Mahmoud Khalil will tell the story of his detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as his fight against deportation, in a new memoir.
Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt, will publish the activist’s No Land To Stand On: Notes From Detention next year, the press announced in a news release. It calls the book “a revelatory and powerful testament of protest, courage, and imprisonment in America’s deportation regime.”
Khalil was born in Syria, the son of Palestinian refugees. He was educated at Lebanese American University in Beirut and Columbia University in New York, and in 2024 he received lawful permanent resident status in the U.S. The same year, he served as a negotiator on behalf of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia, which was dismantled by New York police after 14 days.
In March 2025, Khalil was arrested by ICE despite not being charged with any crimes. He was held in detention for more than three months. The federal government is attempting to deport him, and his case is currently under appeal.
In his book, Metropolitan Books says, Khalil “conjures the despair and cruelty of ICE detention, where prisoners can vanish overnight and visiting families risk their own deportation.”
Khalil said in a statement, “I began this book while in detention and I finished it fighting a deportation order that may take me from my family. That is what it has cost me to tell this story. I wrote it anyway because I believe testimony is one of the few things that can make injustice visible before it becomes inevitable. My hope is that anyone who reads this understands that Palestine is not the exception, it is the warning. The rights we are losing were never only ours to lose.”
No Land To Stand On is scheduled for publication on Jan. 12, 2027.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
