Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate facing the threat of deportation, on Wednesday asked a federal judge in New Jersey who was formerly a top Justice Department official to recuse himself from weighing in on Mr. Khalil’s case.
In March of last year, Mr. Khalil became the first campus protester to be arrested during President Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations at American colleges. His lawyers wrote Wednesday that the judge in New Jersey, Emil Bove III, was probably involved in high-level decision-making related to Mr. Khalil’s case while still at the Justice Department.
They said it would be a conflict of interest for Judge Bove to weigh in on a high-stakes legal issue related to Mr. Khalil’s release from detention last June. Mr. Khalil, 31, a legal permanent resident whose wife and infant son are U.S. citizens, was held in Louisiana for months before a different federal judge ordered him released.
While at the Justice Department, “Judge Bove wrote memoranda about and directed immigration enforcement investigations and decisions against student protesters on college campuses — particularly at Columbia University, where Mr. Khalil was enrolled,” Mr. Khalil’s lawyers wrote in a brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where Mr. Bove has been a judge since September.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers said the department had conveyed to them that it “sees no basis for recusal but defers to Judge Bove.”
It is not unusual for judges to recuse themselves, particularly if a case before them involves work they did before they took the bench. But the situation in which Judge Bove and Mr. Khalil find themselves is unusual: The two were on opposite sides of the early phase of President Trump’s second-term crackdown on college campuses, with Mr. Khalil becoming the face of an aggressive approach to immigration enforcement that Mr. Bove pushed at the Justice Department.
At the time, Mr. Bove, a former defense lawyer for the president, was becoming known as his enforcer at the department. In May, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bove had ordered an investigation of student protesters at Columbia, prompting alarm from career prosecutors at the department and pushback from a federal magistrate judge.
Mr. Bove was said to have pushed prosecutors to obtain a membership list of a coalition of student groups called Columbia University Apartheid Divestment, or CUAD, so that the information could be shared with immigration agents who were targeting foreign-born protesters.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said then that the story was false, “fabricated by a group of people who allowed antisemitism and support of Hamas terrorists to fester.”
The federal government has accused Mr. Khalil of being a leader of CUAD. Mr. Khalil has consistently said he was not; that the group is not an organization unto itself but rather a coalition of student groups; and that his role was to act as a mediator between the university administration and pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
In January, a Third Circuit panel said the district judge who freed Mr. Khalil in June, Michael E. Farbiarz, had not had the authority to do so, or to weigh in on the constitutional issues in his case. The panel said that those decisions should have been made in immigration court, which is under the control of the Justice Department.
Mr. Khalil has asked the full Third Circuit to reconsider that decision, which could have profound implications not just for his case but for similar immigration cases across the country. Mr. Khalil’s request that Judge Bove recuse himself came the day after his request to the full court. Judge Bove is one of 14 judges on the court who would normally weigh in.
The court has no obligation to consider the case and it is unclear whether it will do so. If it does not, Mr. Khalil’s lawyers could appeal the panel’s decision to the Supreme Court.
Judge Bove is no stranger to recusal motions. While he was working as a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump, he asked three separate times for the Manhattan judge who oversaw the criminal case against Mr. Trump to recuse himself, saying that the judge was compromised by his daughter’s work as a Democratic consultant.
The judge, Juan Merchan, declined each time.
Seamus Hughes contributed reporting.
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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