When government agents surrounded Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and his pregnant wife outside their New York City apartment over the weekend, it marked a chilling escalation in the battle over free speech in America. Those agents weren’t enforcing immigration policy; they were sending a message about the consequences of political expression. 

After serving as a negotiator during campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, Khalil became the target of what his attorney called “a profound doxing campaign for two months related to his First Amendment protected activities” — harassment so severe he had desperately sought help from university leadership.

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Despite being a lawful permanent resident entitled to constitutional protections, Khalil was transported to a detention facility thousands of miles away, effectively “disappeared” for over 24 hours. The political motivation became explicit when President Donald Trump celebrated the arrest on social media, calling it “the first arrest of many to come.” 

On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, we discuss the profound implications Khalil’s case raises for free speech and due process with Edward Ahmed Mitchell, civil rights attorney and national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Columbia Journalism Review reporter Meghnad Bose.

“It’s very clear the administration is waging a war on free speech — free speech for Palestine. They said they were going to do it when they took office. And that is what they are doing. Their issue with him is that he is a Muslim who is a lawful, permanent resident of America and he exercised his right to speak up for Palestinian human rights,” says Mitchell. 

Bose adds, “ It’s this sort of thinking that if you are somehow critical of a certain position of the United States government, except this isn’t even a position of the United States government. You’re basically saying, if you’re critical of the position of a foreign government — in this case, the Israeli government — that you can be penalized in the United States, even if you’ve not broken any law.” 

Mitchell warns even U.S. citizens face risk: “American citizens should be safe in all this, but Stephen Miller and others have said they want to review the naturalization of citizens to see whether or not there are grounds to remove their citizenship. So in the worst-case scenario, you can imagine them trying to find or manufacture some way to target even the citizenship status of people who were lawful permanent residents and then attained citizenship. So they’re going all out to silence speech for Palestine.”

Bose says it’s not just about immigration status; the government has other draconian tools at its disposal as well. “They can jail U.S. citizens too. They don’t have to deport you or take away your citizenship, he says. “They can incarcerate U.S. citizens too.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

The post The Disappearance of Mahmoud Khalil appeared first on The Intercept.

In short, Khalil is safe from further detention — for about a month and a half, his legal team told The Intercept. Khalil is fighting two separate legal battles: one in federal court, and the second in immigration court.

“We understand there’s a lot of concern about whether ICE can go pick him up again right now,” said Brett Max Kaufman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and member of Khalil’s legal team. “Before the appeals process is over, that cannot happen.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Khalil, a green card holder, at his New York apartment in March and quickly flew him to a Louisiana detention center. He spent the next three months there while the government sought to deport him, missing the birth of his child.

Khalil was released in June after New Jersey District Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled that the Trump administration’s detention of Khalil was likely illegal and violated his First Amendment rights. As a graduate student at Columbia University, Khalil had been a vocal participant in student activism opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza — putting a target on his back for the Trump administration, which has sought to crush advocacy for Palestine under the guise of combating antisemitism.

On Thursday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rules on appeals in New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, overturned the New Jersey federal court’s release order in a split 2–1 decision. The two majority opinion judges — appointees of Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump — stated the lower court didn’t have jurisdiction over the free speech claims case, while the dissenting judge, a Biden appointee, argued it did and Khalil’s release should hold. 

Even though the appeals court tossed the order that bailed Khalil out of detention, the decision does not immediately go into effect, according to court rules.

Thursday’s decision goes into effect in 45 days, at which point Khalil would again be exposed to detention. Before that deadline, Khalil can appeal the 3rd Circuit’s recent decision. 

That doesn’t mean Thursday’s decision isn’t alarming, Kaufman said — both for Khalil personally and for free speech rights overall.

The decision essentially endorses the idea that even if someone’s free speech rights were violated, Kaufman added, the government can still detain and seek to deport them for their activism, making them wait in detention as they challenge their case in immigration court.

“That just defeats the entire purpose of the First Amendment,” Kaufman said. “If this decision stands, the government might be able to snatch you up for your speech and put you in detention for years.”

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In a statement released by the ACLU on Thursday, Khalil called the ruling “deeply disappointing” but reaffirmed his commitment to activism for Palestinian rights.

“The door may have been opened for potential re-detainment down the line, but it has not closed our commitment to Palestine and to justice and accountability,” he said. “I will continue to fight, through every legal avenue and with every ounce of determination, until my rights, and the rights of others like me, are fully protected.”

If Khalil pursues another appeal, it would allow all 14 judges — rather than the customary three — on the appeals court to weigh in on the case and possibly reverse Thursday’s decision, potentially reviving Khalil’s release order. 

Thursday’s appeals court decision also allows the Trump administration to resume its separate fight to get Khalil deported in immigration court. There, Trump administration attorneys have used an obscure immigration policy to argue Khalil’s activism for Palestine has adverse consequences for U.S. foreign policy. The government has claimed Khalil has ties to the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which attorneys assert is false. Trump attorneys have also accused Khalil of lying on his green card application.

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Deportation, Inc.

In April, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that the government does have grounds to deport Khalil, but attorneys appealed, and the decision which is now being reviewed by the Board of Immigration appeals. If the board, known as the BIA, sides with Khalil, the Trump administration’s immigration case against him would end. 

If the board sides with the government, upholding the immigration removal, Khalil could pursue an additional appeal in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which governs decisions in Louisiana. Such a process may take months to play out. Appeals courts, in such immigration cases, can also offer a stay, halting the government’s deportation order, even after a BIA decision.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a prominent ally of Khalil’s, condemned the court’s ruling in a statement on Thursday.

“Last year’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil was more than just a chilling act of political repression, it was an attack on all of our constitutional rights,” Mamdani wrote on X. “Now, as the crackdown on pro-Palestinian free speech continues, Mahmoud is being threatened with rearrest. Mahmoud is free—and must remain free.”

Other pro-Palestinian activists detained by the Trump administration, such as former Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, who is also a green card holder, and Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, are awaiting their appeals. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing similar arguments for Mahdawi and Öztürk, who were both released last year after federal judges also ruled their constitutional rights were violated. 

Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who was arrested in 2024 while protesting outside Columbia University and was detained in March by the Trump administration, remains in immigration detention in Texas. The government continues to allege she also has ties with Hamas, which she continues to refute in court.

The post Despite Court Ruling, ICE Can’t Detain Mahmoud Khalil — For Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite being one of the most recognizable faces among the activists, however, Mahmoud Khalil still faces possible re-detention and deportation to Algeria, a country he’s never lived in.

Now, on the heels of a federal court ruling that delivered a blow to his case, Khalil is mounting a new fight in immigration court, where he is appealing his deportation order.

Earlier this month, Khalil and his legal team requested that the government move the case out of Louisiana, the conservative district where he was held for three months. The legal team asked the court to send the case back to New York, where Khalil was initially detained and where he lives with his wife, Noor Abdalla, and their 10-month-old son Dean, who was born when Khalil was incarcerated.

If they’re successful, the legal team plans to submit new evidence to show the government’s retaliation against Khalil in hopes of dismissing his deportation case, according to the February 13 motion exclusively obtained by The Intercept. The motion, filed in immigration court, lays out the inequities of how Khalil’s deportation proceedings were handled last year by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.

Khalil’s attorneys hope to use a raft of government documents that have become public since his initial hearings — documents that emerged after Louisiana courts denied him access to the materials in discovery.

“This is the bare minimum that immigration courts should do, to look at the evidence,” Khalil told The Intercept. “And it’s clear by the government’s statements, by ICE and DHS conduct, that these were brought in retaliation to our freedom of speech.”

Among the documents is a newly unsealed March 2025 legal memo from the Department of Homeland Security that shows the Trump administration lacked evidence to support its case.

In addition to the documents, Khalil’s legal team drew comparisons to the cases of other student activists who have won relief from the courts. Unlike the cases of recent Tufts University graduate Rümeysa Öztürk and former Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, for instance, the immigration judge presiding over Khalil’s case has refused to rule on whether the Trump administration unconstitutionally targeted Khalil for his activism at Columbia while he was a graduate student.

Both Öztürk and Mahdawi relied in part on a landmark ruling in a separate case that the government violated the constitutional rights of pro-Palestinian activists, including Khalil, when it detained them last year. In late January, a judge dismissed Öztürk’s deportation case and cited the September ruling. Just last week, Mahdawi beat his own deportation case after the judge said the government failed to certify the document it used to detain the activist.

“At least some part of this immigration system is still functioning fairly,” said Khalil, whose legal team hopes to add to the string of victories.

The Khalil Exception

For nearly a year, the Trump administration has attempted to make an example out of Khalil as part of its harsh crackdown on advocacy for Palestinian rights. ICE agents detained Khalil last March at his New York City home and whisked him away to Louisiana.

