Hundreds rally for Mahmoud Khalil outside courthouse as lawyers condemn ‘unprecedented’ case against Columbia student
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A Columbia University graduate and green card holder was arrested and marked for deportation by Donald Trump’s administration solely for his “advocacy for Palestinian rights,” lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil said in a federal courtroom in Manhattan on Wednesday.
Khalil — who is being processed for deportation in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana — was “identified, targeted, detained and is being processed for deportation on account of his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” according to Ramzi Kassem, an attorney with the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project at CUNY School of Law.
Attorneys for Khalil, a prominent organizer for pro-Palestine demonstrations on campus, made their first appearance in a case to determine the legal basis for Khalil’s shocking arrest in New York, where he was pulled away from his U.S. citizen wife, who is eight months pregnant, and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana, more than 1,300 miles away.
On Monday, District Judge Jesse Furman temporarily halted his removal from the United States, and is barring the government from deporting him. But Khalil will remain in Louisiana, for now.
The attempt to deport a legal permanent resident for their political views has drawn international scrutiny and raised fears of a crackdown on free speech by the Trump administration.
His detention has “severely limited” his attorneys’ access to him, Kassem told the judge.
Khalil’s lawyers were able to schedule one attorney-client privileged call — on March 20, more than two weeks after his arrest. “We have not been able to confer with our client once,” Kassem said.
Government lawyers said that was “the first we’re hearing of client access issues” and will “look into it.”
But Khlalil “has been processed for deportation” and will be “placed in removal proceedings” in a Louisiana court, according to assistant U.S. attorney Brandon Waterman.
The judge ordered Khalil access to two privileged calls — one on Wednesday and another on Thursday.
Khalil was first detained in a New Jersey facility in the early morning hours on Sunday before he was moved to Louisiana that night.
His arrest has been widely condemned by Democratic officials and civil rights groups, questioning how a legal permanent resident could be deported, without facing any criminal charges, and without any evidence from the government of the allegations against him or any other demonstrators.
Administration officials have argued that Khalil doesn’t need to be charged, let alone convicted of a crime, to be removed from the country, alleging without evidence he was “aligned with Hamas” thus providing material support to a terrorist organization.
His attorneys plan to submit a new filing this week to “flesh out grave constitutional” violations and expand on their arguments after the Trump administration’s statements, Kassem said.
A timeline of his arrest and detention and when attorneys intervened could ultimately determine where Khalil’s case can be heard. He was detained in New Jersey shortly after 3 a.m. on Sunday. A petition for his removal was filed after 4 a.m. Later that night, he was moved to Louisiana.
But the judge appeared somewhat skeptical that Khalil should remain in Louisiana as his attorneys fight for his return to New York.
Judge Furman suggested there could be an “exception” if there was “bad faith” in an attempt to intentionally deprive a court of having jurisdiction, or if the government’s “constant movement” of a person in custody intended to prevent them from even “knowing where to file” their case, pointing to concurrence written by former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy more than 20 years ago.
Outside the court, hundreds of people joined a rally demanding Khalil’s release.
David Maloof, a 68-year-old lawyer and Columbia graduate from 1988 who wore a red “Make America America Again” hat to Wednesday’s rally, said he was concerned about the implications for free speech.
“If we don’t stand up now, citizens are next,” he said. “I mean, how close is that line for somebody like Trump? … This thing may go all the way to the Supreme Court, and hopefully they’ll reach the right decision, which is you need more than just the word of a politician like [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio, to remove somebody, to take away their liberty.”
Miriam Osman, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, said she was “enraged” by what she described as the “illegal detention” of Khalil.
“No matter what your political opinions are in this country, you have a right, constitutionally, to be able to express them, and that is exactly what Mahmoud Khalil was doing,” she said.
“For the Trump administration to come and say you, as a green card holder, can just be picked up from your home one night with no due process, this should be completely appalling to every single American,” she added.
From the steps of the Thurgood Marshall courthouse, actress and activist Susan Sarandon told reporters that “freedom of speech is a right we all have, and this is a turning point in history.”
Kassem called the government’s grounds for revoking Khalil’s green card “absolutely unprecedented,” he told reporters after Wednesday’s hearing.
“It cannot be the case that you can be disappeared at night, off the streets of New York city, simply because the current administration in the White House dislikes what you have to say,” Kassem said.
“Essentially they are a form of punishment and retaliation for the exercise of free speech,” he added. “We think it won’t fly in federal court. We think it won’t fly in immigration court. And it certainly should not fly in the court of public opinion.”
Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center of Constitutional Rights and a member of Khalil’s legal team, compared his arrest to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, a grim period in 20th-century American history when the U.S. government suppressed and persecuted its own citizens for their political beliefs.
“Mr. Khalil’s detention has nothing to do with security. It is only about repression,” Azmy said.
Joseph Howley, associate professor of classics at Columbia University, invoked Martin Niemöller’s quote about the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany as he drew comparisons to the current landscape for civil rights in America.
“Where exactly are we in the poem that begins, ‘When they came for the communists, I did not speak out’? Well, they’ve already come for the asylum seekers,” he said. “They’ve come for the migrant families. Now they’ve come for Mahmoud Khalil. It’s not a very long poem, so how far down the list do you think you are?”
