An immigration judge in Louisiana is expected to decide Friday whether to release Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist who was arrested by immigration officials last month as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on student protesters it claims support Hamas.
Judge Jamee Comans had given the federal government until Wednesday evening to provide evidence to support why Khalil should be deported, saying she would “terminate” the case if it failed to do so.
An attorney for the Department of Homeland Security submitted a brief memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio arguing that Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes him to personally deport people if he believes their presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
While Rubio acknowledged that Khalil’s activities were “otherwise lawful,” he argued that letting him remain in the country would undermine U.S. policy to “combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence.”
“Condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” Rubio wrote in the undated memo.
The judge said she would issue a decision Friday.
How we got here
Khalil, an Algerian of Palestinian ancestry who received his master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University last year, was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on March 8 at his university-owned apartment in Manhattan, where he and his pregnant wife live, according to his lawyer.
The 30-year-old, who holds a U.S. permanent residency green card, was transferred to an ICE processing facility in central Louisiana.
Khalil had served as a negotiator for Columbia University students involved in pro-Palestinian demonstrations that followed the Israeli military’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel by Hamas militants. Khalil bargained with university officials over winding down a tent encampment on campus while pressuring the college to divest itself from Israel.
The role made him one of the most visible pro-Palestinian activists at Columbia and prompted pro-Israel activists to call for his deportation.
Khalil was the first known student protester to be targeted for deportation by the Trump administration.
Trump’s crackdown on foreign student activists
In January, President Trump signed an executive order to “combat anti-Semitism” on college campuses.
And Trump made clear Khalil’s arrest was part of that effort.
“Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University,” Trump wrote in a post on TruthSocial on March 10. “This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
“Many are not students, they are paid agitators,” he added. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
The Trump administration has since arrested several other students, including Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student at Tufts University who was detained by immigration officials on the street near her home in Somerville, Mass., and taken to an ICE detention center in southern Louisiana.
Rubio said his department has revoked the visas of more than 300 students to date.
“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campus,” Rubio said in a recent news conference. “We’ve given you a visa and you decide to do that — we’re going to take it away.”
Arrests alarm free speech advocates
The arrests have been denounced by free speech advocates who say the Trump administration is blatantly retaliating against foreign students whose opinions it does not like.
“The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the U.S. and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement. “To be clear: The First Amendment protects everyone in the U.S. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate.”
In a letter released by the ACLU, Khalil, writing from the detention center, called himself a “political prisoner.”
“My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza,” he wrote. “The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”
“This is what happens in a dictatorship, and these are test cases,” Eric Lee, an attorney who represents Momodou Taal, a Cornell University PhD student whose visa was revoked, told NPR. “If the government can get away with doing this to these students, it can do it to everybody in this country. Your citizenship won’t save you.”
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