Immigration detainees are frequently rushed to Louisiana; critics of the transfers say they serve to isolate immigrants from loved ones and communities that could aid them, and also takes advantage of more conservative judges who could be friendlier to administration positions. Yet Khalil’s attorneys said the swift nature of the transfer, flying him out of New York within several hours of his detention, was especially punitive.

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At the time of his detention and transfer, the Trump administration said Khalil should be deported because his campus activism harmed U.S. foreign policy, justifying the position by conflating his advocacy for Palestine with support for Hamas and antisemitism. The government later added a charge of immigration fraud to Khalil’s case.

Khalil and his legal team have long argued the Trump administration’s case against him was never about immigration, but about silencing Israel’s critics. That argument was never considered by Judge Jamee Comans, who declined to consider Khalil’s free speech claims.

Comans also denied Khalil’s application for a waiver that would create another path toward remaining the country; usually the waiver applications are reviewed in a hearing, Khalil’s lawyers said, but Comans denied Khalil’s outright.

Comans upheld the Trump administration’s claims in the case and twice last year ordered Khalil’s deportation.

In the February 13 filing, Khalil’s attorneys said the rejection of his waiver was part of the government’s relation for protected speech, an opinion backed up by a declaration from a former immigration judge. Khalil’s legal team said it was “unprecedented” for a judge to deny a detainee the opportunity to make a case for a violation of free speech rights.

“The whole case has been an example of abnormal, from Mahmoud’s arrest until now,” said Johnny Sidonis, a head attorney on Khalil’s immigration legal team. “If this evidence had been available to us and set forth in the record immigration court, it would have affected the outcome of the case.”

In December, Comans, the Louisiana judge, was promoted to an acting assistant director position in the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Comans could not be reached for comment, but her office said it does not comment on immigration judge decisions or active cases. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)

Khalil’s lawyers now hope to make the newly unsealed Homeland Security memo a major piece of their case. Drafted the day of Khalil’s detention, the memo was unsealed by a federal court in Massachusetts in late January as a part of litigation brought by The Intercept and other news outlets. The Trump administration acknowledged in the document that it lacked evidence to support its deportation case against Khalil beyond the rarely used foreign policy grounds provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The government said in the memo that it anticipated legal blowback.

A week after Khalil’s detention and after his initial lawsuit, the government added the immigration fraud charge to the docket, accusing Khalil of leaving information about his internship for a United Nations agency and membership in a pro-Palestine Columbia group off his 2024 green card application.

The new motion in Khalil’s case accuses the government of adding the second charge because the foreign policy-related “charge would not pass constitutional muster and therefore the government needed another reason to pursue Mr. Khalil’s removal, no matter how meritless and tenuous it would be to do so, due to its retaliatory animus.”

“I Could Be Deported Any Day”

Khalil’s legal fight is being waged in two courts: in federal court, where the adverse ruling came from on January 15, and in immigration court.

In immigration court, the Department of Homeland Security has until March 23 to file its response to Khalil’s filing at the immigration appeals board, after which the board will render its decision. And Khalil already has an ongoing case against his detention in federal court.

Last month, a panel of appeals court judges overturned a lower court’s order to release Khalil based on his First Amendment rights, saying the lower court doesn’t have jurisdiction over free speech aspects of the case. Khalil has until March 31 to appeal that ruling.

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In the meantime, Khalil has remained free from detention since last June, but he seldom gone outside since the federal appeals court ruling last month. A week after the ruling, an ICE spokesperson said the Trump administration was making plans to deport Khalil to Algeria.

Planning a future with his family is bogged down in uncertainty, he said. Before signing the lease to their new apartment, the first question he asked the landlord was: “What if I break the lease prematurely?”

“I can’t buy any piece of furniture,” Khalil said, “because I could be deported any day.”

Despite the stress of his possible deportation and security risks, Khalil has continued his advocacy for Palestinian rights and that of others to speak out, giving speeches at events and meeting with members of Congress on Capitol Hill.

He has also remained in contact with Öztürk, Mahdawi, and Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri, who was also detained for his pro-Palestine advocacy, as well as Leqaa Kordia, the last person who remains jailed after participating in the Columbia protests.

For Khalil, continuing to speak out, despite security risks, is his way of showing he will not be intimidated into giving what the Trump administration wanted: his silence.

“The administration wanted to make an example out of me,” Khalil said. “And this is the way that I’m making an example of this administration.”

The post Pro-Palestine International Students Have Won in Court. Why Hasn’t Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom? appeared first on The Intercept.

After Mahdawi’s 14 days in immigration detention, Vermont District Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered the immediate release of the pro-Palestine activist, arguing in part that his continued detention would “likely have a chilling effect on protected speech.”

The judge also noted that Mahdawi, 34, is not a “flight risk” or a “danger to the community.”

Mahdawi’s legal fight is far from over. The U.S. permanent resident, who was born in the West Bank, will have to return to court to argue his habeas petition to block the government from detaining and deporting him.

But on Wednesday, Mahdawi struck a defiant tone. “I am saying it clear and loud. To President Trump and his Cabinet: I am not afraid of you,” said Mahdawi from the outside Vermont courthouse.

Mahdawi, a pacifist who stepped back from his activist work to focus on building bridges between Jewish and Israeli students and the Palestinian movement on campus, also shared a message of unity and joint struggle.  

“What we are witnessing now and what we’re understanding is exactly what Dr. Martin Luther King has said before: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he said.

On April 14, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Mahdawi at his scheduled naturalization interview. Mahdawi had previously been in hiding after ICE arrested his friend and fellow Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, fearing similar retaliation. His attorneys argued that the interview was effectively a “trap.” The government is now trying to deport him back to the West Bank, where he fears repression.

“It’s kind of a death sentence,” Mahdawi previously told The Intercept. “Because my people are being killed unjustly in an indiscriminate way.”

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While his legal battle is ongoing, the decision marks a clear victory for the international students at the center of the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian organizers. “We are hopeful that it will build momentum for the release of Mahmoud [Khalil], Rumeysa [Öztürk], Dr. Bader Khan Suri, and other students and scholars detained for their speech in support of Palestinian rights,” Noor Zafar, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and a member of Khalil’s legal team, wrote to The Intercept.

On Tuesday, a judge issued a key ruling in favor of Khalil, a Syrian-born U.S. permanent resident. The court ordered that Khalil’s attorneys can argue in federal court that he was detained and targeted for expressing his political views.

Despite these victories, both Khalil and Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student who had her visa revoked and was kidnapped off the street by ICE agents for writing an op-ed critical of Israel, remain detained in Louisiana. On Monday, an appeals court paused an earlier court order transferring Öztürk to Vermont. Her lawyers argued that could mean she remains in the Louisiana detention facility, notably without access to proper medical care, for months.

The post Students Are Winning in Court Against Trump’s Deportation Regime appeared first on The Intercept.

While Rubio and the Trump administration claimed in public that they wanted to deport students including Mahmoud Khalil and Yunseo Chung for supporting terrorism, internal Department of Homeland Security and State Department documents instead cite their advocacy for Palestinian rights in protests and writings — activities protected by the First Amendment.

Rubio and the administration have repeatedly conflated pro-Palestinian speech with support for Hamas, which the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization, but a DHS memo shows the government did not find any evidence that Chung or Khalil provided “material support” — meaning cash payment, property, or services — to any terror group. Even in their own communications, DHS and the State Department acknowledged they were in uncharted territory and likely to face backlash.

“DHS has not identified any alternative grounds of removability that would be applicable to Chung and Khalil, including the ground of removability for aliens who have provided material support to a foreign terrorist organization or terrorist activity,” reads the March 8 memo. “We are not aware of any prior exercises of the Secretary’s removal authority in [the Immigration and Nationality Act] section 237(a)(4)(c), and given their [lawful permanent resident] status, Chung and Khalil are likely to challenge their removal under this authority, and courts may scrutinize the basis for these determinations.”

Yet the following day, Rubio claimed that Khalil and the other students were supporting terrorist organizations. “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” wrote Rubio on X on March 9, referencing Khalil’s arrest.

The hundreds of pages of documents were evidence in a lawsuit brought against President Donald Trump, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and DHS by five students and academics — Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, Mohsen Mahdawi, Khalil, and Chung — who alleged that their deportation orders violated their freedom of expression. 

The students won their case last year, but until Thursday, the trove of documents remained under lock and key after the judge agreed to seal the records on the State Department’s behalf. At the request of The Intercept, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, Massachusetts District Judge William G. Young ultimately unsealed the records, revealing intimate details about the State Department’s persecution of students speaking out in support of Palestine.

