Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate student arrested by U.S. immigration agents in March, was able to hold his month-old son this week after a federal judge intervened to thwart efforts by President Donald Trump ’s administration to keep the father and newborn separated by a plexiglass barrier.

Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States and Columbia University student, has become a symbol for the Trump administration’s crackdown on those who participated in pro-Palestinian, anti-war protests on college campuses.

Federal authorities have not accused Khalil of a crime, but the State Department revoked his green card under a little-used provision of US immigration law allowing the deportation of any non-citizen whose presence in the country is deemed adverse to US foreign policy interests —a claim that his lawyers, friends, family, and several people connected to Columbia have held is false.

Khalil, 30, a Palestinian who was born and raised in a refugee camp in Syria, entered the US on a student visa in 2022, according to Reuters , and became a lawful permanent resident in 2024 through his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla , an American citizen.

Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil (C) talks to the press during a briefing organized by Pro-Palestinian protesters who set up a new encampment at Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus in New York City on June 01, 2024.

The in-person visit with his wife and their son Deen is the first time he has met his child, as Khalil has been detained in a Louisiana facility since plainclothes officers took him from his apartment building as his pregnant wife recorded in early March. His request to attend his son’s birth on April 21 was denied by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

On Wednesday, ICE stepped in to prevent an in-person visit between Khalil and his family.

“Granting Khalil this relief of family visitation would effectively grant him a privilege that no other detainee receives,” Justice Department officials wrote in a court filing on Wednesday. “Allowing Dr. Abdalla and a newborn to attend a legal meeting would turn a legal visitation into a family one.” They were going to permit a “no-contact” visit through plexiglass.

Khalil’s attorneys held that the government’s refusal to grant the visit was “further evidence of the retaliatory motive behind Mr. Khalil’s arrest and faraway detention” from the family’s residence in New York City. Late Wednesday, Michael Farbiarz , a federal judge in New Jersey, intervened to allow the family to meet sans plexiglass between them.

Abdalla had traveled nearly 1,500 miles to the remote detention center. “This is not just heartless,” Abdalla said of the government trying to stop her from having contact with her husband. “It is deliberate violence, the calculated cruelty of a government that tears families apart without remorse. And I cannot ignore the echoes of this pain in the stories of Palestinian families, torn apart by Israeli military prisons and bombs, denied dignity, denied life.”