Former Cornell Ph.D. student Momodou Taal fled the country in March 2025 after his lawyers were sent an email requesting that he turn himself in to Immigration and Customs Enforcement — nearly a week after Taal sued the Trump administration. On Friday, he was detained by British police at London Heathrow Airport for six hours, according to posts from Taal on X.
Taal wrote that he was questioned immediately after landing in the United Kingdom, and that questions focused on his personal history during the six-hour-long detainment, in a post on X. He also wrote that police confiscated his phone and laptop and took his DNA.
Under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, British police can question anyone whom they believe is involved in the “current, emerging and future terrorist activity,” at ports of entry, according to the Counter Terrorism Policing website.
Taal was suspended by the University in September 2024 for helping to organize the pro-Palestinian encampment, and was later suspended in September 2025 for protests at a Statler Hall career fair. In March 2025, he was told to surrender himself to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. However, Taal has never been formally charged with any crime.
He voluntarily left the country amid a lawsuit against the Trump administration, writing in a statement that he had “lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs.”
During his detainment in the UK, authorities asked about “his childhood, mosque, Islamic preachers, and friends,” and if he had ever “read Karl Marx,” Taal wrote in a post on X on Friday.
The detainment comes amid reports that a group of United Nations Special Rapporteurs sent a letter to Cornell and four other universities expressing concern over human rights violations in October.
Specifically, the letter singles out Taal and Amandla Thomas-Johnson, another Cornell graduate student who left the country in April 2025 after his visa was revoked, as examples of “individuals who have faced violations of their rights to liberty, due process, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, religion, and access to justice,” that the University would need to detail how it would protect.
The detainment “stinks of British complicity in American intelligence operations and human rights abuses — and not for the first time,” Taal wrote in the X post. “Powerful institutions on both sides of the Atlantic that support genocide do not want their dirty linen aired in public. … Did the Americans ask authorities in the UK — the submissive partner in the so-called ‘special relationship’ — to stop and interrogate me?”
At the time of publication, Taal remains without his laptop or phone, according to his post on X.
Correction, Jan. 27, 1:55 p.m.: This article was updated to clarify that The Sun did not receive an email statement directly from Taal, but a press statement which quoted Taal's X posts.
Atticus Johnson is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a senior writer for the News department and can be reached at ajohnson@cornellsun.com.
