ICE officials and a prison contractor have refused to grant a contact visit between Mahmoud Khalil and his family, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, denying him the chance to hold his newborn son. The boy was born last month while Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian activist, remained in ICE custody in Louisiana.
“After flying over a thousand miles to Louisiana with our newborn son, his very first flight, all so his father could finally hold him in his arms, ICE has denied us even this most basic human right,” his wife, Noor Abdalla, said in a news release from the nonprofit civil rights organization on Wednesday. “This is not just heartless. It is deliberate violence, the calculated cruelty of a government that tears families apart without remorse.”
The ACLU said the refusal by ICE and the prison contractor GEO Group came after multiple requests from Khalil’s legal team pointing to federal policies that encourage contact visits between children and their detained parents. Officials, they said, cited “a blanket no-contact visitation policy at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center (CLIPC) and unspecified ‘security concerns’ relating to the presence of a mother and newborn baby in an unsecure part of the facility.”
Khalil, a 30-year-old legal permanent resident, was taken into custody in early March at his Columbia-owned apartment in New York City. He was a vocal member of last year’s campus protests over the war in Gaza.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Renee Anderson and
contributed to this report.
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