This story was originally published on May 29, 2025. On June 20, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release Mahmoud Khalil on bail, setting in motion the end of his three-month detention.
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When Noor Abdalla came home from the hospital last month, she put the car seat carrying her newborn on the kitchen floor and burst into tears. “I walked into the house by myself with this beautiful baby, and I think it just kind of hit me,” she says, sitting on a gray sectional in her Morningside Heights apartment. “I have to do this alone.” Her voice cracks, and she reaches for a Kleenex to dab at her eyes. “I think I’m doing so well, until people start to ask me questions.”
It’s late May, and her baby, Deen, is napping soundly in the other room. “Sometimes he’ll have the little crying fits where you don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve changed his diaper, I’ve burped him, I’ve fed him. What’s going on?” Such are the challenges faced by every first-time parent, and Abdalla’s living room has all the typical trappings of postpartum life: a diaper bag on top of a green pouf, a WubbaNub pacifier attached to a stuffed giraffe, a bassinet against the wall. But among the baby gear is a poster that says FREE MAHMOUD KHALIL and a Mother’s Day bouquet with wilting white roses that her husband sent through a friend. Instead of celebrating the day with his wife and new son, Khalil has been held in an immigration-detention center nearly 1,500 miles from his family since Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested him on March 8. “To the most beautiful mother in the world,” the card reads. “I love you and will see you soon.”
Abdalla was raised in Flint, Michigan, by Syrian-born parents. She had a classic immigrant upbringing, surrounded by a large community of Arabs and expected to get straight A’s in school. As a premed student at the University of Michigan–Flint, Abdalla realized she was too squeamish for surgery and decided to become a dentist. During her sophomore year, she volunteered at an education nonprofit for youth in Lebanon, where she met Khalil. He was running the program, the kind of charismatic leader who always managed to draw a crowd. “I was kind of in awe of him,” she says. After she went back to Michigan, she and Khalil kept talking and texting, which eventually turned into a seven-year long-distance relationship. In 2023, when he was accepted into a master’s program at Columbia, they both moved to New York and got married.
Abdalla, who grew up with three siblings and many cousins, always knew she wanted a big family. “He’s always been like, ‘Sure!’” she says of Khalil. “‘However many you want.’” As they began to try to get pregnant, she worked as a dentist in New Jersey and he took classes at Columbia. When Khalil became the face of the Gaza protests in the spring of 2024, she wasn’t surprised: his family was displaced during the Nakba, and he was raised in a refugee camp in Syria. Abdalla wasn’t as worried about her husband’s safety as he was. A day before his arrest, he emailed Columbia about protection after a fellow student and professor accused him of being a Hamas supporter on X, tagging Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He asked Abdalla if she knew what to do should ICE agents come to their door.
When Khalil was arrested in March, Abdalla was eight months pregnant. She assumed that he’d be released soon; he has a green card and has still not been charged with a crime. The days after he was taken blurred together. Friends stopped by with food; she paced the apartment, speaking on the phone with family members and lawyers. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, after ICE had transferred him to Louisiana, that the reality of their situation finally sank in. He had been doing all of the cooking, cleaning, and laundry throughout her pregnancy. Now, she was alone and she could go into labor any day. “I rely on him a lot,” she says, arms crossed over the waist of her faded blue jeans. “It was always a fear of mine that he was not going to come to the birth.” Still, she tried to stay hopeful that he’d be home before her water broke. When it did, in late April, her lawyers asked ICE to grant him a temporary release. “I still had a feeling that, maybe, they’re going to feel that we are humans,” she says. While contracting in the hospital, she learned that immigration authorities had denied the request. “I was angry with everybody,” she says, breaking into tears. “Sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “Giving birth is not easy.”
She didn’t sleep during the two nights she spent at the hospital after giving birth to her son, too nervous about the baby leaving her side. She made her mother, who had flown in from Michigan, accompany the newborn to nearly all of his tests and declined the nurses’ offers to look after him so that she could get some rest. “I didn’t want my baby to leave the room,” she says, her legs tucked under her. “I didn’t want to take my eyes off of him.” Khalil first met his son through a screen shortly after he was born. He’s allowed to make video calls a few times a day, during which he stares into Deen’s eyes, or watches him sleep in the bassinet. On one recent call, Abdalla was overwhelmed; the baby was crying, and she had no idea how to soothe him. He could be helping me, she thought. “I try not to direct my anger at him, but at times I feel like I do,” she says. “Who else am I going to yell at?” On another call, Khalil asked her to angle her camera toward Deen while she was trying to multitask. “I don’t have time,” she snapped back, then felt guilty. “He’s like, ‘I’m so sorry,’” she says. “I can’t be mad at him. What is he supposed to do? He’ll take it. He says, ‘Just let it out.’”
As she learns how to soothe and feed Deen, Abdalla is also fielding calls from the lawyers working on her husband’s case. Becoming a public figure has been overwhelming for the self-described homebody, who often skipped the social events at dental school because they felt like “too much.” While out walking Deen recently, she was approached by a man who had been staring at her. “Is that Mahmoud’s son?” he asked. “We’re all supporting you.” She was relieved, and touched, but wondered what would happen if she was confronted by a person not as sympathetic to Khalil. She understands that all the attention has given their family resources that aren’t available to the roughly 1,200 other immigrants locked up in the same detention center. On May 20, Abdalla and Deen traveled more than ten hours to Louisiana to watch Khalil’s latest immigration hearing and to visit in-person so that her husband could hold his newborn for the first time. Initially, ICE denied the request. But after a team of lawyers spent 24 hours remonstrating with the detention center’s warden and a court, the family was allowed to meet for one hour in an empty courtroom. When Abdalla walked in, with Deen strapped to her chest, she burst into tears. “Mahmoud said, ‘He’s so fragile,’” Abdalla told me. “You could tell he was nervous. He didn’t want to hurt him.” Khalil played with his son’s tiny fingers and toes, and when the baby started to fuss, he walked Deen around the room while singing an Arabic lullaby. “There was a lot of emotion,” she says. “There was a little bit of pain in there as well, thinking about the missed moments over the past month” — Deen’s first visit to their local bakery with their favorite cheesecake, Khalil’s Columbia graduation. (Students chanted her husband’s name at commencement, but Abdalla says no one from the administration has reached out to her.)
When the hour was up, she and Deen went to yet another courtroom, where she listened to her husband and witnesses argue that being deported would endanger his life. At times throughout the ten-hour hearing Deen slept on Abdalla’s lap, and every time he cooed, Khalil looked over and smiled. She has no idea when they’ll see each other next. Just in case, she’s already in the process of procuring Deen a passport. “We don’t know if Mahmoud’s going to be deported,” she says. “So we don’t want to end up needing it and not having it.” Abdalla gets up to check on Deen and brings him back into the living room. He has a full head of brown hair and curls onto her chest like a caterpillar clinging to a rock. She takes off his socks so he can wiggle his toes, kisses his forehead, and whispers “I love you” in his ear. She sits down on the couch, leaning Deen’s back against her knees, and tries gently to rouse him. “I think the chin is mine,” she says. “But when he opens his eyes, he looks exactly like his dad.”