Attorneys for Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University grad student who has been in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention for 10 weeks, are fighting to allow him to have physical contact with his wife and newborn son.
In a letter to District Judge Michael Farbiarz, Khalil’s legal team says the detention facility in Louisiana has not allowed Khalil to communicate with Noor Abdalla, his wife, and their month-old first child outside of “muffled communication through a full plexiglass window that permits no human touch.”
“In order to provide the most indispensable human connection and to help Mr. Khalil prepare for his ongoing habeas proceeding and for the upcoming immigration hearing, Petitioner’s wife and his newborn baby have traveled over 6 hours and 1500 miles to visit Mr. Khalil,” the letter reads.
The legal team said the officials at the facility have denied requests for a contact visit between Khalil and his family, despite his lawyers having a contact visit on Wednesday with Khalil in the facility.
“Such a visit is necessary for the most elementary human reasons and given the ongoing strain of his pending habeas petition, this visit is critical to ensure Mr. Khalil, who is an active participant his legal case, can continue to meaningfully contribute to the proceedings before this Court,” they wrote.
Officials for the facility have said a face-to-face meeting “would pose security concerns, such as requiring the visit to occur in an unsecure part of the facility or requiring Mr. Khalil’s wife and newborn inside a secured part of the facility,” according to Khalil’s lawyers.
The Hill has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
Khalil, a leader in Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protest movement last year, was arrested in February and swiftly transferred to Louisiana, becoming the first and most prominent case in the Trump administration’s crackdown on international students.
Abdalla gave birth to their first son on April 21.
“My heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry, that I could not unfurl your clenched fists or change your first diaper,” Khalil wrote to the boy in a letter published by The Guardian.
“I am sorry that I was not there to hold your mother’s hand or to recite the adhan, or call to prayer, in your ear. But my absence is not unique. Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life,” he added.
The Trump administration argues Khalil and other pro-Palestinian demonstrators pose a threat to the foreign policy of the United States, and it has successfully fought to keep him in detention so far, even as other foreign-born students held by ICE have been released as their cases proceed.
