The Trump administration’s implacable assault on civic life has had many inflection points—cracks that signaled the astonishingly rapid shattering of what many Americans understood to be our bedrock sociopolitical order. Trump ordering troops into U.S. cities, the firing of the entire vaccine advisory board as measles made a comeback, criminal inquiries into political opponents, the use of regulatory power to try to censor broadcast networks.
An early such break came in March of last year, a couple months into Trump’s second term, when federal agents arrested legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil explicitly over his pro-Palestinian speech and organizing. Even among reporters who covered immigration and the first Trump term, it was a shock, a brazen shot across the bow of the First Amendment. Khalil would go on to spend over three months in detention before a federal judge ordered his release, and he remains embroiled in parallel federal and immigration court cases as the government tries mightily to deport him still.
For these tribulations, he became an emblem. Of what, depends on who you ask: of Palestinian resistance, of “woke” campus politics, of the retrenchment of free speech, of supposed antisemitism. In his plainspoken memoir, No Land to Stand On, Khalil seeks to reestablish sovereignty over his own life story, at least, and re-center the underlying reason he ended up in this position: Since his grandfather and countless others were expelled from Palestine as a result of the Nakba in 1948, he and his community have been standing on borrowed land, at best tolerated by the authorities wherever they’ve managed to set down.
The book begins with the account of a sort of inadvertent martyrdom, as Khalil finds himself a symbol of his people’s resistance by circumstance. Not his 2025 detention; it is 14 years earlier, when the teenage Khalil is growing up in Khan al-Sheih, the large Palestinian refugee camp in Syria where he was born. A group has resolved to march to the Israeli-controlled town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights at an opportune moment while Syrian security forces are diverted to the burgeoning domestic civil war. The bookish young Khalil convinces a teacher to let him postpone an exam so he can join them. As he follows his stateless countrymen through a minefield and toward the border fence, he is shot in the leg by Israeli border guards and carried back toward the camp by demonstrators behind. In the chaotic aftermath, it is misreported through the camp and to his family that he has been killed.
He wasn’t, of course, but the ordeal marked the beginning of a life of striving against authoritarianism and trying to reach a border that he’s never been closer to than the day he was shot. That path takes him to organizing resistance against the Bashar Al Assad regime, as a result of which he is forced to flee Syria for Beirut, when his fellow organizers are disappeared by Assad’s Mukhabarat police and it becomes clear he’s next. And later it takes him, of course, to his role as a communicator and negotiator for the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia University, which leads to his arrest and imprisonment by the Trump administration.
Khalil seemed ambivalent then and conflicted now about his status as an avatar for his community’s struggle. Throughout his detention in Louisiana, his face occasionally flashes on the television screens playing the news inside the cavernous holding cell he shares with dozens of others, and he thinks often and with some pangs of guilt about the men that surround him, who may not have any lawyer at all, let alone a team of 25 and the attention of major news outlets and members of Congress.
The detainees—young and old, longtime residents of the United States and recent arrivals, fellow Muslims and followers of other religions, people from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe—seem bemused by having this celebrity among their ranks, though Khalil fears that their feelings may teeter into frustration when the controversy swirling around him reaches in from outside, as when a protest on his behalf outside the facility’s gates prompts a multiday lockdown inside.
If the men feel any resentment, though, they certainly don’t show it. As he is first brought into the detention hall and the full reality begins to set in, Khalil is initially wary of the men who spring into action to help him get set up and acclimated, including a young Honduran named Alexander, who sets up his bed and tries to get Khalil to eat in the first days. Yet Khalil realizes quickly that this solidarity is the only way to survive in the detention center. Whatever is going on outside, inside he is mostly just another man in a jumpsuit trying to stay sane in the dull brutality of the unchanging room, lit 24 hours a day, which he discovers early on is owned by the publicly traded prison conglomerate GEO Group, meaning “every day we spent here was revenue.”
He is soon helping lead prayers for the small group of Muslims in the room, and eventually helping other detainees navigate the complexities of the system they’re in, having read a stack of ICE policy documents and the detention facility’s own handbook, which “described a facility that did not exist. It was a document written for auditors and lawyers.” This is as much a tale about the other detainees as it is about Khalil. The self-described political prisoner is horrified at the experiences and treatment of the others, who he finds to be kind, bewildered, regretful, and human, despite the dehumanization that surrounds them.
