A federal judge on Friday ordered that Mahmoud Khalil be released on bail, a ruling that stands to end the monthslong imprisonment of the first pro-Palestinian campus protester detained by the Trump administration.
Mr. Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and legal permanent U.S. resident, has spent 104 days in detention, watching as other students targeted by the administration won favorable rulings and were released on bail. He was denied the opportunity to be present when his wife gave birth to their son in April and he missed his graduation from Columbia.
But his lawyers slowly chipped away at the government’s case, and on Friday they convinced the judge, Michael E. Farbiarz of Federal District Court in Newark, that there was reason to believe Mr. Khalil’s detention was an unlawful retaliation for his role in demonstrations at Columbia’s Manhattan campus.
Toward the end of a two-hour hearing, Judge Farbiarz said there was “at least something” to the argument that there had been “an effort to use the immigration charge here to punish Mr. Khalil.”
“And, of course, that would be unconstitutional,” he added, before ordering the release.
A lawyer for the government, Dhruman Sampat, asked the judge to pause his order for a week while the administration considers an appeal, but the judge declined.
The decision ends the initial stage of President Trump’s campaign against pro-Palestinian student demonstrators, which began in early March with ICE agents bearing down on Northeast college campuses where the targets lived and studied.
Legally, the detention campaign has been unsuccessful, with other high-profile students, including Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi and Badar Khan Suri, already having been freed.
The politics of the effort, however, are more complicated, and the administration may have achieved a broader goal of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech. Judge Farbiarz said as much when he noted that Mr. Khalil’s detention had had a chilling effect on his First Amendment-protected activities.
“This ruling does not begin to address the injustices the Trump administration has brought upon our family and so many others,” Dr. Noor Abdalla, Mr. Khalil’s wife, said in a statement. She added: “Today we are celebrating Mahmoud coming back to New York to be reunited with our little family, and the community that has supported us since the day he was unjustly taken for speaking out for Palestinian freedom.”
The day was not a complete success for Mr. Khalil. The Louisiana judge in his immigration case, Jamee Comans, denied him asylum and ruled that he could be deported based on another of the government’s allegations, a ruling that Mr. Khalil will have an opportunity to appeal. Judge Comans also denied him a bail hearing, although Judge Farbiarz’s ruling made the importance of that moot.
Mr. Khalil had been the most prominent of Mr. Trump’s student targets. His sudden arrest in March was followed by a burst of fanfare from the White House. The president called him a “radical foreign pro-Hamas Student” and pledged that other arrests would follow. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Mr. Khalil was “siding with terrorists” and she accused him of having been involved in handing out pro-Hamas fliers.
And the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, invoked a rarely cited law, saying that Mr. Khalil’s should be deported because his mere presence in the United States threatened the administration’s foreign policy goal of preventing antisemitism.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have disputed the claim he has spread antisemitism. They have cited his past comments, including a statement he made on CNN that “the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand by hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.”
More than a week after Mr. Khalil was arrested, the government added a second allegation against him, accusing him of misrepresenting his employment history on his 2024 application for permanent residency.
The government said Mr. Khalil had failed to disclose his membership in several organizations, including a United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees, and did not mention work he had done for the British government after 2022.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have called the allegations bogus. They have said his employment with the British government did end after 2022, and that his work for the U.N. agency was part of his Columbia coursework.
Judge Farbiarz, who has overseen the case since March, moved methodically through the cascade of legal issues, writing dozens of pages on jurisdictional issues alone. But over time, he began to cut off some elements of the government’s argument for continuing to hold Mr. Khalil. Last week, he ruled that the foreign-policy statute invoked by Mr. Rubio could not be used to justify Mr. Khalil’s detention.
The Trump administration then explained that it would continue to hold Mr. Khalil for the allegations related to his residency application, despite an indication by Judge Farbiarz that he would look askance at that rationale.
On Friday, Judge Farbiarz rebuked the government, noting that it had offered no evidence to suggest that Mr. Khalil was a danger to his community. The administration’s claims about his links to, or even sympathies for, Hamas have not been substantiated in court.
“He is not a danger to the community, period, full stop,” the judge said.
He also said that the government’s behavior in Mr. Khalil’s case — in effect, continuing to detain him on the job history allegations — was “highly, highly, highly unusual.”
While other judges have been quick to free student protesters, expressing strong skepticism of the Trump administration’s motives, Judge Farbiarz’s handling of the case presumed the government’s good faith. That has been a typical practice in federal courts, but one that has been challenged in the Trump era, with some judges accusing the government of playing fast and loose with the truth.
Judge Fabiarz systematically dismantled the arguments of the government lawyer, Mr. Sampat, moving from procedural issues to the fundamental question that would determine his decision to release Mr Khalil.
The judge was more open to arguments made by one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, Alina Das, who said the government’s determination to keep Mr. Khalil confined only strengthened her case.
“They’ve been targeting Mr. Khalil from the start based on his speech and his viewpoint,” Ms. Das said.
The administration can appeal Judge Farbiarz’s ruling, and even if it is unsuccessful, will almost certainly continue trying to deport Mr. Khalil.
But, if the Homeland Security Department heeds the judge’s order, the immigration case will proceed with Mr. Khalil free and back in New York with his family.
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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