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The documents include a series of memos sent from the Department of Homeland Security to the State Department recommending deportation orders for the five students. The correspondence overwhelmingly focuses on the students’ participation in on campus protests and advocacy.

In the memos, commissioned by Rubio, the State Department and DHS argued that the students posed a threat to U.S. foreign policy because the protests they participated in fostered a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States” and undermined “U.S policy to combat anti-semitism around the world.” DHS and the State Department repeatedly based accusations of antisemitism and supporting terrorism on the students’ public speech, often noting that the First Amendment could make it difficult for the U.S. to win their deportation cases.

In Öztürk’s case, a State Department document dated March 21, 2025, noted that her visa had been revoked because she “had been involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students indicating support for a designated terrorist organization’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later banned from campus.”

A separate document from the State Department dated March 15, referencing an assessment from DHS, found that Suri was “actively supporting Hamas terrorism” and “actively spreads its propaganda,” based on Facebook posts.

However, the State Department memo cautioned that Suri was likely to challenge his removal on First Amendment grounds. “Given the reliance on Suri’s public statements as an academic, and the potential that a court may consider his actions inextricably tied to speech protected under the First Amendment, it is likely that courts will closely scrutinize the basis for this determination,” officials wrote. 

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While the students won their lawsuit against the government, an appeals court earlier this month reversed the decision that released Khalil from custody. He still has time to appeal the reversal before he can legally be detained, but the White House has said the government plans to rearrest him and deport him to Algeria.

The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment by the time of publication.

The post New Legal Documents Show Marco Rubio Targeted Students for Op-Eds and Protesting appeared first on The Intercept.

The Department of Homeland Security submitted Rubio’s letter, a 1 ½-page declaration, on Wednesday evening at a Louisiana immigration court at the LaSalle ICE facility. The letter from Rubio is undated and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Khalil’s arrest on March 8. Khalil has been imprisoned at the Louisiana ICE facility since the day after his arrest. 

On Tuesday, Judge Jamee Comans ordered the government to present evidence by Wednesday to justify its attempt to deport Khalil. Rubio’s letter was the sole piece of evidence provided by DHS attorneys, the source said.

Comans will preside over a hearing on Friday to decide whether the government’s evidence is sufficient to deport Khalil. If Comans rules against the government, Khalil could be released as early as Friday. 

“If he’s not removable, I don’t want him to continue to be detained — I will have him released,” Comans told attorneys for Khalil and the government during Tuesday’s hearing, according to multiple reports.

Rubio’s letter does not include new allegations or new evidence to support its deportation claim against Khalil, a legal permanent resident.

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Instead, the letter cites the “adverse foreign policy” provision in the Immigration Nationality Act, the same provision cited by the government when it imprisoned Khalil in Louisiana. The Trump administration’s attorneys have referred to the provision in multiple court documents in Khalil’s separate habeas petition case in New Jersey, in which Khalil’s legal team has been pushing for his release. 

The rarely used immigration law provision gives the secretary of state the authority to request the deportation of an individual, who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country harms U.S. foreign policy interests.

The letter filed Wednesday asserts that Khalil engaged in “antisemitism” and that it is U.S. foreign policy to keep people out of the country who engage in such activities. The letter also includes a second person targeted for deportation, but their name was redacted by the government. The government regularly conflates Khalil’s advocacy for Palestine with antisemitism.

“The public actions and continued presence of [redacted name] and Khalil in the United States 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 in the United States,” Rubio wrote. He then cited Trump’s “America First” executive order that calls on the secretary of state to “always put America and American citizens first” in foreign policy. 

“Condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” Rubio wrote.

The State Department declined to comment due to the ongoing legal case.

In previous public statements, Rubio has called Khalil “a supporter of Hamas,” the Palestinian militant group which governs over Gaza, a common and baseless claim made by the Trump administration about student protesters who oppose U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. During an interview with CBS News one week after Khalil’s arrest, Rubio refused to answer a question about whether the government has evidence linking Khalil to Hamas. Instead, Rubio deflected by accusing Khalil of leading protesters in “taking over” Columbia’s campus. 

Khalil was a lead negotiator between the Palestinian solidarity encampment at Columbia University and school administrators in the spring of 2024. The student-led movement demanded the university disclose and withdraw its investments in companies that profit off of Israel’s war in Gaza. Protesters briefly occupied Hamilton Hall, renamed Hind’s Hall, before NYPD officers raided the building, violently arresting dozens of students. Khalil was not among those arrested and faced a short suspension, which school officials quickly apologized for and rescinded after one day.

The Trump administration’s attorneys have previously accused Khalil of hiding certain employment experience from the government when applying for his green card. They claimed that Khalil failed to mention that he had previously worked for the Syria office of the British Embassy in Beirut as well as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. Khalil was an unpaid intern at UNRWA for a brief time in 2023.

The government, however, did not include these allegations in its filing in immigration court on Wednesday. 

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Khalil’s attorneys have pointed to a statute within the Immigration and Nationality Act that prevents the secretary of state from using the “foreign policy” provision to deport someone based on an individual’s speech unless it has compelling grounds to do so. In a virtual press conference on Thursday, Khalil’s attorneys said Rubio’s letter falls short of establishing such grounds.

“The Rubio memo is completely devoid of any factual recitation as to why exactly Mahmoud’s presence in the United States is adverse to a compelling U.S. government interest,” said Johnny Sinodis, a San Francisco-based immigration attorney and a lead in Khalil’s immigration case. “There’s absolutely nothing there in the letter itself, and that’s all the government has provided in order to establish the ‘foreign policy’ ground.”

Baher Azmy, who is leading Khalil’s case in New Jersey federal court, called Rubio’s letter “a tacky Soviet-style dictate that’s equal parts empty and chilling.”

Marc Van Der Hout, who is leading Khalil’s immigration defense, criticized Judge Comans for moving too quickly on the case without giving the legal team more time to bolster its defense of Khalil against deportation. He still plans on asking to depose Rubio to seek what more evidence, if any exists, the government has against Khalil. Rubio’s letter also alluded to several attachments, such as a letter written by DHS about Khalil and a Homeland Security Investigations profile of Khalil, but both were absent from the government’s filing.

Khalil’s attorneys said it’s clear the government’s case is about cracking down on his speech in support of Palestine and represents a precedent amid the Trump administration’s nationwide attacks on universities and students. The Trump administration has revoked hundreds of student visas since Khalil’s arrest. Many were not involved in protests at all, while some were being targeted for low-level misdemeanors. 

“And where would this lead?” Van Der Hout said. “Are we going to now throw people in jail for speaking out against the Social Security cuts in this country? This is a dangerous slope, and we are taking a stand on behalf of Mahmoud, and he is taking a stand.”

“He’s decided to stay in jail and fight this case to the bitter end,” he added, “while we try to establish that people like Mahmoud have a constitutional right to speak out in this country.”

Update: April 10, 2025, 7:14 p.m. ET
This article has been updated with additional comments.

Update: April 10, 2025, 3:54 p.m. ET
This article has been updated with additional details from the government filing in the case.

The post The Case Against Mahmoud Khalil Hinges on Vague “Antisemitism” Claim appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump’s administration moved this week to declare thousands of immigrants dead.

The 6,000-plus very-much-alive people, predominantly undocumented immigrants from Latin America, continue to eat, sleep, breathe, and work on U.S. soil. Their names have nonetheless been added to the Social Security Administration’s “death master file,” the database used to list dead people who should no longer receive benefits.

The New York Times, the first to report on the perverse repurposing of the death master file, noted with unusual pointedness that the administration was including “the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead.”

It’s just the latest move in a relentless effort to make life so unlivable for immigrants.

Listing immigrants among the dead is a nasty workaround to swiftly remove access to means of survival in this country — permanently cutting off access to benefits, bank accounts, and the ability to legally work. It’s just the latest move in a relentless effort to make life so unlivable for immigrants, such that they will be forced to choose to leave, if not swept up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported first.

This is more than cruel expediency. Death is the point.

The Trump administration is openly stating its willingness to condemn millions of people to civic and social death on multiple fronts, from immigrants marked as dead by the Social Security Administration, to denying trans people access to passports, correct documentation, or any existence according to government records at all.

This is not mere metaphorical killing: Expulsion from official public life can be truly deadly.

Trump’s escalation of necropolitical rule — historian Achille Mbembe’s notion of governance organized around exposing certain groups to premature death and elimination — is producing a fascist reality that threatens to revoke the legal rights of whole swaths of the population.

The dead, after all, have no claim to rights.

