No Land to Stand on: Notes from Detention
Khalil recounts in stark detail the terrifying experience of being surrounded by men in the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building, handcuffed in front of his pregnant wife, pushed into an unmarked car and flown to a detention camp in Louisiana ... The prose in this prison memoir is matter-of-fact and unadorned, noticeably free of self-pity. Especially striking is Khalil’s account of being caged in a camp apparently designed to get people to give up hope and self-deport by wearing them down ... This is a frightening, important book. But there is also a measure of hope.
Read Full Review >>
Kafkaesque ... Khalil spends the book jumping around, mixing the chronology of his detention with memories of his upbringing and young adulthood. This never feels disorienting because the narrative is cemented around the core idea that, regardless of place and circumstance, he is defined by being Palestinian ... This is not a story of stoic heroism but of constant estimation (and sometimes underestimation) of risk and the decision to accept it as the price of doing the right thing in a world of despots and cowards.
Read Full Review >>
Mahmoud Khalil was completing a master’s degree at Columbia University when, in March 2025, plain-clothed officers from the Department of Homeland Security snatched him from his home in New York and took him to an immigration detention centre; he was then transferred to another facility in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away ... Khalil recounts this Kafkaesque ordeal with a quiet fury in his memoir, No Land to Stand On. The episode is a damning snapshot of the Trump administration’s creeping authoritarianism and the cruelty of its immigration enforcement policy.
Read Full Review >>
