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THE RADICAL COURAGE OF NOOR ABDALLA  
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Aida Alami
May 21, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ How the wife of Mahmoud Khalil has navigated becoming a new mother
while fighting for her husband’s freedom. _

Noor Abdalla, Photograph by Caitlin Ochs / Reuters

 

Last Sunday, Noor Abdalla drove from her apartment in Morningside
Heights to St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church, on the
Upper West Side. She was with her sister and her month-old son, Deen;
the occasion was an alternative graduation ceremony for students at
colleges and universities in New York who had been expelled or
suspended for protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. Inside the church,
preparations were under way, with photographs of the protests
projected on a far wall and signs hung elsewhere that read “_WAR
CRIMINALS OFF OUR CAMPUS_” and “_FREE PALESTINE_.” Abdalla made
her way to the pastor’s office, where she left Deen sleeping soundly
in his stroller. “Honestly, he’s a really good baby,” Abdalla,
who is twenty-eight, told me. “Obviously, I’m biased; I’m his
mom. But he’s really good. You know, as long as he’s fed, he’s
happy.”

Abdalla, a dentist who grew up in Flint, Michigan, is a U.S. citizen.
Her husband, Mahmoud Khalil
[[link removed]],
a Palestinian who recently graduated from Columbia University’s
School of International and Public Affairs, is a permanent green-card
holder. He was arrested in March, during Ramadan, as the couple
returned to their apartment after iftar, and he is currently being
held in an _ICE_ detention center in Louisiana. Khalil had been
worrying for days that authorities were after him. He was the subject
of a doxxing campaign on _social media_
[[link removed]], with one
Columbia professor asking
[[link removed]] Secretary of
State Marco Rubio to take “strong action.” But, as Khalil and
Abdalla walked home that night, Khalil seemed calm. “That was the
first night that he was, like, ‘I’m being dramatic, nothing is
gonna happen,’ ” Abdalla told me. Shortly after reaching the
lobby of their building, Khalil was handcuffed and led away. Abdalla
was eight months pregnant. She hasn’t seen him in person since.

In the weeks that followed, at least seventy-eight more
students _were arrested_
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part of the university’s wider crackdown on antiwar protests. In
April, Abdalla’s water broke. A friend assisted her during her first
contractions. Her mother, who was set to fly in from Michigan that
day, arrived a few hours earlier than planned to insure she would be
with her daughter at Lenox Hill Hospital when the baby was born.
Khalil and Abdalla had narrowed a list of names down to three—Deen
was one, and the other options were Younes and Idriss. Through a
friend, Khalil had sent her flowers along with a card addressed to
“Oum Deen” (“Deen’s mother”). Abdalla wasn’t sure if
Khalil, who had been “on the fence” about the name, was joking.
Soon after, they spoke on the phone and made a final decision. “I
was so scared that he was going to miss the birth of Deen,” she told
me. “It was something I would get so emotional about, and it ended
up happening, and I was O.K. I survived.”

Khalil is one of several pro-Palestinian voices at U.S. colleges and
universities who have been detained since the start of the second
Trump Administration. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student
and a Fulbright scholar at Tufts University, was arrested in April,
apparently for co-authoring an opinion piece about Gaza. (She was
released on bail earlier this month.) Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown
scholar, and Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student, were also arrested
last month. (Both have since been released; Mahdawi attended his
graduation on Monday.) Khalil remains in custody, as the federal judge
assigned to his case has not yet ruled on either a bail motion or a
motion for a preliminary injunction. Such a ruling could come out at
any time. But it could also come too late. The government could decide
to preëmptively deport Khalil, whose next immigration hearing is
scheduled for Thursday.

While Khalil’s case drew international attention, Abdalla has had to
grapple with the anxieties of learning to be a mother. There have been
sleepless nights, some difficulties breast-feeding. Meanwhile, she
constantly checks her phone for updates on her husband. She says the
baby has his father’s temper—and her chin. He enjoys being
outside. Abdalla takes him on long walks around the city, though she
worries that, one day, she will be recognized, and that it will not be
“a very nice interaction.” “I put on a good face for people,”
she told me. “I’m trying really hard not to go into a little dark
hole of, like, sadness.”

Khalil and Abdalla met in Lebanon, where Abdalla, as a college
student, spent a month volunteering with an education nonprofit. Her
parents had moved to the United States from Syria—her father for a
medical residency, and her mother, later, to teach Arabic. Khalil grew
up in a refugee camp in Syria. He had been displaced to Lebanon when
he was eighteen, after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. He taught
himself English while working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and went
on to earn a degree in computer science from the Lebanese American
University in Beirut. When Abdalla travelled there as a volunteer,
Khalil was her main point of contact on the ground. Her father had
worked as a taxi-driver before becoming a doctor, and she admired
Khalil’s ability to advance his career with few resources. Khalil
had once told her that he wouldn’t marry before the age of forty,
but, in the years that followed, their friendship evolved. In 2023,
they were married.

Studying at Columbia—the home of such Palestinian scholars as Edward
Said and Rashid Khalidi—had always been a dream of Khalil’s. (I am
a full-time visiting faculty member at Columbia’s journalism
school.) He had been admitted to the university’s School of
International and Public Affairs in 2022, but he couldn’t afford to
attend. The following year, he got a scholarship and enrolled that
January, nine months before Hamas launched its attack
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southern Israel, on October 7, 2023. Israel’s response, an invasion
of Gaza that has killed an estimated fifty-three thousand people,
sparked waves of rallies at Columbia. Khalil, known for his charisma
and his conciliatory manner, eventually became a mediator,
representing the protesters in talks with the university’s
administrators. He had made a point of not covering his face during
demonstrations. “We’ve talked about the mask thing,”
Abdalla told
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March. “He always tells me, ‘What I am doing wrong that I need to
be covering my face for?’ ”

On March 5th, the _Columbia Daily Spectator_ reported
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more than two dozen students had staged a sit-in at Barnard College,
demanding the reversal of suspensions issued to classmates who had
participated in an earlier protest on campus. Videos of N.Y.P.D.
officers _arresting_
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at the sit-in went viral. One of the students was Yunseo Chung, a
permanent resident who has lived in the U.S. since she was seven. She
is currently being targeted by _ICE_ officers for arrest and
deportation; after she sued the Department of Homeland Security, a
federal court issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the
agency from detaining her.