Mahmoud Khalil’s Rights

These necropolitical affronts aren’t just visible on Social Security rolls. They are an unspoken part of so many of the immigration cases before us. Take, for example, the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University, where he was involved in the anti-genocide protests, and a permanent resident whose U.S. citizen wife is expecting their first child.

“Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked in his March letter from a Louisiana ICE detention center. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”

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On Friday, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled Khalil can be deported on baseless Trump administration claims that he poses a threat to American foreign policy.

“This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family,” Khalil told the judge, after she informed him of her ruling. “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.”

Khalil’s lawyers will be appealing the decision and are pressing a separate habeas corpus petition in federal court in New Jersey. Like the kidnapping and detention of Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed and the revocation of hundreds of student visas apparently for participation in anti-genocide protests, Khalil’s predicament makes a mockery of constitutional protections.

Khalil’s fight against deportation on baseless charges of “antisemitism” and threats to “national security” is indeed a test case for the limits of basic constitutional and human rights under Trump.

“The right to have rights,” which was first mentioned by philosopher Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany, highlights that a person is not inherently rights-bearing but must be acknowledged as a member of a political community to be granted any other rights at all. We might speak of universal rights, but they must be recognized and only have material force when recognized by state powers.

It is precisely the removal of the right to have rights, the right to be recognized as a human under law, at which Trump aims.

It is no accident that Palestinians and their supporters are among the first targeted. Israel, the U.S., and the so-called rules-based international order have designated Palestinians outside the bounds of rightful acknowledgment — that is to say, expellable, detainable, and killable — for 76 years.

It is precisely the right to be recognized as a human under law at which Trump aims.

“I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention — imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights,” Khalil wrote in his letter.

Khalil’s lawyers are arguing that he has been targeted by the administration for nothing more than speech that should be protected under the First Amendment. There is even a particular measure in the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act that is supposed to bar the government from deporting people as threats to “foreign policy” for speech alone.

And yet to assert these protections has proved fruitless. Where are Mahmoud Khalil’s rights?

Necropolitics Out in the Open

When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to round up Venezuelan immigrants, this, too, was an attack on the right to have rights. And it is proving successful: The majority of the 200-plus men rounded up on consistently groundless charges of gang membership had no criminal record. That didn’t stop them from being sent, with no due process, to a brutal prison camp in El Salvador.

This policy of extraordinary rendition as deportation only becomes darker with every new detail. U.S. designations of criminality have long been used to strip people of their basic rights. The potentially permanent removal to a totalitarian prison camp would not be justified even if every detainee were convicted of serious crimes.

Take the case of a man who the Trump administration admits was wrongly sent to El Salvador. Despite this admission, the government is fighting to not have to retrieve the man — going so far as to defy a court order on Friday. It reflects a commitment to the removal of demarcated people from the rights-bearing community.

Trump’s Republican Party has been described as a “death cult” since his first term, when MAGA Covid denialism took on deadly and suicidal forms. A rejection of medical science, a welcoming of environmental decimation, an all-out assault on basic welfare provisions, extraordinary worker exploitation, reproductive health care bans, an undying commitment to gun power — these are typical morbidities of American reaction under capitalism, imbued with a messianic charge under Trump.

Like much of the Trumpian project, the administration this time round has a more honed, violent, and unambiguously fascist mode of death-dealing.

Trump’s policies may leave the entire population, including his devoted base, more vulnerable to premature death and debility; Trumpian politics of domination, meanwhile, rely on clearly demarcating so-called enemies and threats as already dead, removable, or killable.

There is, however, at least one way that Trump’s “death cult” turns necropolitics on its head.

Necropolitical governance — the deadly, racist ordering of life and death by Western liberal democracies — have typically sought to administer death behind closed doors or far from home. The public was not supposed to learn about the tortures in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison or the abuses in Guantánamo Bay; the police killings; the racist brutality of prisons; the pollution and its grossly unequal distribution of environmental devastation; and much more.

The Trumpian move is to don the Totenkopf, to embrace and supercharge this monstrous and grossly unequal death tableau.

Khalil, meanwhile, continues to show us what it means to fight for the living.

“After the hearing, Khalil turned around to face the 22 observers and journalists filing out of the courtroom and formed the shape of a heart with his hands,” NPR reported. “He smiled.”

The post Mahmoud Khalil and the Necropolitics of Trump’s Deportation Regime appeared first on The Intercept.

For the conservative pundit class, few issues have been as central to their cause as their supposed defense of free speech. Over the last decade, they have built a powerful political movement revolting against the force of so-called cancel culture, which they argued had restricted permissible dialogue and punished free thinkers willing to speak their own truths. 

But as the Trump regime moves to expel from this country a Palestinian U.S. permanent resident based solely on his political expression, many of those free speech warriors have changed their tune. The arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University graduate and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil demonstrates the clear hypocrisy of many conservative voices when it comes to free speech in America. Conservatives who previously opposed “cancel culture” on the grounds of defending free speech are now quick to support state violence against critics of Israel through the arrest and expulsion of those critics from U.S. society.

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ICE Secretly Hauled Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana as Retaliation, Lawyers Allege

On March 8, officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security arrived at the home of Khalil and arrested him, separating him from his wife, a U.S. citizen who is 8 months pregnant. He was ultimately moved to a detention facility in Louisiana, a friendly jurisdiction for government cases against immigrants. Though Trump’s desire to immediately deport the legal U.S. permanent resident has been temporarily blocked by Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York, the threat against him remains. After speaking with Khalil on Tuesday, his attorney Amy Greer said that he “is moved by the extraordinarily broad and steadfast support he has received from a variety of communities that understand what is at stake.”

Khalil faces no criminal charges, and no evidence has been offered to substantiate the Trump administration’s propagandistic claims that he is a “national security threat” who was “inciting violence,” in the words of Trump border czar Tom Homan. Indeed, top White House and Republican Party officials have essentially admitted that Khalil has not committed any crime. Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified his attempt to deport Khalil by claiming — without evidence — that he supports Hamas and “antisemitic activities.” This demonstrates that even as Rubio grossly misrepresents Khalil’s politics, he is actually attempting to deport Khalil because of his alleged politics. When asked what crime Khalil committed, House Speaker Mike Johnson reverted to propaganda talking points.

It is worth noting what Khalil has actually said. In a 2024 interview with CNN, Khalil stated, “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other. Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.”

Perhaps that is why large numbers of Jewish protesters took over the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City on Thursday to demand Khalil’s release.

Related

The Legal Argument That Could Set Mahmoud Khalil Free

The Trump administration has argued that it has the power to deport Khalil under the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which states, “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” But the White House has not shown how Khalil’s advocacy against Israel’s genocide in Gaza would cause “serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” unless one considers it “adverse” to end U.S. support for that genocide. Under the Trump administration’s sweeping interpretation of this language, any legal permanent resident of the U.S. who criticizes any aspect of Trump’s foreign policy — from Trump’s desire to occupy Greenland to his gross abandonment of Ukraine — could be deported. This is a clear attack on the First Amendment and constitutionally protected free speech.

A wide range of conservative voices who have frequently criticized “cancel culture” have been quick to defend the Trump administration’s ugly actions. Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk is one example, having made cancel culture his calling card while justifying the deportation of Khalil. Kirk called him “a Hamas propagandist” and claimed without evidence that he “distributed pamphlets on Hamas’ propaganda” — claims that remain unsubstantiated and are fundamentally about political speech. Dinesh D’Souza followed the same path, arguing against “cancel culture” on the one hand while calling for Khalil’s expulsion based on his alleged offensive speech against “Western civilization,” an allegation that actually appears to be based on a fake Instagram post. Ben Shapiro has often opined against cancellation campaigns that have targeted everything from slave-owning historical figures to present-day conservative media personalities like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. However, Shapiro has retweeted multiple voices on X arguing in support of Khalil’s removal from the U.S., while sharing nothing regarding the free speech concerns or unconstitutionality of this action. The list goes on and on.

To be fair, there have been exceptions to this hypocrisy. Ann Coulter, in her typical style, stated on X, “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?” Candace Owen has questioned the absence of criminal charges against Khalil and debunked conservative claims regarding what Khalil has said. 

Prominent conservative publications that have argued against “cancel culture” have staked out divergent positions. The Wall Street Journal has been sympathetic to deporting Khalil over supposedly “pro-terrorist” speech, due to the student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest stating, “We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.” It raises the question: If a Ukrainian student group took this stand, would the Wall Street Journal support their deportation too? Maya Sulkin, a reporter for Bari Weiss’s Free Press, argued that Khalil’s deportation was not about free speech but on-campus crimes. Of course, Khalil has not been charged with or convicted of any crimes, something Sulkin failed to mention. In contrast, Reason Magazine, whose tagline is “Free Minds and Free Markets,” has published multiple pieces that are skeptical or critical of Trump’s actions against Khalil. 