There’s Ricardo, who had spent a quarter-century in the U.S. working and raising two citizen daughters, who yearned to return to them and to his farm with his horses. Mamuki, a Georgian asylum-seeker, is consumed by remorse for having believed that the U.S. was a safe haven and convincing his wife to make the trek with him, at which point they were detained separately. Khalil, it turns out, is one of the lucky ones, ordered released into the U.S. and able to keep fighting his legal battles, as most of his fellow travelers remain detained, or deported, or worse. After his release, he hears from Ricardo that Alexander has been killed following his removal back to Honduras.
Khalil’s story is one of personally discovering the Kafkaesque nature of the U.S. immigration system. While he became an exemplar of Trump’s immigration overreaches, he was not an immigration activist. As a green card holder, he wasn’t particularly worried that immigration status would be an avenue to target him. When right-wing media and activists began fixating on him in early 2025, Khalil spent time reading Know Your Rights literature, with an eye toward dealing with the NYPD and FBI. He skimmed ICE, figuring they could no longer get to him.
It is hours into his detention, in a holding cell at the imposing 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, before he gets any real sense of why he was arrested and the gravity of his situation, when he overhears agents saying the White House wants an update. Agents present him with documents laying out the claim from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that his presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”—this, it turns out, is the government’s basis for attempting to deport him. They ask him to sign. Khalil refuses.
This sets off a crash course in our system’s irrationality, in which at different times Khalil learns from his attorneys that the so-called Rubio determination automatically disqualifies him from receiving bond; that the fact of his having been moved to New Jersey and then Louisiana in the middle of the night means that there will have to be a whole legal discussion about where and how his First Amendment case can be heard; and that the court hearing his immigration case is part of the Justice Department, presided over by an employee of the same executive branch trying to deport him. The latter culminates in a curt and cursory dismissal of his asylum case by an immigration judge, a month after his son, Deen, is born.
Each chapter heading is a location—Jena, Louisiana, or Beirut, Lebanon, for example—and Khalil spends the book jumping around, mixing the chronology of his detention with memories of his upbringing and young adulthood. This never feels disorienting because the narrative is cemented around the core idea that, regardless of place and circumstance, he is defined by being Palestinian, both to himself and to the systems around him, a sense felt perhaps most acutely when it becomes evident that he will miss his son’s birth. For his entire time in the GEO facility, he has pushed away the possibility that he’d remain locked up for this moment; then his wife, Noor, goes into labor and the government denies his furlough request. “This was the fate of Palestinian men, I thought. Was I any different from the Palestinian prisoners who not only missed the birth of their children but also their lives?” Khalil writes.
This sentiment is a double-edged sword in that it also motivates Khalil to keep fighting. After his lawyers inform him that he has the ability to accept “voluntary” deportation, he sits in his bunk and thinks about all the people who had risked their prospects to protest for Palestinian rights, the Palestinians worldwide who had kept the movement going through decades of public ridicule and penalization, and those dying in Gaza and the West Bank. “If I ran, what message would that send to them? That the fight wasn’t worth it?” Khalil writes. Plus, he understands acutely that he is a test case for the Trump administration to whittle down speech and organizing through fear, as he witnesses firsthand when some acquaintances refuse to serve as character witnesses as they fret about what it could unleash for them.
He reserves some of his sharpest words for Columbia itself, which, over the months of his mediation between the administration and the pro-Palestinian movement, he perceives to be completely uninterested in protecting pro-Palestinian students against obvious threats and instead catering to donors, administrators, and trustees who support the Israeli point of view. “Had Columbia itself possessed the power to deport me and the other students, I have little doubt it would have done so,” Khalil writes.
While Khalil imbues the text with some of his musings from within and without detention about Palestinian political factions, free speech, bureaucracy, and so on, all are derived directly from his own experiences and this is fundamentally a memoir, not a text of theory or commentary. That is partly a product of Khalil’s own clear discomfort with “my life flattening into a cause, a headline, a legal precedent, or just a face on a poster,” which drove him to write his letter from detention and has driven him here to simply tell the story of what he’s actually experienced over a lifetime of trying both to just survive and to advance the cause of Palestinian rights.
This is not a story of stoic heroism but of constant estimation (and sometimes underestimation) of risk and the decision to accept it as the price of doing the right thing in a world of despots and cowards. It’s marked by fear, second-guessing, and frustration, all with no guarantee that things will actually get better. Khalil does not want to be shot at, or sought by the secret police, or detained in some for-profit gulag. He wants to live a normal life in his home with his wife and son, something that the world around him has decided is impossible, and so he struggles on.