A day after the arrests at Barnard, a pro-Israeli professor, who had
been temporarily barred from the Columbia campus for “threatening
behavior” online, posted a video of Khalil during the demonstration.
“Illegally taking over a college in which you are not even enrolled
and distributing terrorist propaganda should be a deportable offense,
no?” he wrote
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that’s what Mahmoud Khalil from @ColumbiaSJP did yesterday at
@BarnardCollege.” The post was directed at Marco Rubio. Two days
later, _ICE_ agents arrested Khalil.

The ceremony at St. Paul and St. Andrew was the work of student
organizers. A year earlier, a similar event
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taken place following a lockdown at Columbia; the university, after
dismantling the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, had cancelled all
graduation celebrations. Abdalla told me that Khalil had been so
excited about his graduation, which was scheduled for Tuesday, May
20th, that he had bought his cap and gown a year in advance. He was
hoping to take photos at the ceremony that he would one day share with
his son. “He’s not gonna be able to go to his graduation,”
Abdalla said. “It’s just another thing that’s taken away from
him.”

Instead, at the People’s Graduation, held in the church’s main
sanctuary, Abdalla was the guest of honor. She was there on behalf of
her husband but also, she told me, to celebrate the community that has
helped her through the most trying period of her life—cooking for
her, keeping her company, helping her prepare for the arrival of her
son. The other students being honored, and the friends and family who
gathered with them, were the people who hoped, along with Khalil, that
their organizing would make a difference, would change their
institution, would press for change, and would stop the bombs from
falling on civilians in Gaza. “The main thing for tonight is I
really want to make sure that people know how grateful both me and
Mahmoud are,” Abdalla said. “We’re surrounded by so much love
and so many people that love us and support us and have been
incredible for the past two months.”

Abdalla had prepared her speech a few days earlier; she was no
stranger to public speaking. In 2018, she was the commencement
speaker [[link removed]] at the
University of Michigan–Flint, where she graduated with honors. Back
then, she spoke about the realities of war in Syria and, also, about
her own privilege. “I go to class and I know that I am safe in so
many ways,” she said. “I am safe to speak my mind whenever I feel
it necessary.” At Michigan, she had participated in on-campus
demonstrations against the Syrian war. “As an undergrad student,”
she told me, “what can you do? You go to protests, you plan vigils,
you make sure that people keep talking about something that you care
about and something that’s important.” Now, at the church, she
found it difficult to reflect on those ideas. “Is there still a
level of freedom of speech that we have here?” she said. “Yes. But
when I look at what happened with my husband, and I’m, like, do we
really have freedom of speech?”

As Abdalla readied Deen for the ceremony, cheers could be heard in the
main hall. The event’s featured speakers, including the Palestinian
writer Mohammed el-Kurd, the Tunisian singer Emel Mathlouthi, and the
actor Susan Sarandon, were arriving. A box in the room where Abdalla
was getting ready contained dozens of pieces of fabric with the names
of Palestinians killed in Gaza written on them in both English and
Arabic. Abdalla pinned one on herself: “Azhar Ibrahim Ayesh Shaheen
age: 22.” Deen was wearing a miniature cap and gown with text
printed on the back that read “They tried to bury us but they did
not know we are seeds.”

At around 8 _P.M._, Abdalla entered the room, leaving her son with
her younger sister. Onstage, a chair was dressed in a Columbia
commencement gown, with a white-and-red kaffiyeh; on the seat was a
framed diploma with Mahmoud Khalil’s name on it. Abdalla sat in the
front row. Sarandon stepped up to a podium that read “Free
Mahmoud.” “Now, it is my deep honor to introduce someone whose
presence tonight speaks to something far bigger than a ceremony,”
she said. “Noor is not a proxy. She is a force, a scholar, a healer,
a woman whose brilliance is matched only by her compassion.”

When it was Abdalla’s turn to speak, she told the audience, “I was
not supposed to be standing here today. Mahmoud was.” She paused a
few times, overwhelmed by emotions. “To the students here today, you
spoke when silence was the easier choice,” she said. “You stood
firmer when these institutions failed you. True justice and education
must include the freedom to dissent, the right to speak out for human
rights, and the courage to stand in solidarity with the oppressed.”
Then she read some words from Khalil: “Columbia University, the
place where we sought knowledge, justice, and truth, chose silence
instead of solidarity. It failed me, but you didn’t.”

After the speakers were done, a roll call of names was announced. A
procession of students walked to the stage. Abdalla, holding her baby,
went first. She was handed a symbolic diploma on behalf of her husband
by Edward Said’s daughter, Najla. She turned, saluted the crowd, and
then left through a door at the back of the altar. Other students
continued marching, while a vocalist sang “We Shall Overcome.”
Abdalla left before the ceremony ended. It had been a long day, and
she wanted to take Deen home. “I’m not gonna lie and say it’s
easy—it’s not, it sucks,” she told me. “But I’ve had my
family here supporting me, helping me.” She added, “You know,
we’re taking it one day at a time.” ♦

 

* Noor Abdalla
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* Mahmoud Khalil; Columbia University; Trump
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