Two days before US agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and Palestinian activist asked his wife if she knew what to do if immigration agents came to their door.

Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife of more than two years, said she was confused. As a legal permanent resident of the US, surely Khalil did not have to worry about that, she recalls telling him.

“I didn’t take him seriously. Clearly I was naive,” Abdalla, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, told Reuters in her first media interview.

Earlier on Wednesday, Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist in New York, sat in the front row of a Manhattan courtroom as Khalil’s lawyers argued to a federal judge that he had been arrested in retaliation for his outspoken advocacy against Israel’s military assault on Gaza following Hamas’ October 2023 attack.

They told the judge that was a violation of Khalil’s constitutional free speech rights. The judge extended his order blocking Khalil’s deportation while he considers whether the arrest was constitutional.

Read more here.