The wife of detained Palestinian student Columbia says she was naive to believe that he was safe from his arrest

Two days before US agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a college student of Columbia and Palestinian activist asked his wife if she knew what to do if immigration agents came to their doors.

Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife for more than two years, said she was confused. As a legal permanent resident of the United States, Khalil must not have worried about it, he remembers she told him.

“I didn’t take him seriously. Obviously I was naive,” said Abdalla, an American citizen who has been a pregnant eight months, said Reuters in her first media interview.

The agents of the American Ministry of Homeland Security are in the Loba on Manhattan on Manhattan on Saturday. Khalil’s arrest is one of the first efforts of President Donald Trump, a Republican who returned to the White House in January, to fulfill his promise to seek the deportation of some foreign students involved in the collapse protest movement.

Earlier on Wednesday, Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist in New York, was sitting in the first place by Manhattan courtrooms, while Khalil’s lawyers claimed a federal judge that he was arrested in retaliation for his open advocacy of Israel’s military attack on Gaza after an attack on a militant group 2023. They said to the judge.

The judge extended his command that blocked Khalil’s deportation while considering whether the arrest was constitutionally.

Trump said without evidence that Khalil, for 30 years, promoted Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist group managing a gauze. His administration said Khalil was not charged or charged with a crime, but Trump says his presence in the US is “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.”

On Sunday, Trump’s administration switched Khalil from an American immigration and customs prison in Elizabeth, NJ, near Manhattan, in a prison in Rural Jena, Louisiana, about 2,000 kilometers away.

Abdalla and Khalil met in Lebanon in 2016 when she joined the Volunteer Program Khalil overlooked a non -profit group that provides Syrian youth to educational scholarships. They began as friends before a seven -year distance relationship, they led to their wedding in New York 2023.

“He’s the most amazing person who cares for other people so much,” she said. “He is the favorite, true soul.”

The couple expects their first child in late April. She said she hoped Khalil would be free until then. She showed Reuters a picture of a recent sonogram: a boy whose name they still have not chosen.

“I think it would be very devastating for me and that he met his first child behind the glass screen,” Abdalla said, adding that Khalil insisted on everything cooking, laundry and cleaning through pregnancy. “I’ve always been so excited that I have my first child with the person I love.”

The government announced that the deportation procedure had begun to Khalil and to defend his custody in court proceedings by then.

Trump called the anti -Semite against the protest against the Israeli student and said Khalil “the first arrest of many who came.”

Khalil was born and grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, and now he came to a 2022 student visa, receiving his American permanent residence last year. In December, he completed his studies at Columbia’s School for International and Public Relations, but one has yet to obtain a master’s degree.

He has become a high member of the Ivy League University protest movement, often speaking to the media as one of the main negotiators with the administration of Columbia for many years of protesters to invest in school completion of their $ 14.8 billion in weapons manufacturers and other companies supporting the Government of Israel.

More than 1,200 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’ inflammation, in which 251 hostages were taken to Gaza, according to the Talties Israeli. Since then, the attacks of Israel have killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, according to health officers in Gaza, although Tally is probably significantly higher because more than 10,000 people are missing and believed to be lost under the ruins.

Trump’s administration says that the Pro-Palestinian protests at the college campuses, including Columbia, included support of Hamas, which they have now determined as a terrorist organization, and an anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students. Student protest organizers say criticism to Israel is misjudged with anti -Semitism.

The Faculty of Jewish Faculty in Columbia held a set and a conference for journalists in support of Khalilo outside the university building on Monday, holding signs that say, “Jews say not to deportations.”

But Abdalla said no one from Columbia’s administration contacted her to offer her help, which she considered frustrating.

She said her husband’s focus was supported by his community by advocating and in a more direct ways. She had a few short telephone calls with Khalil from prison, where he told her that he helped her other detained migrants with bad English filings written in Legales and donating food to his prison friends, purchased from the Commissioner’s account.

“Mahmoud is Palestinian and he was always interested in Palestinian policy,” she said. “He is advocating for his people, fighting for his people.”

Abdalla suddenly ended the interview on Wednesday when she saw Khalil called her from prison.