What emerges from the above examples is that too many conservative voices are quick to defend free speech when it serves their ideological goals, but are equally quick to endorse the violent repression of free speech when the speech in question runs counter to those goals.  This targeting of Khalil by Trump and the conservative media ecosystem is just the latest escalation in a decadeslong campaign to silence critics of Israel in the U.S. These strategies have included unfounded claims that critics of Israel are antisemitic, denying opponents of Israeli policy funding or employment, calling them “terrorists,” blocking or removing people from elected office, and preventing advocates for Palestinian freedom from participating in public discourse. The use of these tactics is by no means limited to Republicans, as the Kamala Harris presidential campaign demonstrated when it said no to having a Palestinian speaker at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

Trump has promised that Khalil’s arrest is “the first arrest of many to come.” It is worth noting that this policy statement comes directly from the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank that brought us Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” explicitly calls for deporting leaders of the Palestine solidarity organizations who aren’t U.S. citizens. It also demonizes critics of Israel as part of a “global Hamas Support Network” and ludicrously labels advocates for Palestinian freedom as “destroying capitalism and democracy.”

The simple and ugly reality is that pro-Israel repression in the United States is a necessary ingredient for maintaining U.S. military support for Israel’s destruction of Palestinian society. Without this internal climate of repression, more Americans would be likely to oppose the immense military support the U.S. has long provided to a nation that subjects millions of Palestinians to apartheid and genocide.

As with many of Trump’s actions, his attack on Khalil’s freedom may have backfired by triggering a dramatic response from advocates for civil rights and Palestinian freedom. Protests are occurring at multiple campuses across the U.S, and the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it is joining Khalil’s legal team. Multiple organizations have launched grassroots campaigns calling on universities to oppose Trump’s actions and protect student rights.  

Some elected Democrats have taken a stand in support of Mahmoud Khalil, though many have remained silent. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., declared, “Today it’s Mahmoud Khalil. Tomorrow it’s me or you.” Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee posted “Free Mahmoud Khalil” on X and decried Republican hypocrisy on free speech: “So pro-‘freedom of speech’ that Republicans will DETAIN you if you disagree with them. This is actual cancel culture.” A small contingent from the House of Representatives have released a letter demanding Khalil’s release, as have some New York state elected officials. More actions are expected from other Democrats in the hours and days ahead. 

However, many Democrats have not said anything. Most embarrassingly, Khalil’s own member of Congress, New York Rep. Adriano Espaillat, told The Intercept, “I expect the Department of Justice to work within the confines of the law and that due process is guaranteed to [Khalil] and his family.” This is an utterly absurd position given Trump’s total hostility to the rule of law. Meanwhile, senior Democratic Party leaders have been muddled in their own language. Both Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries combined calls for Khalil’s release with the repetition of false claims of antisemitism. Through their statements, they implicitly erased the many Jews who support Khalil and participated in protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

But despite the silence of many, Trump’s actions have brought the vigorous defense of freedom of speech and support for the Palestinian people back into the center of U.S. political debate. The critical task at hand is to combine a robust rejection of Trump’s repression of Palestinian voices with strategies that advance the broader cause. That means freeing Khalil and blocking the detention and deportation of other leaders like him. But it also means putting pro-Israel networks on the defensive, shattering the lie of Republican concern for free speech, and holding silent Democrats accountable. By doing so, we can begin to liberate America from the new McCarthyism of censorship and repression of pro-Palestine speech. And through this, we can end U.S. support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.

The post The Right Loves Free Speech — Unless It’s Pro-Palestine Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

It found little support among Tlaib’s colleagues in Washington, with a mere 14 Democrats signing their names on the letter condemning Khalil’s detention as an “illegal abduction.” 

Instead, statements from prominent Democrats suggest much of the party is taking the Trump administration’s targeting of Khalil in good faith.

Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., who counts Khalil as one of his constituents, did not sign the letter. When contacted by The Intercept about the case, Espaillat said he expects the Trump administration — which has explicitly flouted and sought to circumscribe federal legal protections for civil liberties — to adhere to the rule of law.

“Regarding the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a constituent who lives in my district, my office has been following this case closely and as a former green card holder, I expect the Department of Justice to work within the confines of the law and that due process is guaranteed to him and his family,” Espaillat said in a statement Tuesday morning. “The rule of law must be respected.” 

In a statement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., condemned Khalil’s activism and “antisemitic actions at Columbia,” without providing examples of those actions. He said that the administration should release Khalil if it could determine he had not broken any laws. 

The Trump administration itself has admitted the case against Khalil does not hinge on allegations that he broke the law and told a conservative news outlet that it will these proceedings as a blueprint to target other students.

Tlaib’s letter — first reported by Jewish Insider — specifically calls out the Trump administration’s campaign for pushing to expel Khalil despite the fact he “has not been charged or convicted of any crime.”

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If Trump Can Deport Mahmoud Khalil, Freedom of Speech Is Dead

“As the Trump administration proudly admits, he was targeted solely for his activism and organizing as a student leader and negotiator for the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia University campus, protesting the Israeli government’s brutal assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza and his university’s complicity in this oppression,” the letter said. “This illegal justification has been stated clearly by figures throughout the administration, including the president himself.”

In a bid to find additional backers, the letter was distributed among all 100 House members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Monday evening with a 10 a.m. deadline, according to a source familiar with the letter. Less than 15 percent of CPC members signed onto the letter, which was published Tuesday morning.

Signatories of the letter include Reps. Andre Carson, D-Ind.; Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas; Al Green, D-Texas; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; Jim McGovern; D-Mass.; Gwen Moore, D-Wis.; Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Mark Pocan, D-Wis., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.; Lateefah Simon, D-Calif.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y.; and Nikema Williams, D-Ga. 

At least one Democrat reportedly consulted about Khalil prior to his arrest. According to The Forward, an aide for Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., discussed Khalil’s situation with a former operative for the Zionist group Betar. The group has taken credit for sending a list of students it wanted deported to the White House. Betar named Khalil, misspelling his first name, in a tweet in January.

In response to a tweet on Monday from the Senate Judiciary Democrats calling to free Khalil, Fetterman replied: “Free all the hostages who have been tortured, starved, raped, beaten and STILL in tunnels in Gaza by Hamas since October 7th, 2023.” Fetterman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Correction: March 11, 2025, 11:09 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the publication that first reported that an aide for Sen. John Fetterman discussed Khalil prior to his detention. That was first reported by The Forward.

The post Dems for Some Reason Expect Trump to Follow the Law on Detention of Mahmoud Khalil appeared first on The Intercept.

But one student newspaper is fighting back. 

The Stanford Daily — the independent publication covering Stanford University — filed a First Amendment lawsuit suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this month over two tactics they’ve used in targeted deportation cases.

“What’s at stake in this case is whether, when you’re in the United States, you’re free to voice an opinion critical of the government without fear of retaliation,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a civil liberties group representing the plaintiffs.

“It does not matter if you’re a citizen, here on a green card, or visiting Las Vegas for the weekend — you shouldn’t have to fear retaliation because the government doesn’t like what you have to say,” Fitzpatrick said.

Soon after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration agents in early March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, student journalists and editors around the country sensed a shift.

“That’s when we saw a significant uptick in calls,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, who manages the nonprofit’s hotline.

Over three decades helping student reporters navigate censorship and First Amendment issues, Hiestand had never fielded so many calls focused on potential immigration consequences for coverage on campus, both for the journalists and their named sources.

Öztürk’s arrest just a couple weeks later sent the legal hotline “into overdrive,” Hiestand told The Intercept. He heard from reporters, editors, and even political cartoonists worried their work about Israel, Palestine, and student protests might make them targets too.

In early April, the Student Press Law Center put out an unprecedented alert with other student journalism organizations, which advised campus publications to consider taking down or revising “certain stories that may now be targeted by immigration officials.”

“ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms,” reads the alert.

The next week, the Stanford Daily editors ran a letter about the chill its own staff was facing on campus.

“Both students and faculty have been increasingly hesitant to speak to The Daily and increasingly worried about comments that have already been made on the record,” their letter read. “Some reporters have been choosing to step away from stories in order to keep their name detached from topics that might draw unwanted attention. Even authors of dated opinion pieces have expressed fear that their words might retroactively put them in danger.”

Following the editors’ letter, FIRE approached the Stanford Daily’s editors to sue the Trump administration. It’s not the first time the publication has fought for freedom of the press in court. In 1978, a case brought by the Stanford Daily over a search warrant targeting its newsroom reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-3 that the warrant was valid and did not violate the First Amendment.

