Momodou Taal, the British-Gambian Ph.D. student who faces possible deportation for his pro-Palestinian activism at Cornell, said he never envisioned becoming embroiled in an American protest movement when he arrived on campus in 2022.
He had been mostly content to study, teach and work on his dissertation, a look at sovereignty and political economy in Guinea.
Even so, politics ran in his family — he is the great-grandson of Gambia’s first president, Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara — and he has been interested in the Palestinian cause since he was a teenager.
He studied Arabic and Sharia law in Cairo. And when war broke out in Gaza, Mr. Taal, 31, found himself increasingly drawn to the protests on Cornell’s campus, he said in a phone interview this week.
On the day of the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, Mr. Taal posted online, “Glory to the Resistance.” Cornell suspended him twice for his activities in the year that followed.
When dozens of tents went up on the campus lawn as part of an effort to get the school to divest its holdings in companies supporting the conflict, he was among the group’s leaders who refused to disband for two weeks. Later, he was suspended for participating in an unruly protest.
Now, he is one of at least nine international students the Trump administration is trying to remove from the country in its promise to quell activities it calls antisemitic.
But unlike some of the other students, who have been picked up by immigration agents and held in a detention facility in Louisiana, Mr. Taal has not yet been detained. Before he could be detained, he filed a pre-emptive lawsuit and he is fighting to block his detention in court. During the interview this week, he did not reveal his location.
Fearing he would be taken into custody, Mr. Taal did not appear for a hearing in his court case on Tuesday. But he also said he would voluntarily surrender if the court ordered it.
“This process is imminently hanging over me, and it has impacted every aspect of my life. I feel like a prisoner already, although all I have done is exercise my rights,” Mr. Taal wrote in court papers.
A court ruling on Thursday denying a request to delay government action against Mr. Taal seemed to increase the chances of his detention or deportation, but another hearing in the case is scheduled for next week.
In an executive order signed on Jan. 29, President Trump said it would be U.S. policy to use “all available and appropriate legal tools,” including to “remove” aliens who engage in “unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
“We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post on March 10. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
Mr. Trump’s comment followed the first detention of such students, on March 8, when ICE agents took in Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student. Others include Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident who moved to the United States from South Korea when she was 7. She had participated in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, where she is a student.
A doctoral student at Tufts University, Rumeysa Ozturk, was also detained by ICE officers. She was the co-author of an essay in the Tufts student newspaper last year criticizing the university administration’s response to the war in Gaza.
Officials in the Trump administration have argued in several cases that a “visa is a privilege, not a right.”
Civil libertarians have called the deportation effort one of the biggest assaults on free speech in decades.
Unlike Mr. Khalil, who is a permanent resident of the United States, Mr. Taal, who holds joint United Kingdom and Gambian citizenship, is here on a student visa. Lawyers for Mr. Taal have said efforts to deport him are a violation of his First Amendment rights.
Mr. Taal grew up in the United Kingdom, where his parents had emigrated, and said he spoke before British Parliament at age 15. At one point, he aspired to be Britain’s first Black prime minister.
Around that time, someone gave him “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Mr. Taal said he was inspired, “given that he was a Muslim and also Black.”
He came to Cornell in 2022 to study for a Ph.D. in Africana studies.
After the war broke out in Gaza, he joined a newly formed campus organization, the Cornell Coalition for Mutual Liberation. In fall 2023, the group staged demonstrations at major buildings, held a “leftist potluck” and even put on a mock trial attacking Cornell’s president at the time, Martha Pollack.
Mr. Taal, whose activities were covered extensively by the campus newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, assumed the title of “intercampus liaison” for the organization and became a visible presence at rallies.
In February 2024, at a demonstration outside Cornell’s Day Hall, he led chants after Cornell’s student assembly rejected a resolution to end university partnerships with companies that provided weapons to Israel.
“We are in solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine from the river to the sea,” Mr. Taal told a crowd on campus following the vote.
Some on campus saw such statements as threatening. The phrase “from the river to the sea” has been interpreted by some Jews as a genocidal call to eliminate the state of Israel.
Mr. Taal has said he views it as a call for Palestinian liberation.
“I know there have been times people don’t like some things I’ve said,” said Mr. Taal. But, he added, “I’ve never been violent. I’ve never been convicted of a crime. I’ve never been arrested.”
Asked about his social media post on Oct. 7, he said he did not support a particular Palestinian group. “What I support is the Palestinian right to resist to colonialism, as guaranteed by international law and the principle of self determination,” he added.
A pro-Zionist organization called Betar had been tracking Mr. Taal’s activities, according to court documents. The group placed him on a list of students it was circulating to members of Congress, urging that they be deported, according to Mr. Taal’s lawsuit.
In a recent post on X, Betar took credit for federal efforts to deport Mr. Taal.
Eliza Salamon, a 2024 Cornell graduate who is Jewish and who was involved in the Cornell protests, said that accusations of antisemitism against Mr. Taal are unfounded.
“I’ve always seen Momodou treat everyone with the utmost respect, and I think it’s truly awful that these false accusations of antisemitism are being weaponized,” she said.
By April 2024, Mr. Taal’s activism had pushed Cornell’s administration to its limit. He served as the official representative for an encampment of 17 tents, occupied by 50 students, that had been erected on Cornell’s Arts Quad.
In an April 26 letter, Cornell officials notified Mr. Taal that he was temporarily suspended for ignoring demands to remove the encampment, along with several other violations, including loud and disruptive behavior.
Last September, Mr. Taal ran afoul of the administration once again, when a crowd of students entered the Statler Hotel on campus to protest a career fair where exhibitors included weapons manufacturers. Cornell again suspended Mr. Taal, saying he had ignored police orders and participated in “unreasonably loud” chants.
Mr. Taal feared he would lose his visa.
But as a petition supporting him gathered thousands of signatures, the university permitted him to remain in his Ph.D. program, as long as he continued his studies remotely. He was also no longer able to teach his class, titled “What is Blackness,” an analysis of how the conception of race varies based on geography. He would have been eligible to return to campus at the end of this semester.
Cornell University has not commented on his detention.
“There’s nothing in the Immigration and Nationality Act that makes someone deportable for attending a protest,” Eric T. Lee, a lawyer representing Mr. Taal, said at a court hearing in Syracuse, N.Y., on Tuesday. “What we’re asking this court to do is strike down these orders. They’re plainly unconstitutional.”
Mr. Lee has said the lawsuit is a test case on the question of whether the government can jail people for their speech.
For his part, Mr. Taal said he hopes to have the option of remaining in the country as he completes his dissertation. At Cornell, about 200 students held an emergency rally on March 20 as a show of support.
Cole Louison contributed reporting.