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Sunday marked one year since Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate, was arrested last year for his political advocacy. Below, he writes to Leqaa Kordia, a fellow Palestinian currently in ICE detention in Texas. Khalil was released after more than three months but the Trump administration continues to seek his deportation; Kordia has been detained for nearly a year. Read more about her case here.
Dear Leqaa,
Ramadan Kareem. I say it with a heavy heart, knowing these words reach you in a place that has tried to strip them of meaning.
It has now been one full year. One year since that dreadful night that marked the beginning of a brutal wave of arrests targeting protesters for nothing more than speaking the truth. Though we have never met in person, I have carried you with me every single day since Noor called me while I was detained in Jena, Louisiana, to tell me that you had been taken. I remember thinking: not again, not another one of us. From that moment, a piece of my heart has been tied to your struggle.
Leqaa, this is your second Ramadan in detention. I need to say that plainly, not as a detail but as a measure of what has been stolen from you. Ramadan is the sound of your mother’s voice calling you to iftar. It is the particular smell of food being prepared with love after a long day of fasting. It is the feeling of breaking bread with family, of praying together, of being held by community in the holiest time of the year.
But they denied you halal food in that facility. They denied you the basic dignity of practicing your faith. Last Ramadan you endured this, and now another has come and found you still caged, still waiting, still being told that your faith, like your grief, is something to be managed rather than honored.
I keep replaying what it felt like to walk into those detention centers. How impossible it is to describe to anyone who hasn’t lived it. An open room with 70 people breathing the same stale air. The lights that never quite dim. The strange intimacy of strangers forced to share space, each person trying to carve out a fragment of dignity where none could be found. I learned from fellow detainees whose families are also in detention that conditions in the women’s prisons are even harsher.
I think about what we share, you and I. It is more than detention centers in Louisiana and Texas. More than protests against the genocide of our people or becoming targets for our existence as Palestinians.
We are both refugees. You were born in Jerusalem, the city whose Palestinian history Israel has sought to erase long before either of us drew breath. I was born into a family driven from Tiberias, scattered across refugee camps in Syria.
Between us, we carry the entire geography of Palestinian dispossession: the holy city they claim was never ours, Tiberias stolen and emptied of its people, the camps built to warehouse us, Ramallah where you grew up under occupation, Gaza where your mother lived and where you watched more than 100 of your family members be slaughtered, and the exile that has followed Palestinians across every ocean and border for 77 years.
We carry not only the dust of those memories but their mark on everything we are. Foreign powers promised our grandparents they could return. Then they were told to stop waiting. Then they were told to forget. We have done none of these things. We remember. We insist. We speak.
And for this, we are punished.
This is what Israel and its American patron cannot tolerate: Palestinians who remember. Palestinians who will not perform gratitude for the small mercies such as aid corridors and fragile ceasefires granted by those who stole everything. Palestinians who stand in public and name genocide for what it is. We are the living refutation of their narrative. Our very existence, loud and unapologetic, is the crime.
This is what they mean when they talk about the “Palestine exception”. It is the idea, practiced openly now without shame, that when it comes to Palestinians, the rules do not apply. Due process is suspended. Academic freedom shatters. Constitutional protections evaporate. The first amendment, which is supposed to shield all of us from government retaliation for our speech, somehow does not extend to those of us who speak about Palestine.
Leqaa, I want so badly to tell you that the world has stood by you. But I refuse to lie to you. The truth is that the world has failed you, and so have we. I cannot grasp that you remain, a full year later, thousands of miles away from your home, from your family, from the life you were building. And for what? For the crime that has followed our people across continents and generations: being Palestinian and daring to speak our truth.
We refuse to let the world forget us. We speak about our right to live, our right to return, our right to exist, and for that, they try to silence us. Your detention, my detention, the detentions of so many others, they are all pieces of the same story. A story of a people who have been displaced, erased, demonized, yet continue to rise every time the world tells us to disappear. We were born into a struggle we never asked for, yet we carry it because our ancestors did, and because our children must not.
Palestinian women have always known this in their bones. They are the ones who organized communities when the men were imprisoned or exiled, who defended their homes with the tools available to them – rarely more than presence and persistence. They are the ones who went back to the olive groves the morning after soldiers and settlers had torn through them. They have always been the spine of this struggle. You are in that lineage, Leqaa. Not as a symbol. As yourself.
I want to tell you what I could not tell myself when I was where you are: this will end. I know it does not feel that way. I know that when you are inside, time stops meaning anything. Days blur into one another. The future becomes abstract, a concept you can no longer quite believe in. The present is all there is, and the present is unbearable, and so you learn to not fully inhabit even that. You learn to be half-present, half-elsewhere, because being fully present to the reality of detention would break something in you that must remain intact for when you get out.
But it will end, Leqaa. Not because the system will suddenly discover its conscience. Not because those who put you there will wake up one morning and realize the cruelty of what they have done. It will end because people will force it to end.
This is what I live with now. I am free, but I am not free. I carry that detention center in Jena with me. I carry my fellow detainees – Alex, Ziyad, Marcel, Juan and Mamuki – with me. I carry the cold and the fluorescent light. I carry the night they came for me and the night I walked out and every night in between. And I carry the knowledge that while I am here, others are still there. That my freedom is partial as long as anyone remains caged for the same reasons I was caged.
So I carry you too, Leqaa. And I will carry you until you are free, and then I will carry the memory of this year alongside you, because we are bound now by what has been done to us and by what we refuse to let it make us become.
Your brother,
Mahmoud
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Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian writer and advocate. He is currently writing a book about his experiences in detention, his family and his life as a Palestinian refugee
