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 Palestinian student activist, who was detained by US immigration officers earlier this month, has spoken out for the first time about his arrest. In a letter dictated over the phone to his family from an ICE detention facility in Louisiana,

The action came less than a week after Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and a prominent figure in campus demonstrations, was arrested.