I was born in Iranian prison to political activists. Our families’ stories demonstrate that those who expose injustice will always be viewed as threats to the established order.
Columbia students, professors, and supporters gather in front of the university’s gates to rally in support of Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, and the numerous other community members who have been unlawfully detained by ICE, often with support from the Columbia administration, in New York City on March 9, 2026.(Selcuk Acar / Getty Images)
The prominent Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by ICE agents in the lobby of his Columbia University residence on March 8, 2025. As the plainclothes agents moved in around Khalil and ordered him to put his hands behind his back, his wife, Noor, called their lawyer, her voice breaking: “They just handcuffed him and took him. I don’t know what to do.” Shock flashed across Mahmoud’s face, but he made an effort to keep his composure—for himself, for his pregnant wife, and for their unborn child, who might already be listening to the terror and chaos unfolding around them. “My love,” he said while being led away in handcuffs, “it’s OK.”
Watching the video of Noor rushing after her husband, filming, crying, demanding to know where the unresponsive agents were taking him, I felt the distance between past and present collapse. A familiar terror of disappearance, state violence, and helplessness came flooding back.
In the summer of 1983, my parents were sitting at the lunch table in their small apartment in downtown Tehran when Revolutionary Guards appeared at their door and took them away. They were both leftist political activists who had fought to overthrow the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and had continued their struggle after the 1979 revolution, this time against the newly established Islamic Republic. My uncle, another activist, was on a bus on the way to his hometown, reading a novel by Howard Fast—one among thousands of books banned by the Islamic Republic’s Cultural Revolution—when the bus was stopped at a checkpoint and he was arrested. Another uncle—the one who would be executed in the summer of 1988 along with thousands of other political prisoners, their bodies dumped into unmarked mass graves—was at work at the Social Security Administration. Meanwhile, my aunt was walking home carrying a bag of apples. Such were the ordinary moments in which their former lives disappeared. At the time of my parents’ arrest, my mother was pregnant with me, and my brother was 2 years old. It fell to the landlady to call my grandfather and tell him to come and collect his grandson.
The parallels between Mahmoud Khalil’s story and that of my parents are not, of course, exact. Iran is not the United States. A democracy, however imperfect and staring into the precipice of fascism, is not an authoritarian regime. The Palestinians’ fight for self-determination has its own history separate from the unfinished revolution of Iran, even if they carry the same belief that dignity, freedom, and justice belong to all.
What links these stories, then, is not only the horrifying spectacle of activists, separated by decades and continents, being recast as public threats. It is the logic behind it: to treat those who expose injustice and demand change not as citizens exercising their rights but as threats to the established order. Governments fear activists, like my father and Khalil, not because they command military units or institutions but because they possess something more dangerous: the ability to challenge the state’s claim to moral and political legitimacy. They act not out of loyalty to the existing arrangements of power but from the conviction that a country can be more just than it is, fighting so that the next generation may inherit a more decent world than the one they were given. Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest—not because he posed a threat to anyone, but because he helped organize a movement to stop the bloodshed in Gaza—would become one of the defining images of a broader struggle over political activism, free speech, and the question of belonging in America.
Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student and a leading negotiator in the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment, first came to national attention during the student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Born in 1995 to Palestinian parents in a refugee camp in Syria, he fled the country at the age of 18 after organizing protests against the Assad regime during the Syrian revolution. In the United States, Khalil was arrested without a warrant on the order of the US State Department, which argued that his activism posed a threat to American foreign-policy interests. He was held in detention for 104 days as the Trump administration sought to deport him. Though Khalil has since been released, his case remains before the courts while a deportation order hangs over his head. At the time of this writing, his case is on its way to the US Supreme Court for a final judgment.
Across continents and generations, activists and dissidents have been persecuted, surveilled, marginalized, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, and often even killed for their beliefs and the audacity to act on them. Authoritarian states brand them as traitors, enemies of the people, and dangers to national security; democracies cast them as extremists and agitators. The vocabulary might change, and the severity of the repression might vary, but the objective is often the same: to place dissent beyond the bounds of legitimacy and to deny these dissidents a place in shaping the future of the society to which they belong.
