Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs The activist Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent figure in the pro-Palestinian student movement at Columbia University, has been transferred to Louisiana after federal immigration officials arrested him over the weekend, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement website.Mr. Khalil is being held at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, La. His lawyer, Amy Greer, said after his arrest that he was a green card holder and that the detention would be challenged.Federal immigration officials did not immediately reply to questions about Mr. Khalil’s transfer, including why he was taken more than 1,000 miles from his home in New York City.President Trump hailed the arrest of Mr. Khalil in a Truth Social posting on Monday and pledged that more student arrests are forthcoming.“ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas student on the campus of Columbia University,” the president wrote. “This is the first arrest of many to come.”Mr. Khalil’s arrest drew outrage from students and faculty at the university. Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, described him as brave, yet mild-mannered and gentle — a “consummate diplomat” who worked to find middle ground between protesters and school administrators.Mr. Howley, who has known Mr. Khalil for about a year, having met him after Mr. Khalil began speaking out in campus protests, said he was frustrated by depictions of Mr. Khalil as a dangerous person.“This is someone who seeks mediated resolutions through speech and dialogue,” he said. “This is not someone who engages in violence, or gets people riled up to do dangerous things. So it’s really disturbing to see that kind of misrepresentation of him.”Mr. Khalil is of Palestinian heritage and graduated in December from Columbia with a master’s degree from the School of International and Public Affairs, according to his LinkedIn profile. He is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, his lawyer said.The arrest of Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States, represents a drastic escalation of President Trump’s crackdown against what he has called antisemitic campus activity.The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday issued a statement saying the arrest was unprecedented and illegal.“To be clear: The First Amendment protects everyone in the U.S. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate,” Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, wrote in the statement. “The government must immediately return Mr. Khalil to New York, release him back to his family, and reverse course on this discriminatory policy.”As news spread about Mr. Khalil’s detention, a petition calling for his release amassed more than one million signatures by Monday afternoon. A group of faculty members from Columbia prepared to gather Monday evening with Jewish community leaders and immigrant rights advocates to denounce what they described as “the unprecedented and unconstitutional arrest of a permanent resident and Columbia graduate student in retaliation for his political activity.”Sophie Ellman-Golan, the communications director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and a Barnard College graduate, described Mr. Khalil’s arrest as “so deeply wrong and scary.”“To target someone for their political speech in this way, to target a permanent resident in this way, is an aberration,” Ms. Ellman-Golan said.Mr. Khalil’s lawyer said that ICE agents initially told him that his student visa had been revoked, even though he had a green card, not a student visa. He was detained even after informing the ICE agents of that fact.Green cards, formally known as permanent resident cards, grant immigrants the right to live and work in the United States on a permanent basis. Revoking them is uncommon and is considered a serious step for the government to take.Green cards are typically revoked if the person lied or misrepresented something during the application process, failed to maintain residency in the country or was convicted of a crime. The federal government must notify a green-card holder that it intends to revoke the status, but only an immigration judge can formally revoke the card and issue a final deportation order.Immigration experts said Mr. Khalil should have received charging documents from the Department of Homeland Security indicating the statutory basis for the green-card revocation. The agency would then have the burden to prove those charges during the proceedings before an immigration judge.Immigration and civil rights lawyers said the Trump administration appeared to be targeting and retaliating against Mr. Khalil for engaging in constitutionally protected speech.“What is the purpose of doing a transfer when there are detention facilities within the geographical region of New York City?” where his lawyer and his wife could have access to him, said Robyn Barnard, an immigration lawyer at Human Rights First. “To me that just speaks of being unnecessarily punitive.”Hamed Aleaziz and Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting.
