threats he was receiving for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, he said in an interview on Sunday. He said he did not receive assistance.
Columbia’s failure to support him was part of a pattern of “deliberate indifference” against him and other pro-Palestinian students that began even before the Hamas-led terror attacks of Oct. 7, according to the lawsuit that he and fellow former students filed on Monday in Manhattan.
“I’m not suing Columbia for what ICE did,” Mr. Khalil said. “I’m suing Columbia for creating the conditions for ICE to do what it did.”
Columbia declined to comment on the litigation, but released a general statement in response.
“Creating a campus environment where every member of our community feels welcome, supported and safe is fundamental to who we are as a university,” said Samantha Slater, a Columbia spokeswoman.
Mr. Khalil, who still faces deportation, emerged as a foil for the Trump administration during its aggressive crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus protests. The 2023 and 2024 protests divided the Columbia campus, with thousands joining in, and others, including some Jewish students, saying they were too disruptive or made them feel unsafe.
But Mr. Khalil’s detention marked a frightening new phase for student activists, sparking demonstrations nationwide and crystallizing concerns that under President Trump, even a legal permanent resident could be detained for political speech. In recent months, Mr. Khalil has also filed a lawsuit accusing Trump administration officials, pro-Israel groups and a conservative think tank of colluding to suppress his constitutional rights.
The lawsuit filed on Monday seeks to hold Columbia responsible for failing to end the harassment it claims was faced by more than a dozen members of the SIPA Palestine Working Group, an advocacy organization that Mr. Khalil led while a student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs between 2023 and 2025.
The student group was formed in 2018 to “encourage a more holistic understanding of Palestine,” according to its mission statement. The lawsuit charges that when the fliers for the group’s events were torn down, or when group members faced anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic rhetoric from fellow students, Columbia did not do enough to stop it.
The lawsuit says that the treatment of the group worsened under the current dean of SIPA, Keren Yarhi-Milo, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. After she began as dean in 2022, the group faced extra roadblocks when organizing events compared with other organizations, the lawsuit claims. When its events did take place, Columbia sent security personnel, which pro-Palestinian students found intimidating.
After the Oct. 7 attacks, an outside organization, Accuracy in Media, published photographs and names of student group members that were accessible only to people with Columbia passwords, the lawsuit said. The students were publicly shamed on a truck circling campus with their faces under the words “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.”
When students met with Dean Yarhi-Milo to ask that she investigate who leaked the photographs, she initially dismissed their concerns, the lawsuit stated. The images were removed from the Columbia platform several days later, but the damage was already done, the lawsuit said.
Websites that Accuracy in Media created that accuse the former students of being antisemitic remain active.
In a statement, Adam Guillette, the president of Accuracy in Media, said his group had “repeatedly delivered accountability to Columbia’s pro-Hamas radicals,” using language that echoed the Trump administration’s description of pro-Palestinian campus protesters.