A judge in former Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil’s case ruled against him Friday, finding he is eligible for deportation while giving his legal team a little less than two weeks to respond.
Jamee Comans, an immigration judge in Louisiana, found the government’s case is “facially reasonable.” She gave his team until April 23 to file its response.
The government had “established by clear and convincing evidence that he is removable,” Comans said, The Associated Press reported.
“I would like to quote what you said last time that there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” Khalil said at the end of the hearing. “Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me are afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”
The ruling comes after Khalil, the former lead negotiator of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia, has been in a Louisiana detention center for more than a month after he was arrested on March 8.
“The fight to bring Mahmoud home is far from over,” Noor Zafar, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “We will continue undeterred to press for his release after this startling escalation of the Trump administration’s war on dissent. We will fiercely defend his and others’ right to speak freely about Palestine or any other issue without fear of detention and deportation.”
In addition to appealing the Louisiana decision, Khalil’s legal team plans to fight for his release in a federal habeas corpus case in New Jersey.
His lawyers are arguing in the New Jersey proceedings that Khalil is being illegally detained. They are asking for bail and a preliminary injunction that would release him back to his family.
The federal judge in those proceedings has already ruled Khalil is to stay in the country for now.
Khalil’s arrest kicked off a battle between foreign students and the Trump administration, which is aggressively targeting those who participated in last year’s campus demonstrations amid Israel’s war in Gaza.
Federal officials have not accused Khalil of committing any crime, but they say his behavior justifies terminating his legal immigrant status.
“[Immigration and Customs Enforcement] proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. 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,” President Trump said last month.
Khalil was quickly moved to Louisiana by federal officials after his arrest. In separate proceedings, Khalil’s lawyers and the federal government have been battling over where the Algerian citizen should be tried, whether New York, New Jersey or Louisiana.
In the government’s case against Khalil and other foreign-born student activists, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is pointing to a rarely used provision of law that says he can order a noncitizen to be removed if they threaten U.S. foreign policy.
Khalil’s proceedings in Louisiana drastically picked up speed after Comans ruled on Wednesday the federal government had 24 hours to produce what evidence it had against Khalil so she could make a decision on Friday.
After the 24-hour deadline, Rubio submitted a filing doubling down on the government’s position, that it has the authority to remove Khalil because of his speech and beliefs. If Khalil remained in the country, Rubio argued, it would harm “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 in the United States.”
“This document underscores that the government has ripped Mahmoud Khalil from his home and nine-months pregnant wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, solely because it disagrees with his speech. Controversial speech is not illegal, and political speech that criticizes the Israeli government or U.S. foreign policy is constitutionally protected,” said Molly Biklen, interim legal director for New York Civil Liberties Union and part of Khalil’s legal team, in response to the filing.
Khalil has been stuck in detention as Abdalla, a U.S. citizen, is pregnant and due to give birth this month.
“This is the longest we have been apart since we got married. I miss you more and more everyday and as the days draw us closer to the arrival of our child, I am haunted by the uncertainty that looms over me — the possibility that you might not be there for this monumental moment,” Abdalla wrote to him while he was in detention.
“Every kick, every cramp, every small flutter I feel inside me serves as an inescapable reminder of the family we’ve dreamed of building together. Yet, I am left to navigate this profound journey alone, while you endure the cruel and unjust confines of a detention center,” she added.
Families around the country and the world are watching the crackdown on international students nervously as hundreds of visas have been revoked, affecting dozens of universities.
Harvard University, Tufts University, the University of Alabama and many others have seen their students detained or leave the country out of fear of getting arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Most of the high-profile cases against foreign students show the individual participated in pro-Palestinian protests or made their support for Palestine public on campus.
“What we will see [is] the students will continue their activism, will continue doing what they’ve done in conventional and unconventional ways. So not only protests, not only encampments, kind of any — any available means necessary to push Columbia to divest from from Israel,” Khalil told The Hill last summer when speaking about protest efforts for the 2024-2025 school year.
Schools have begun offering legal support, directing students to immigration attorneys and conducting seminars so foreign students know their rights.
“If you’re a foreign student and you’re feeling uneasy about your situation … you should go have a checkup with a lawyer and pay for a consultation to just see what your options are,” said Jeff Joseph, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Zach Schonfeld contributed.
Updated at 4:54 p.m. EDT
