Student activist Mahmoud Khalil has announced that he is suing Columbia University and one of its deans, accusing them of systematic discrimination against Palestinian students.
"Today, I'm filing a lawsuit against Columbia University and SIPA (School of International and Public Affairs) Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo for their gross and systematic discrimination against Palestinian students at Columbia," Khalil told a New York news conference on Monday.
He accused the university of creating an environment that intimidates Palestinian students, stressing that Columbia laid the groundwork for his targeting by the US administration “through its deliberate indifference and discrimination aimed at intimidating Palestinian students.”
"For over two years, we pleaded with Columbia. Columbia did not care," he said, adding: "Our safety and well-being did not serve the ideological project its board of trustees was protecting, so they traded us away."
Stressing the need for the lawsuit, he said: "We are suing because no student, no student, regardless of their background, should ever have to go through the hell we went through over the past two years."
Khalil said the university banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, deploying surveillance mechanisms against students and faculty, and repeatedly called the New York Police Department onto campus.
"They launched a secretive, Gestapo-like office, the Office of Institutional Equity, that's only role is to harass me and other pro-Palestine students, to intimidate us not to speak out for Palestine," he said.
'Equal treatment'
He also said the university hired private investigators who contacted him during class to question whether he had attended certain events.
Khalil said Columbia President Jennifer Mnookin "must do the right thing and end discrimination against Palestinian students and their allies."
"What we're asking for is very simple: equal treatment," he said.
Khalil's lawsuit says Columbia "refused to correct disinformation" about him while he was detained, "allowing a false narrative about his conduct and role to persist and further enabling peer-on-peer harassment of other Palestinian students and students with perceived shared Arab and/or Muslim ancestry."
Instead of investigating reports of harassment, the university retaliated by characterising events by a pro-Palestinian campus group as security risks and revising disciplinary policy to target criticism of the Israeli government, according to the lawsuit.
Khalil, a lawful US resident and a former Columbia University graduate student, was detained in March 2025 without a warrant by immigration officers in New York City and transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he was held for months.
He missed the birth of his first child, and his deportation case remains active.
In January, a US federal appeals court ruled that a judge had no jurisdiction to order his release.
