Khalil said in a declaration filed in Manhattan federal court that while he was held overnight at a detention center in New Jersey, “I did not hear anyone mention bedbugs.”

A detained Columbia University student says the subject of bedbugs never arose after he was arrested and flown to a Louisiana detention center by authorities who now say bedbugs helped force the long

Mahmoud Khalil — the Palestinian Columbia University president whose detainment by ICE set off a firestorm of controversy and protests — spoke out in an open letter from his cell at a Louisiana facility and called himself a “political prisoner.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered a lawsuit challenging the deportation of former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil to be moved from a district court in New York to New Jersey, where the antiwar activist was first detained after he was arrested by immigration officers earlier this month.

Khalil said he was targeted for his pro-Palestinian activism and as part of the Trump administration’s “broader strategy to suppress dissent.”