No Land to Stand On

A revelatory and powerful testament of protest, courage, and imprisonment in America’s deportation regime

‘Are you Mahmoud Khalil?’ This was the question asked by ICE as they took the Palestinian student and U.S. legal resident from his pregnant wife and home in New York City, transported him across the country, and locked him up in a Louisiana detention camp under threat of deportation. His ‘crime’: exercising his right to free speech at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leading voice against the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. No Land to Stand On is his indelible account, the story of a man confronting the reality that he had become target number one in a lawless regime shredding basic rights.

Drawing on his prison diary and writing in vivid, page-turning detail, Mahmoud Khalil conjures the despair and cruelty of ICE detention, where prisoners can vanish overnight and visiting families risk their own deportation. There is humanity, too, in the men’s acts of care, as they help each other with documents, and make a prison cake for Mahmoud after he can only follow the birth of his son on a public payphone. In tandem, he tells the multi-generational story of a family expelled from Palestine to a Syrian refugee camp, of flight from Assad’s regime to Lebanon, of arrival in an America that promised permanence and protection, and of the enduring struggle for Palestine.

A work of immense courage and resistance, No Land to Stand On is a call to all of us to defend the inalienable right to safety, freedom, and a place to call home.