Maqluba, in Arabic, means “upside down.” It’s also the name of a pilaf dish popular in the Levant: a pot of rice, vegetables, meat, and potatoes, coagulated and flipped into a stout cylinder. Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate whom the Trump Administration has spent months trying to deport, makes it using his mother’s recipe. “Hers just tastes, I don’t know . . . better?” Khalil said the other day. “Every time I cook it, it tastes a little different.”

Khalil, wearing a T-shirt reading “ FOR LAND & LIBERATION ,” stood barefoot while paring an eggplant in the kitchen of the Brooklyn apartment he moved into last month. His previous relocations made headlines: in March, plainclothes federal agents arrested him in his Morningside Heights building and shippe

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