NEW YORK, Mar 15 (APP): Nearly 100 protesters were arrested Thursday after a sit-in at Trump Tower, a 58-story building belonging to the US president, in New York City to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student detained over the weekend by immigration agents.
The organization ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’ livestreamed the sit-in, showing hundreds of demonstrators packed into the building’s lobby.
Some held signs that read “Jews say stop arming Israel,” chanted “Bring Mahmoud home now!
The arrest of Khalil, who is in immigration custody in Louisiana after his arrest in New York on last weekend, has sparked an outcry by Democratic lawmakers, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian territories, and civil liberty advocates, among others.
In the lobby of Trump Tower, about 300 people donning red shirts chanted slogans seeking the release of Khalil and held anti-Israel banners, said Sonya Meyerson-Knox, a spokesperson for Jewish Voice for Peace, a group critical of Israel and U.S. policies toward the Palestinian territories. Over the weekend, federal immigration agents detained Khalil, a 30-year-old permanent U.S. resident, as officials said they revoked his status in the country.
Born in Syria and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, Khalil attended Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and completed his programme in December, his attorneys said. He is now in a detention facility in Louisiana as protests against his arrest unfolded around New York City, including a demonstration outside the Manhattan federal courthouse Wednesday during a hearing.
Organizers protested in the lobby for about an hour Thursday. Police began removing people in zip ties, Meyerson-Knox said. Police arrested 98 people, according to John Chell, a senior New York Police Department official.
Khalil was a lead negotiator in Columbia student encampment protests last spring that launched similar demonstrations on college campuses nationwide. Columbia demonstrators pushed for the university to cut ties with Israel amid the war, including with financial investments and student exchange programs.
On Thursday, the Columbia university said it had doled out a range of punishments to a group of students who occupied a campus building last spring during pro-Palestinian protests. The university asked New York City police enter the campus to clear the building and encampment. Authorities arrested dozens of people, though Manhattan prosecutors dropped charges for most last June.
The announcement came a week after President Donald Trump’s administration announced that it had canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts in response to what it said was the Ivy League school’s poor response to anti-Israel protest on campus.
The university said in a statement that its “judicial board determined findings and issued sanctions to students ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions related to the occupation of Hamilton Hall last spring.”
The university did not release the names of students disciplined, nor did it say how many students faced punishments.
One of the students expelled was Grant Miner, the president of Columbia’s student workers union and a Ph.D. student in the English and comparative literature department, a United Auto Workers news release said Thursday night. Miner was expelled a day before contract negotiations would begin with the university on Friday.
“The shocking move is part of a wave of crackdowns on free speech against students and workers who have spoken out and protested for peace and against the war on Gaza,” a union statement said.
On March 12, 2025, a U.S. judge extended his order blocking federal authorities from deporting a detained Khalil. His lawyers say his arrest by Department of Homeland Security agents outside his university residence in Manhattan was in retaliation for his outspoken advocacy against Israel’s military assault on Gaza, and thus violated Khalil’s right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
Neither the Trump Organization nor the White House responded to email requests for comment.
“As Jews, as people of conscience, we know our history,” Meyerson-Knox told USA TODAY in a phone interview from the building’s lobby. “We know where this leads,” she said.
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