(The Hill) — An immigration judge’s order for Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation Wednesday is not the end of the former Columbia University activist’s fight against the Trump administration.
The deportation order, which found Khalil failed to disclose relevant information on his green card application, cannot go into effect due to another case the pro-Palestinian demonstrator brought against the federal government for allegedly violating his constitutional rights, and in which a district judge has ruled the Trump administration cannot currently deport him.
And Khalil is all but certain to appeal immigration Judge Jamee Comans’s deportation decision.
The district judge ruled Khalil “not be deported pending further order from the court in that case. So we’re heartened that that order remains in place, but to be clear, Mr. Khalil remains in danger of being deported if this administration continues its efforts,” said Conor T. Fitzpatrick, supervising senior attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Can you answer 20 questions from new US citizenship test?
“Mr. Khalil will have the opportunity in immigration appeal proceedings to raise many of the constitutional issues he has not yet been allowed to raise in the immigration court, but the concern now is that the administration may try and deport him before those appeals have been decided,” he added.
Khalil was arrested back in March, the first of several foreign-born pro-Palestinian protesters targeted by the Trump administration in the wake of their campus activism. The federal government says the activists represent a threat to U.S. foreign policy, which it says makes them eligible for deportation by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Although the Trump administration has accused Khalil and others of supporting Hamas and other U.S.-designated terrorists, it has pointed to little evidence outside of these demonstrators’ speech to justify the detentions, worrying First Amendment advocates.
While in detention for months, missing the birth of his first child, Khalil had another accusation levied against him: allegedly omitting past work on his green card application. He worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, had employment with the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut past 2022 and was a member of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group.
Comans ruled that, due to that information missing on Khalil’s permanent residency application, he should be deported to Syria or Algeria.
State Dept. to revoke visas for celebrating Charlie Kirk shooting
“It is a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans, and harass Jews, take over buildings and deface property, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.
“Even as a rogue district judge seeks to deny these basic truths, an immigration judge has ordered Khalil removed based on immigration fraud. The Trump Administration will continue to fight to vindicate these important principles,” she added.
Khalil’s lawyers have laid out their next steps for the immigration proceedings and the district court case. In immigration court, they are ready to appeal but are wary of success after what they said was an abnormal deportation ruling.
“Here, what we saw is that the immigration judge, in some ways, went out of her way by using, applying the case law, or sort of reading the case law in a way that it hasn’t even read before, to deny him this waiver that would otherwise routinely granted,” said Noor Zafar, senior staff attorney with ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and part of Mahmoud’s legal team.
The judge denied a waiver preventing the removal of Khalil from the United States, one Zafar says is common for immigrants to get, especially ones with an American wife and children, which he has.
His legal team is skeptical of their chances in immigration court as the case will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where it is notoriously difficult to get an order like this reversed.
Family deported with ill American child need to return for care, lawyers say
“We are concerned that there’s aspects of this process that the way that it’s laid out in immigration court, that has sort of deviated from the standard procedure … So we’re going to put forward our best case, and we’re hopeful that our legal arguments will carry,” said Zafar.
In a separate proceeding in the district court, Khalil is challenging the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s attacks against him and that his First Amendment rights have been violated.
In this proceeding, his lawyers are planning to amend documents with new discoveries about the “retaliatory action” by the federal government against Khalil, court filings state.
“A big part of our case has already been established, given the sort of voluminous record and voluminous evidence of the administration’s public statements and public pronouncements targeting Mr. Khalil. But we do think that we are entitled to additional discovery that really shows a little bit more behind the scenes, the decision making that took place and how it was selected to be targeted on what basis. And so, we’re going to seek leave in the district court to get discovery from the government on an expedited schedule so that we can further substantiate these claims of retaliation,” Zafar said.
It could be months to years before a final decision is reached for Khalil.
While the new development does not necessarily impact those other proceedings, it creates fresh worries for international students who have seen their college careers heavily scrutinized under the Trump administration.
“If Khalil is successfully deported here, then no foreign student will feel safe to express unpopular political views on campus, and university communities will suffer terribly for it, but we’re not there yet, and it remains to be seen what the district court will,” said Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