The student newspaper’s current suit — filed with two individual plaintiffs suing under the pseudonyms Jane Doe and John Doe — challenges two broad, arcane legal provisions that have become Rubio’s go-to tools against student activists and campus critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The first provision, which was added to the country’s immigration code in 1990, grants the secretary of state sweeping authority to render noncitizens deportable if they “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The second law is even broader, allowing the secretary to revoke visas “at any time, in his discretion.”

There are relatively few cases in which either statute has been the grounds for deportation, particularly compared to the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has rounded up and detained since Trump returned to the White House.  

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The Case Against Mahmoud Khalil Hinges on Vague “Antisemitism” Claim

In fact, immigration scholars found that invoking the foreign policy provision as the sole grounds for deportation was “almost unprecedented,” according to a brief submitted in Khalil’s ongoing court battle by more than 150 lawyers and law professors. Based on government data, the scholars identified just 15 cases in which the foreign policy provision has ever been invoked, and just four in the past 25 years — most recently in 2018, during the first Trump administration.

“At a minimum, the government’s assertion of authority here is extraordinary — indeed, vanishingly rare,” the scholars wrote in their brief.

In Khalil’s case, the government identified only two others beside Khalil who had been targeted by Rubio under the “foreign policy” provision: although not identified by name, descriptions of the cases match Rubio’s orders against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, and Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University. Oddly, the government failed to mention the case of Yunseo Chung, another Columbia undergraduate with a green card, whose deportation Rubio authorized in the very same letter as for Khalil.

The State Department greenlighted Öztürk’s detention, meanwhile, under the second, broader provision, court records show. The government has not made any similar accounting of how many times Rubio and his staff have invoked his “discretion” to revoke visas over alleged antisemitism. At one point Rubio claimed to have revoked as many as 300 visas, without specifying the authority under which he did so.

“The chill is the point,” Fitzpatrick, the FIRE attorney, said. “It doesn’t take deporting thousands of noncitizens to accomplish that chill,” since no one wants to become “the next Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk.”

In recent months, numerous courts have cast doubt on whether these two statutes can be used to target noncitizens based on their speech.

In Khalil’s case, which is currently pending in a federal appellate court, a district court judge in New Jersey ruled in June that the “foreign policy” provision is “very likely an unconstitutional statute.”

Similarly, in May a judge in Vermont ordered Öztürk’s release to “ameliorate the chilling effect that Ms. Ozturk’s arguably unconstitutional detention may have on non-citizens present in the country.” The government has also appealed that order, along with similar rulings that freed Mahdawi and Suri from detention, and another ruling that blocked the Trump administration from detaining Chung.

Now, the Stanford Daily is mounting a direct challenge to these two laws as deployed by the Trump administration. The student newspaper argues both provisions are unconstitutional under the First Amendment, at least when used to retaliate against protected speech.

“The Secretary of State and the President claim to possess unreviewable statutory authority to deport any lawfully present noncitizen for speech the government deems anti-American or anti-Israel. They are wrong,” reads their complaint, filed August 6. “The First Amendment cements America’s promise that the government may not subject a speaker to disfavored treatment because those in power do not like his or her message.”

Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian who has written about the history of ideological deportation in the U.S., told The Intercept that Congress never meant for the foreign policy provision to be used “as a tool to suppress freedom of expression and association.”

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The Legal Argument That Could Set Mahmoud Khalil Free

“Members of Congress intended for the foreign policy provision to be used in unusual circumstances, and only sparingly, carefully, and narrowly to exclude or deport specific individuals who would have a clear negative impact on United States foreign policy,” Kraut said, citing changes signed into law after the Cold War.

“What this case is seeking to establish is that political branches’ authority over immigration does not supersede the Bill of Rights,” FIRE’s Fitzpatrick said.

Briefing in the case is ongoing, and a hearing is scheduled for October 1.

“It’s gratifying to see a student newspaper upholding free speech at a time when many institutions are bending the knee,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford, in an emailed statement. “Many students are afraid to protest the Trump administration’s actions not only because of the deportations, but because their own universities restricted speech and harshly disciplined protestors. I hope their courage inspires others to act.”

The post The Student Newspaper Suing Marco Rubio Over Targeted Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.

When ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday for comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, outrage poured out of all corners of the liberal body politic. It was an example of “government silencing dissenting voices,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said. Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor called it “a wild overreaction.” If you fall for it, according to commentator Hasan Piker, “you’re an easily tricked adult and a fucking loser.”

In light of threats from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, ABC’s move to crush Kimmel over the comments stands as a particularly craven example of capitulation by the corporate media — especially given the relatively banal and careful wording Kimmel used.

The corporate media has not covered itself in glory during President Donald Trump’s second term. Poor coverage decisions, a willingness to give the powerful the benefit of the doubt, and an eye toward profit at the expense of journalistic integrity are nothing new.

Yet the Kimmel affair is a prime demonstration of how the president’s vindictiveness and greed have pushed those failures to a new low. 

What might be more telling about the mainstream media’s failure to stand up against the assault on free speech, however, was something few commentators have bothered to mention: what happened to sometime student activist Mahmoud Khalil just hours earlier. 

Cowardice Begets Cowardice

Khalil, who was detained by immigration authorities for three months earlier this year over his advocacy for Palestinian rights, was ordered deported to Algeria or Syria on Wednesday afternoon. 

The Palestinian green card holder, who was born in Syria, became a flashpoint after his detention was explicitly tied to his activism against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

The news that he may now be expelled from the country should have been met with equal or greater condemnation from liberals and the left than Kimmel’s was. (Khalil appears safe so long as his federal case against the original detention proceeds, but the new immigration ruling was under new pretenses, meaning he could be deported when the federal trial ends.)

It’s a far more dangerous and brutal consequence of speech the White House doesn’t like than a suspension from late night hosting duties. 

Never mind the imbalance — the two cases didn’t even merit equal treatment in the eyes of the corporate media.

Kimmel is certainly more prominent and famous — a household name to much of the country — than Khalil is. That isn’t the only reason for the differing levels of outrage. Indeed, the recognition gap was in large part thanks to the corporate media’s failings to properly cover Khalil’s detention in the first place, due to the uniqueness of the main issue animating his ordeal: his advocacy for Palestine. 

As with so many cases of the “Palestine exception” to free speech, Khalil’s detention was treated by much of the media as being implicitly justified by baseless accusations of antisemitism against him. Media figures on the left and right alike created a permission structure for his silencing. 

The same fear, miscalculations, and hostility to free speech that informed coverage of Khalil are now resulting in corporate media censorship of its own on-air personalities. 

Eager to please a president who is notoriously thin-skinned and obsessed with his treatment on television, ABC and its parent company Disney folded instantly to pressure from the FCC chair as well as local syndicators Nexstar and Sinclair. 

In both cases — pressure against directly confronting the lies behind Khalil’s detention and the capitulation on Kimmel — the political forces at work came from the ideological right. Sinclair is a longtime ideological ally of Trump and the conservative movement, having served as a useful organ for the right, including through a literal fake news scheme. 

There were, of course, other interests at work — business interests. Nexstar is preparing for a $6.2 billion merger with competitor Tegna, one that would require regulatory approval from an administration that has shown its willingness to weaponize government power in service of its agenda.

Cashing Out

Nexstar isn’t the only media company to put corporate interests above speech in Trump’s second term. 

Before the election, the Washington Post pulled its expected endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, a move that reportedly came from owner Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon Web Services holds billions in federal contracts.

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How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image

In July, Paramount settled a lawsuit from Trump to the tune of $16 million over an episode of CBS’s “60 Minutes” — just ahead of a Paramount sale to the son of pro-Trump billionaire Larry Ellison, a sale that required regulatory approval. 

Yet more media consolidation under craven pro-Trump political forces is looming. David Ellison’s Paramount is angling to make two mega-network deals, eyeing acquisitions of Warner Bros. Discovery and CNN.

And the younger Ellison allegedly floated the idea of buying anti-speech conservative gadfly Bari Weiss’s The Free Press and putting the ideological Weiss — who once, as a college student, sought to ban professors for their views on Israel and Palestine — in charge of CBS. 

Ellison’s control of CBS News has already resulted in policy changes to appease administration officials and canceling the show of Trump critic Stephen Colbert. 

With men like Ellison ready and willing to deploy their billions in service of the ruling party and a media institution so weak it can’t stand up to a despotic regime tightening the screws, the future of news media in the U.S. looks exceptionally bleak. 

Kimmel’s suspension is only the latest example of mainstream media’s willingness to bend over backward to appease Trump, but a sign of an increased willingness from corporate giants to cannibalize their own popular figures. 

