Officers from the Department of Homeland Security who arranged the arrests of foreign university students over their pro-Palestinian speech claimed that the orders they received were so unusual, they weren’t sure if they were legal, Politico reported Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Willliam Young heard testimony from four veteran DHS officers as part of a lawsuit alleging that the Trump administration is implementing a policy of “ideological deportation,” violating the First Amendment rights of non-citizens in the United States. Across the country, federal judges have ordered the release of multiple students and faculty detained as part of Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech.
Darren McCormack, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, said orders to arrest Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student and green card holder, came from the very top.
“Somebody at a higher level than the people I was speaking to had an interest in him,” said McCormack, who oversaw Khalil’s arrest. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had attempted to justify Khalil’s months-long detainment and pending removal by claiming he was a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests because he would create a “hostile environment” for Jewish students.
McCormack said he’d been instructed to surveil Khalil ahead of his arrest, leading McCormack to consult with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office in New York, which typically handles deportation arrests.
“We historically in recent times had not enforced those laws,” McCormack said. “I wanted to confirm there was a legal basis for arrest.”
When asked why ERO wasn’t responsible for carrying out the arrest, McCormack said he didn’t have an answer. “I wondered why HSI was effecting this arrest and not ERO,” he said. “I still don’t know.”
Brian Cunningham, an assistant special agent at HSI in Boston, said there had been “a lot of hands in the fishbowl” regarding the horrific arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tifts University grad student who was swarmed by six masked plainclothes officers on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Cunningham also said the orders for that arrest came from somebody high up. “I can’t recall a time that it’s come top-down like this with a visa revocation, under my purview anyway,” he said. “I did contact our legal counsel to make sure that we’re on solid legal ground.”
“The operation kind of developed pretty quickly,” he added.
Öztürk was detained over an op-ed she’d written for the school paper that advocated for the school to make good on student resolutions to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza and to divest from Israel.
Cunningham, who said that he’d skimmed the op-ed, testified that he “didn’t see anything in the op-ed that suggested she’d committed a crime.”
He admitted he didn’t have “much experience, if any” with conducting a deportation arrest. “Most of my career as an agent and as a supervisor has been in enforcement of drug laws, drug smuggling, money laundering,” Cunningham said.
“That’s changed recently,” he added. He said that shortly after Trump entered the White House, HSI had several meetings about prioritizing immigration enforcement.
Inside ICE, staff members from the HSI division, which typically focuses on transnational crime, are now being moved to ERO, in what some perceive to be a retaliatory move for HSI distancing itself from the agency’s deportation arm.
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