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A potentially landmark case challenging the Trump administration's attempt to deport
Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate involved in pro-Palestinian protests, will be heard in federal court in New Jersey, a judge ruled on Tuesday. Khalil is suing the federal government, arguing that it violated his constitutional rights, including free speech and due process, when it detained and attempted to deport him. The Trump administration requested to transfer the case from the District of New Jersey to the Western District of Louisiana, where Khalil is currently held in immigration detention and where appeals would have been heard in one of the nation's most conservative courts. The New Jersey court has jurisdiction because Khalil was in New Jersey when his petition was filed, Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled. “With this ruling, the court has rightfully reaffirmed that Mahmoud Khalil’s case belongs in New Jersey — significantly closer to his wife, community and legal counsel," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "The Trump administration has attempted to manipulate the judiciary to suppress speech that supports Palestinian rights. While the trauma ICE has inflicted on Mr. Khalil and his nine-months pregnant wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, is irreparable, this is a step toward bringing him home.” Khalil’s legal team had argued that if the court allowed the transfer, it would reward the Trump administration's "attempts to shop for favorable jurisdictions" by moving detainees across state lines.
The case against Khalil
Khalil was detained in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on what he has called antisemitic and anti-American campus protests. Khalil, a Palestinian born in a refugee camp in Syria, was a spokesperson and negotiator last year for pro-Palestinian demonstrators against war in Gaza at Columbia University in Manhattan. He was arrested in the lobby of his student apartment building in New York City on March 8 after returning from iftar, the fast-breaking meal during Ramadan, with his wife, a U.S. citizen who is due to give birth in April. Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told him his green card was being revoked.
What to know: The Mahmoud Khalil case just landed in New Jersey. Will it stay? They detained Khalil at the Elizabeth Detention Facility in New Jersey for several hours before transferring him to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Facility. The Department of Homeland security charged Khalil under a rarely-used provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which states that the Secretary of State can move to deport any noncitizen whose presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The U.S. government also has alleged Khalil
withheld information on his application that he worked for UNRWA, a UN relief agency. In a statement, his legal team called the allegations “completely meritless.” They say his internship for UNRWA was approved by Columbia for credit and listed on his application. An allegation that he worked beyond 2022 at the British Embassy in Beirut was also “inaccurate” and “irrelevant,” they said.
Khalil's wife speaks out
In a statement, Abdalla she was relieved at the court’s decision to keep her husband’s case in New Jersey. "ICE agents ripped him from our home and took him across state lines to Louisiana, violating his rights and holding him as a political prisoner," she said. "He is being illegally held by the Trump administration, over a thousand miles away, simply because he advocated against Israel’s genocide in Gaza." Other students detained over pro-Palestinian speech also deserve freedom, Abdalla said. The administration has targeted other scholars for deportation over pro-Palestinian speech that it equates with support for Hamas or terrorism. They include a Korean American student at Columbia who participated in protests; a Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow who supported Palestinians in social media posts; and a Tufts University student who co-authored a piece published in The Tufts Daily, the school's student newspaper, in favor of divestment from Israeli corporations. "As the countdown to our son's birth begins and I inch closer and closer to my due date," Abdalla said, "I will continue to strongly advocate for Mahmoud’s freedom and for his safe return home so he can be by my side to welcome our first child. We have prevailed in the past, we are prevailing, and we will continue to prevail until we see freedom for all people, both here and in Palestine."
