In March 2025, one of the guards in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center let slip that the place was locked down because there were protests outside. The men had been barred from their normally allotted yard time for at least five days, though without access to the sun, time warped in a way that made it difficult to keep precise count. The men all eyed Mahmoud Khalil — not with anger, but with something more like frustration or curiosity. Khalil was apprehended by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) despite having a green card, an act explicitly crowed about by the Trump administration, decried by the American Civil Liberties Union, and captured in a chilling video that quickly went viral. Now he was stuck in the overly fluorescent detention center like so many others.
“Out there, I was a symbol, a cause, a name on petitions and protest signs. In here, I was just another man trying to trade Maruchan noodles for a chicken thigh,” writes Khalil.
Khalil’s memoir, No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention, examines the punitive nature of his detention, which began when he was labeled a threat to national security for his role in organizing with the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University. With a sense of calm that he himself notes is “notorious,” Khalil braids together stories from throughout his life, from being a refugee in Syria, to his activism in the US, to the months he spent in detention, illustrating that he is not only one of millions of Palestinians suffering exile but also one of tens of thousands of immigrants in the US locked away.
Khalil’s memoir is vital reading in the swelling corpus of texts detailing the new normal of ICE detention, and the Trump administration’s relentless assault on immigrants across the nation. It is both a singular story of ethical clarity, and a mirror to the inhumane practices America has decided to standardize.
Last month ICE’s arrests hit a record high for the third consecutive month. Between June and August, the agency apprehended more than 140,000 people. Almost a third of those people have no criminal record of any kind. Some people are deported immediately, but many are held in detention centers as they await decisions from immigration judges, shipped to locations far from home and across the country.
And thus there is a fast growing archive of testimony – people inside immigration detention tell of freezing rooms, with lights that never turn off, and of requests for medical care that are ignored for days and weeks, causing infections and fevers to balloon. In the past few months people have managed to get out videos showing drinking water squirming with worms, allegations of violence from guards, and accounts of being force fed with a feeding tube while on hunger strike. People formerly detained in the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” have reported being locked in a cage smaller than most showers as a form of “punishment.”
Many people describe an imprisonment that feels arbitrary, in a country that ostensibly promises justice. “We feel vulnerable and, in a way, kidnapped—detained without justification” stated an open letter penned and signed by almost 300 detainees in Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey this May. “We see with deep helplessness and frustration that our due process, rights, and defense have been violated, disregarding benefits granted under the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments of the UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION.” A Canadian woman similarly wrote she felt kidnapped.
Children in the Dilley Detention center have written in neat school-book lines about the world they miss outside, or simply scrawled notes in big shaky letters, stating, “I am five years old. I want to go home.”
Khalil’s contribution to this ever-growing cannon of detention center writing refuses to exceptionalize, either himself or the system. Khalil has referred to himself as a “double refugee” — born a Palestinian refugee in Syria, he was one of hundreds of thousands with a special identity card that grants something close to, but very far from, citizenship. He later fled to Lebanon when two of his close friends were disappeared by former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, knowing he would be next. “When they wanted you, they took you,” he writes. “I had spent my whole life knowing this: The state is not above the law; the state is the law.”
He writes how he found it bizarre, naive even, that as a student and then as a permanent resident in the US, he was told that speaking out was a protected right, that there were certain legal principles that couldn’t be violated. Then one day masked men showed up at his house, equivocated about why they were there, handcuffed him, and carted him off.
Khalil writes with a measured efficiency, weighing his words to ensure nothing is overstated or undersold. At times, he qualifies his metaphors and analogies to specify why he feels they are elucidating, even if not metrically precise. It is both the kind of writing employed by an academic prepared for peer review and that of an individual used to having his words taken and twisted. The persistent calm his wife teases him for seems to be both a part of Khalil’s natural, quiet constitution and something he says he learned from his mother, who, in turn, he believes developed composure as the only tenable response to a life of war and family disappearances.
Both in experience and in tone, Khalil’s memoir echoes Rümeysa Öztürk’s aching essay on what she witnessed when she was similarly grabbed and hauled off to ICE detention (Öztürk was pursuing a doctorate in child development at Tufts University, when she co-signed an op-ed supporting Palestine in the university newspaper, Shortly thereafter the government abruptly terminated her visa and arrested her.)
Öztürk’s essay refers to every one of the women detained alongside her as a “friend” and writes with awe of the way they held each other up. Her friends share stories of their lives before detention. They share survival tips and food. One tells Öztürk that God cannot hear them in detention, but decides to pray anyway. “I asked her if it was God who could not hear us,” writes Öztürk, “or if it was people like me before this experience, who either know nothing about the immigration detention system or prefer to ignore or forget about it.”
Khalil’s No Land to Stand On works against the possibility of ignoring, and tackles the unchecked jingoism of an administration thirsty to run roughshod on immigrants, by expanding the spotlight he was thrust into.
And it is in these descriptions of the men immured beside him that Khalil’s already evocative writing tightens its grip. He stolidly tells the stories of men apprehended at the border and of those snatched after decades of working American jobs and building American families. He details the ways they made prayer beads out of stale bread mixed with water and how they played card games that tumbled through several layers of translation. His portrayals are delicate, girded with respect and a clear camaraderie. The men tell him how much they miss their wives, how much they miss their children. One man gestures to the spot on his shoulder where his daughter used to sleep, unable to hold back tears.
While he was locked up, ICE denied Khalil lawyers’ request for a two-week furlough so that he could be present for the birth of his first child. His description of the days prior is claustrophobic with panic. Stuck in a cell in Louisiana, he was only able to listen by phone as his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, gave birth. After, the men around him offered congratulations, and he notes their words were weighted with having suffered the same.
Khalil’s No Land to Stand On is a gut punch delivered like a surgical incision– as disturbing as is necessary and as cool-headed as is possible. It is required reading to understand today’s America, in that it defines a cannon that is only guaranteed to grow.
