NEW YORK: Nearly 100 protesters were arrested after a sit-in at Trump Tower, a 58-story building belonging to the US president, in New York City to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student detained over the weekend by immigration agents.

The organization ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’ livestreamed the sit-in, showing hundreds of demonstrators packed into the building’s lobby. Some held signs that read “Jews say stop arming Israel,” chanted “Bring Mahmoud home now”!

The arrest of Khalil, who is in immigration custody in Louisiana after his arrest in New York on last weekend, has sparked an outcry by Democratic lawmakers, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian territories and civil liberty advocates, among others.

In the lobby of Trump Tower, about 300 people donning red shirts chanted slogans seeking the release of Khalil and held anti-Israel banners, said Sonya Meyerson-Knox, a spokesperson for Jewish Voice for Peace, a group critical of Israel and U.S. policies toward the Palestinian territories. Over the weekend, federal immigration agents detained Khalil, a 30-year-old permanent U.S. resident, as officials said they revoked his status in the country.

Born in Syria and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, Khalil attended Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and completed his programme in December, his attorneys said. He is now in a detention facility in Louisiana as protests against his arrest unfolded around New York City, including a demonstration outside the Manhattan federal courthouse Wednesday during a hearing.

Organizers protested in the lobby for about an hour Thursday. Police began removing people in zip ties, Meyerson-Knox said. Police arrested 98 people, according to John Chell, a senior New York Police Department official.–APP