It’s not hard to see how the administration’s demands are getting more brazen when mainstream media capitulated so early in a clear-cut free speech case like Khalil’s.

The post Jimmy Kimmel Wasn’t the Biggest Corporate Media Capitulation to Trump This Week appeared first on The Intercept.

Comans made her decision after weighing a single piece of evidence from the government, submitted in court two days earlier: a one-and-a-half-page letter written by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in which he stated that Khalil’s presence in the U.S. would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Friday’s decision represents a major blow to Khalil and other protesters targeted by the Trump administration. But Khalil’s attorneys promised the fight would continue in the courts. 

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Mahmoud Khalil and the Necropolitics of Trump’s Deportation Regime

Two major paths remain open to Khalil: one within the immigration court system, and the other in federal district court. Despite Friday’s immigration court decision, Khalil’s attorneys continue to argue in federal district court in New Jersey for his release on free speech grounds. A resolution in the federal case could arrive in a matter of days or weeks. In immigration court, Khalil could apply for asylum, appeal the ruling before the Board of Immigration Appeals, and pursue further appeals within the U.S. circuit court — processes that could stretch for months or even years.

Khalil and his attorneys seem committed to such a lengthy fight, in part because they know the outcome of his case carries major implications for other cases in which the Trump administration is targeting immigrants with arrest and deportation. 

“There’s no stopping at Mahmoud Khalil, there’s no stopping at just pro-Palestinian protesters,” said Baher Azmy, a lead attorney in Khalil’s legal team on Friday. “Next, it could be LGBTQI activists under some pretext that that interferes with our foreign relations with Russia, racial justice activists, anyone.”

Path to Release 

Separate from Khalil’s fight in the immigration court system is his petition for release, which is playing out in New Jersey’s federal district court. There, Khalil’s attorneys are arguing that his free speech rights are being violated and that he must be released. 

That decision will come down to Judge Michael Farbiarz, who inherited the case from New York federal district court, where the petition was originally filed after Khalil’s attorneys successfully fought the government’s push to send the case to Louisiana.

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Standing in the way of Farbiarz releasing Khalil is a separate jurisdictional battle. The Trump administration’s attorneys are making the argument that the case belongs only in the immigration courts. Khalil’s attorneys contend that his case is not just about his immigration status, but also about his First Amendment rights since the government is targeting his protest activities. 

Comans made clear during this week’s hearings in immigration court that she cannot weigh in on issues that have to do with the First Amendment or the Constitution in Khalil’s deportation proceedings. Khalil’s attorneys said this admission should help bolster their argument that the case belongs in district court. 

Khalil’s team continues to move with added urgency since his wife, Noor Abdalla, is pregnant with their first child and is due by the end of April. A supporter read a prepared statement by Abdalla at the Louisiana court on Friday, calling the ruling “a devastating blow to our family.” She also said the ruling was “an indictment of our country’s immigration system and does not reflect truth, justice, or the will of the American people.”

Regardless of whether Farbiarz orders Khalil’s release, Khalil’s fight against his deportation would continue separately in immigration court. If Khalil is released, however, it would dramatically change the timeline of his immigration court fight. 

Immigration cases move much faster for individuals who are detained compared to those who are not in custody, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Counsel who has been watching Khalil’s case closely.

Reichlin-Melnick said that if Khalil remains jailed, his fight against deportation in the immigration system could end late this year or next. But if he were freed, the case could take up to three years before it reaches a conclusion, he said.

“This could theoretically, if he is released, not even make it to the circuit courts before Trump finishes out his term,” Reichlin-Melnick said. 

Within the Immigration System

As a part of Friday’s ruling, Comans said Khalil has until April 26 to file for relief from deportation. His attorneys said they are considering filing for an asylum claim under the Convention Against Torture law. 

Marc Van Der Hout, an attorney leading Khalil’s immigration case, said the government’s targeting of Khalil based on his protesting may end up bolstering his claim for asylum. Such a process would require further hearings.

If Khalil is released, he would be able to file for asylum in immigration court in New York, where he lives. New York immigration courts have a backlog of 100,000 asylum claims, despite having only a few hundred judges, said Reichlin-Melnick. Getting to an asylum hearing, a process which he described as “a mini trial” with expert witnesses, could take several years.

If the immigration court rejects Khalil’s asylum claim, his attorneys said they plan to appeal the deportation ruling before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is made up of immigration judges overseen by the Department of Justice. The appeal process before the board may play out over several months or several years, depending on whether Khalil is still detained or free, Reichlin-Melnick said.

Before the board, Khalil and his attorneys would likely face stark opposition — case law would not be on his side. The last time the Board of Immigration Appeals saw a case related to the “adverse foreign policy” provision used in Khalil’s case was in 1999. In that case, the board ruled that the secretary of state had the authority to deport someone under the same provision. But the circumstances were dramatically different. The board was ruling on the deportation of former Mexican attorney general Mario Ruiz Massieu, who had fled Mexico and entered the U.S. on a temporary visa to avoid a slew of criminal charges, including money laundering, embezzlement, and torture. 

Reichlin-Melnick also pointed out that Khalil, a legal permanent resident, would be able to hold on to his green card throughout the immigration court proceedings. It would only be revoked if the board rules against Khalil and upholds his deportability.

A “Kangaroo Court”

Van Der Hout and Khalil’s legal team said they have little confidence in finding relief in the immigration court system. Comans denied separate motions asking to extend the hearing into next week and a request for more evidence from the Department of Homeland Security. In her ruling, she said she does not have the authority to override Rubio’s letter.

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After Friday’s hearing, attorneys for Khalil called the judge’s ruling a “rubber stamp” of the government’s argument. Van Der Hout accused the judge of rushing the matter, giving Khalil’s legal team less than two days to examine evidence from the government before the hearing. He referred to the process as a “kangaroo court.” 

Khalil himself said after the ruling that the proceedings had lacked “due process rights and fundamental fairness.”

“This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family,” he said. 

Van Der Hout further accused the Trump administration of “court shopping,” sending the case into a jurisdiction more favorable to the government.

Amid the Trump administration’s mass layoffs across the federal government, the administration fired 20 immigration judges in February, including nine judges from the Board of Immigration Appeals. All of the nine judges fired from the board were appointed by the Biden administration. Recently-fired immigration judges called the moves by Attorney General Pam Bondi politically motivated. The Bush administration carried out a similar tactic in the early 2000s to achieve rulings favorable to the government in immigration court, which officials at the time had denied.

Khalil’s attorneys said Friday that such moves may also play a factor in his case.

“They’re putting in their hand-picked people who will rule the way they want them to rule,” alleged Van Der Hout. “There’s basically going to be no justice in the immigration court system based on what we’re seeing now.”

Although his attorneys have yet to discuss legal strategy beyond an appeal to the immigration board, if the board rules against Khalil and upholds his deportation, his attorneys could continue their fight in the U.S. Court of Appeals, Reichlin-Melnick said. There, they would be able to pursue their argument that the government is violating Khalil’s constitutional rights.

“This is by no means over yet — there’s a lot that has still yet to happen in this case,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “The decision that he can be deported is not a decision that he will be deported.”

The post What Comes Next in Mahmoud Khalil’s Fight Against Deportation appeared first on The Intercept.

Even the government agrees it’s not about committing a crime.

According to court filings obtained by The Intercept, the government’s main argument against Khalil rests on a civil law provision within the Immigration and Nationality Act, which governs the country’s immigration and citizenship system. The provision, known as Section 237(a)(4)(c)(i), gives the secretary of state the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests. 

Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian whose family is from Tiberias, in the lobby of his Columbia University apartment on Saturday. After initially alleging they had revoked his student visa, they said they had instead revoked Khalil’s green card. Authorities then secretly transported Khalil, a U.S. permanent resident, from New York to New Jersey, then to an immigration detention facility in Louisiana where judges are known to be more favorable to the government’s legal arguments.

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In a notice for Khalil to appear in immigration court in Louisiana where he remains jailed, the government cites the specific provision and states: “The Secretary of State has determined that your presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Government lawyers have not, however, provided any evidence, in court filings or hearings, to support their claim. Khalil refused to sign the notice. 

Khalil’s legal team plans to fight the government’s “foreign policy” provision in both the push for his release in federal court and in his deportation proceedings in immigration court, said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a member of Khalil’s legal team. A Manhattan federal district court judge temporarily halted Khalil from being deported while his lawyers continue to push for his release and transfer back to New York, where his attorneys can represent him more easily and he can be closer to his wife who is eight months pregnant.

Khalil’s attorneys plan to contest his detention on free speech grounds under the First Amendment and by challenging the government’s use of the “foreign policy” provision. By evoking the “foreign policy” provision, the Trump administration is making a clear statement not just about its foreign policy goals but also free speech, Azmy said.

