Mahmoud Khalil describes ice arrest as a

The student at Columbia University and the Palestinian Rights activist Mahmoud Khalil said that his arrest for federal immigration agents and the subsequent detention of the months seemed to be kidnapped, and that he will use his recent freedom to continue fighting not only in the name of Gaza, but also by immigrants without adjustment of the United States.

Khalil, 30, was released on Friday after 104 days of detention at an immigration and customs center in the United States in Jena, Louisiana. The activist was taken from his house in New York City in March by ice agents after leading peaceful protests at Columbia University against the Violence campaign financed by the United States of Israel in Gaza.

“All the information and the flyers of ‘Know their rights’ that I read and familiarized myself were useless,” Khalil told New York Times in his first interview since he was released. “There are no rights in such situations.”

The activist told Times that his arrest reminded him of how the Syrian government operated while growing in Damascus. Khalil fled the country for Lebanon just after he turned 18 when he learned that the agents of the Syrian government had disappeared two of his friends.

His arrest in March, the initial 30 hours of which he went completely cut from communication with his pregnant wife, was the experience he had tried to flee, he said.

“I felt that I was literally being kidnapped, where you have literally civil agents that took you out of your apartment building without presenting themselves, without presenting an arrest warrant,” he told a crowd on Sunday in a demonstration in New York that welcomed him.

Kena Betancur/News through Getty Images

Khalil has not yet been accused of a crime, although his immigration case continues to reach the Court. He is married to an American citizen and obtained his green card in November.

“It was often difficult to find patience in my detention,” he said in the rally. “The center was full of hundreds of people who told him that his existence is illegal, and none of us knows when we can go free.”

Khalil described sharing a “bedroom” with more than 70 men while being detained at ICE facilities in Jena, the lights always lit without privacy. He told The Times that “he did everything possible to make sense of my suffering there”, so he spent a few hours translating the questions of other men for the authorities to English so that they could communicate their needs, such as “what had happened with the money in the account of someone’s police station, or why they had not received their medications.”

The activist said he listened to “a tragic story after another” of his fellow detainees, remembering a four -year -old father whose wife is fighting against cancer and a man who was deported after living in the United States for more than 20 years. Khalil himself lost the birth of his son Deen while he was detained.

Spencer Platt through Getty Images

“It is so normal to see men cry, because they can’t understand why they are there. They know they have no documents, but do this really mean they should be detained?” said. “What is happening behind the ice arrest doors is horrible. It is a stain in the Constitution of the United States, it is a stain in the consciousness of the United States, because I fear that in a couple of decades we look back to what is happening now and regret it.”

“Mahmoud is free now, but we have not finished, because this is bigger than a man, a family or a moment,” said his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, at the rally. “Mahmoud’s liberation is a victory, but it is not justice. Justice is responsibility. Justice is no more destroyed families.”