In Iran, the Islamic Republic cast my parents and countless other political activists as counterrevolutionaries and enemies of the state, even though these same young men and women had helped bring about the revolution that had ousted the shah. Today, the Islamic Republic continues to rely on charges such as “threats to national security” and “enmity against God” to persecute, imprison, and execute activists, dissidents, and protesters.
In the United States, the movement for Palestinian liberation and self-determination has encountered significant repression. Students and activists have been arrested, suspended, expelled, fired from their jobs, denied professional opportunities, threatened with deportation, and in some cases pushed into exile. University encampments were cleared by police, often accompanied by mass arrests and disciplinary proceedings. Beyond these visible acts lay a broader climate of intimidation: surveillance, blacklists, doxing campaigns, public smear efforts, and the persistent accusations that sought to equate political dissent with disloyalty or extremism.
Mahmoud Khalil’s case has been deliberately turned into an example, staged as a warning for the rest of us. The message is clear: The persecution of dissent will not stop at the individual. It will follow you home; it will reach your partner, your child, your family. It will seek to make an example not only of the activist but of everyone who might be tempted to follow their example.
More than a month into Khalil’s detention at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, his son was born. After days of legal wrangling over a cruel order that would have allowed him to see his newborn only through a plexiglass barrier, the 30-year-old father was finally able to cradle his son in his arms and touch the life that had entered the world while he remained behind bars. “My heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry,” Khalil wrote in a letter to his son published in The Guardian. “My absence is not unique…. The grief your mother and I feel is but one drop in a sea of sorrow that Palestinian families have drowned in for generations.”
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On the other side of the world, decades earlier, my own 30-year-old father sat in Evin Prison with no way of knowing that I had been born. Separated from my mother immediately after their arrest and taken to a different ward, he had no news of her, no idea whether she had given birth or even whether she was still alive. A guard summoned him to the courtyard one day. My father feared such a summons: He had seen men called away, never to return. Blindfolded, he followed the guard, convinced that he was being led to his execution. Instead, he was handed a bundle wrapped in a rough prison blanket: “Your child,” the guard said, allowing him to remove his blindfold. My father later told me that all he could do was to look at the raindrops falling on my face, the way I blinked and did not cry, and the way he wept instead.
No newspapers or cameras were allowed to record what was happening inside Iran’s prisons in those years, just as they are not allowed today. My father could not write to me or tell the world what he had witnessed. Instead, he saved pits from the dates occasionally given to the prisoners with their tea. With the help of his cellmates, who contributed their own, he spent weeks turning them into a bracelet. I still carry it today. More than a gift from my father, it is also a testament to all those imprisoned alongside him, a small archive of lives the state tried to erase, and a reminder that even in the darkest places, people continued to make acts of love from whatever they had left.
Over the years, I have come to know many children who have lost dissident parents to prisons, torture rooms, and the gallows—children who, as they grew up, were forced to carry their wounds, visible and invisible, for the rest of their lives. Many asked the same questions: Why did their fathers choose the struggle over their families? Why sacrifice their lives—and their children—for a cause that seemed destined to end in darkness?
I understood those feelings, those relentless questions. I knew what violence and loss does to a family, how it settles into the foundations of a life and reshapes it. But over time, I found myself returning to the same thought: The women and men behind bars, resisting in torture rooms, or buried in mass graves did not create the violence that destroyed their families and societies. That responsibility belongs to those who imprisoned, tortured, disappeared, or executed them. To the architects of terror, not those who resist it. To the executioners, not the condemned. Any moral reckoning worthy of the name must begin there.
Mahmoud Khalil and my parents are part of a long lineage of activists, dissenters, and political dreamers who have sacrificed youth, security, comfort, and often their lives and freedom in pursuit of a freer and more just society. They have done so not despite their children but because of them. Every freedom we take for granted today, every measure of justice, dignity, and safety we possess, is not a gift bestowed upon us but the hard-won legacy of generations of women and men who have refused to accept the world as it was presented to them and fought to change it. “Loving you is not separate from the struggle for liberation,” Khalil tells his son in the letter from the detention center. “It is liberation itself…. I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction…. This struggle is sweeter than a life without dignity.”
Sahar DelijaniSahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree. Her second novel, For Every Person You Kill, is forthcoming from Melville House in the spring of 2027.