Detained anti-Israel protester Mahmoud Khalil worked for the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees while pursuing his graduate degree at Columbia University.
The campus rabble-rouser’s stint at the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees came after he held a senior position at the UK office for Syria in Lebanon for four years, according to multiple reports.
The role would have required a thorough background check and “rigorous security clearance,” Andrew Waller, one of Khalil’s former co-workers there, told The Guardian.
He was involved, too, with a British government program, known as the Syria Chevening Program, which dishes out fully funded scholarships to foreign students who “show potential to inspire” so they can study in the UK.
Khalil — a Syrian-born Palestinian who is also a citizen of Algeria — stopped working there roughly two years ago — right before he relocated to the US in 2022 to enroll at Columbia.
Just about three years later, he would become the poster boy for President Trump’s crackdown on anti-Israel college protesters.
Khalil, 30, was grabbed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Saturday at his Columbia-owned apartment building and later transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he faces deportation.
The new details about his trajectory before he became a student leader of last spring’s riotous campus protests emerged as Khalil, now a permanent legal resident, continues to fight the Trump administration’s push to revoke his green card and boot him from the US.
Born in 1995, Khalil was raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria after his grandparents were displaced from Tiberias, his lawyer has said in court papers.
After civil war broke out in Syria, he fled for Lebanon at 18, the Guardian reported, pursuing an undergraduate degree in computer science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
He then got the gig at the UK office for Syria, a diplomatic mission within the UK embassy in Beirut.
There, he worked in a support role that helped inform British foreign policy on Syria given his knowledge of the region, as well as his Arabic skills, the newspaper reported.
After rising up the ranks, he decided to pursue a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and moved to the US on a student visa in December 2022.
From June through November 2023, he was a political affairs officer with the UNRWA.
The infamous relief agency was stripped of tens of millions in federal funding after an explosive report that some of its members took part in Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Following the bloodshed and the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Khalil became a driving force behind many of the anti-Israel protests, building takeovers and encampments that plagued Columbia for more than a year.
He had a leading role in Columbia United Apartheid Divest (CUAD) — an umbrella of radical student organizations that sympathizes with terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and has previously called for the “end of Western civilization.”
Khalil acted as the main negotiator between CUAD and Columbia administrators during the encampment protests that saw scores of tents set up for weeks on the Morningside Heights campus.
The group also spearheaded the violent takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last April.
He has been pictured at various campus protests over the past year — speaking into bullhorns, taking part in dance circles and marching draped in a keffiyeh head scarf.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, while defending the Trump administration’s move to deport Khalil this week, said “pro-Hamas propaganda fliers with the logo of Hamas” were handed out at some of the protests.
Khalil has also been a regular fixture on news programs discussing the group’s disruptive efforts — including an interview on Quds News Network where he spoke in Arabic.
At one point, Khalil was filmed telling CUAD members during a forum that “we’ve tried armed resistance, which is legitimate under international law, but Israel calls it terrorism.”
He became a permanent US resident after marrying his wife, Noor Abdalla, in the Big Apple in 2023.
The pair had originally met in Lebanon in 2016 when Abdalla, a US citizen, was part of the scholarship program Khalil was overseeing at the time.
They had a seven-year long-distance relationship before tying the knot, she revealed in a Reuters interview this week.
The couple, who are expecting their first child in late April, live in an off-campus apartment owned by Columbia, where ICE agents detained him last week.
His lawyers are currently battling it out in court to prevent his deportation — arguing that ICE detained him illegally.
The attorneys argue Khalil — who completed his graduate degree in December — is being detained in violation of his First Amendment right to free speech, as “retaliation” by the Trump admin over views it disagrees with.
The Trump administration has argued it can legally boot Khalil given his role in the anti-Israel campus protests.
Officials have said that while Khalil isn’t accused of or charged with a crime, his actions are “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.”
Khalil’s wife, a 28-year-old dentist in New York, said her husband tried to prep her on what to do if an ICE agent showed up at their door, but she dismissed him — just days before he was nabbed.
“I didn’t take him seriously,” Abdalla told Reuters. “Clearly I was naïve.”