“The United States government thinks Mahmoud’s speech in favor of Palestinian human rights and to end the genocide is not only contrary to U.S. foreign policy, which is something in itself, but that that dissent provides grounds for arrest, detention, and deportation,” Azmy said. “It’s an astonishing claim.”

Central to their challenge in court will likely be another provision within the Immigration and Nationality Act that exempts noncitizens facing deportation under the government’s “foreign policy” provision. The exception, known as Section 212(a)(3)(C)(iii), says that an individual cannot be deported under the “foreign policy” provision cited by the government if their “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States.”

In other words, since Khalil’s past activities were protected free speech under the First Amendment, he should not be deported under the “foreign policy” provision cited by the government, Azmy said. The Department of Homeland Security has said it arrested Khalil, a lead negotiator for Palestine solidarity protesters at Columbia, for having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” But even if such alignments exist, advocacy is protected activity in the U.S., Khalil’s attorneys maintain.

“If there is constitutionally protected speech,” Azmy said. “It doesn’t matter if it goes adverse to the foreign policy interests of the United States — it’s still protected. The government doesn’t get to decide what you can talk about and what you cannot talk about based on whether or not it helps the U.S.”

Khalil’s legal team said the “foreign policy” provision giving the secretary of state the ability to request a deportation is rarely used, and when it has been evoked it is to deny visas for foreign officials who have interfered with democracy in their respective countries or officials with a poor human rights record. And the exception to the provision that prohibits deportations exists to ensure that it would not be used to specifically crack down on people’s speech, Azmy said. 

“Any kind of removal proceeding because the government disagrees with a political perspective would be unlawful,” Azmy said. “So Congress wrote that into the statute, mindful of what the Constitution requires.”

There is an obvious counterargument for government lawyers seeking to deport Khalil. They can turn to an exemption within the exemption that still gives the secretary of state leeway to further argue for deportation if the State Department can provide “a facially reasonable and bona fide determination” that the individual’s presence and activities in the U.S. “compromises” U.S. foreign policy interest, according to the provision and previous immigration case law. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said Khalil’s case “is not about free speech” but about “people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with.”

“I think being a supporter of Hamas and coming into our universities and turning them upside down and being complicit in what are clearly crimes of vandalization, complicit in shutting down learning institutions,” he said in Ireland on Wednesday, after a visit to Saudi Arabia for ceasefire talks with Ukrainian officials. “If you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in. And if you do it once you get in, we’re going to revoke it and kick you out.”

Rubio’s words rang hollow to a longtime New Jersey-based immigration attorney Robert Frank, one of the few attorneys to have represented a client in the U.S. who faced deportation under the same “foreign policy” provision evoked in Khalil’s case. During his 50 years of practice as an immigration attorney, Frank said a case decided in 1999 was the only time he had seen the government use the provision.

In the late 1990s, Frank represented former Mexican attorney general Mario Ruiz Massieu, who had fled Mexico and entered the U.S. on a temporary visa to avoid a slew of criminal charges, ranging from money laundering to embezzlement and torture. The U.S. government had ordered his deportation by using the “foreign policy” provision after Mexico requested his return, following several failed extradition attempts. Then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher argued that keeping him would strain the U.S. relationship with Mexico. The government eventually won the case, and in 1999 Massieu was ordered to be deported.

“You can see the clear foreign policy connection — the government of Mexico is asking the U.S. to get involved — whereas this present case [with Khalil], you don’t have that at all,” Frank told The Intercept. 

“What is the foreign policy effect of this fellow talking pro-Palestinian or pro-Hamas — how does that affect the foreign policy of the United States?” Frank said, adding, “Israel may not be happy with saying things in favor of Hamas,” but that’s not grounds for deportation under the provision.

Frank challenged the provision in his client’s 1990s case, arguing that an immigration court judge should preside over whether his client would be deported or not, rather than the secretary of state alone. An immigration judge sided with Frank and halted the deportation. However, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is under the Department of Justice, overturned the decision upon government appeal. 

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While government attorneys have yet to argue their claim under the “foreign policy” provision in court, the White House has made unsubstantiated claims linking Khalil with Hamas, the Palestinian militant and political group that governs Gaza, which the U.S. includes on its Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday that Khalil had “organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish-American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda flyers with the logo of Hamas.”

“We have a zero tolerance policy for siding with terrorists,” she said.

Leavitt added that the Department of Homeland Security had provided her copies of the flyers, which the White House press office later privately shared with the conservative tabloid the New York Post. The flyers include the cover of a pamphlet published by Hamas, and widely shared online, titled “Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” and another flyer showing a boot crushing the Star of David with the message “Crush Zionism.” Leavitt and the Post made the accusations without offering evidence that ties Khalil himself to the flyers. 

Azmy dismissed the claims and said government attorneys have not introduced the flyers as evidence in their case against Khalil and haven’t referred to them in court. Even if campus protesters had passed out those flyers, such actions would be protected under the First Amendment, he said.

“We don’t concede for a moment he did any of this,” Azmy added. “And even if the Trump administration is choosing to deport people for flyers, then we have much bigger problems on our hands — it’s a form of tacky authoritarianism.” 

During a press conference outside a Manhattan courthouse where a hearing took place Wednesday for Khalil’s case, hundreds of protesters had gathered. Thousands more marched across the country throughout the last several days, demanding Khalil’s release. 

Ramzi Kassem, one of Khalil’s attorneys and the founding director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility at the City University of New York, said the “foreign policy” provision “is not intended to be used to silence pro-Palestinian speech, or any other speech, that the government happens to dislike.”

“This case is not going to set the precedent that the government wants it to set, whether its federal court or immigration court,” he said before a crowd of protesters. “And you already know that just by looking behind you that it’s not having the effect that the government wants it to have with people’s solidarity with Palestinians.”

The post The Legal Argument That Could Set Mahmoud Khalil Free appeared first on The Intercept.

The suspension lasted only one day before Columbia — with an apology from the university president’s office, Khalil later said — rescinded the suspension and dropped the disciplinary charges against him.

“After reviewing our records and reviewing evidence with Columbia University Public Safety, it has been determined to rescind your interim suspension,” wrote Claudia Andrade, an associate vice president with the school’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, in an email obtained by The Intercept. “Good luck on finals and hope you have a wonderful summer.”

Nearly a year later, the ongoing immigration case against Khalil, a green card holder who earned a master’s degree from Columbia in December, has become a national First Amendment battle with the Trump administration.

The arrest of and attempt to deport of Khalil hinged on casting his protest activity at Columbia as inimical to American interests. The Trump administration cited his role as a negotiator for student protesters as a reason for Khalil’s arrest.

According to documents obtained by The Intercept and a previous interview with Khalil, however, at the height of last year’s protests Khalil had faced disciplinary charges for a single day before being cleared of the allegation, having his interim suspension lifted, and receiving an apology from the school administration. The school, according to the documents, found no fault with Khalil that would merit disciplinary action.

An attorney representing Khalil said the charges and abrupt reversal were a common tactic used against student protesters.

“Emails like this one are one of the many types of psychologically damaging things Columbia does regularly to its students,” Amy Greer, Khalil’s attorney, told The Intercept. “It imposes interim measures and then retracts. It adds students to disciplinary cases and then dismisses.”

The Negotiator

Khalil’s brief suspension came as tensions over Columbia’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza boiled over. Students at the school were at the forefront of a burgeoning movement to erect protest encampments on university grounds. And the Columbia administration was in talks with the students about their demands — particularly divestment from Israel — and how to clear the tent city from campus.

A graduate student active in the protest movement, Khalil served as a lead negotiator in talks over divestment from Israel. While others in the protest movement sometimes covered their faces to conceal their identity, Khalil frequently briefed journalists on the negotiation proceedings without a mask.

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On April 29, Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia who later resigned in August, announced that the negotiations had failed and the university would not divest from Israel.

That morning, the university handed protesters disciplinary warnings on Columbia letterhead saying that if they didn’t leave the encampment before 2 p.m., they would be suspended, preventing them from completing the spring 2024 semester.

According to Khalil, the university had provided written and oral confirmation that he would not be disciplined for his involvement in the encampments as a negotiator, but, the day after the negotiations’ failure and the building takeover, he was issued an interim suspension anyway following the demonstration. (A Columbia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

Khalil was accused of not leaving Columbia’s spring encampment despite earlier warnings. The school charged him with violations including “disruptive behavior,” activity relating to “tenting,” “failure to comply,” unauthorized “access and egress,” and “vandalism.”

A group of students acting on their own volition then moved to occupy Hamilton Hall, a central academic building later that night.

“You are restricted from all Columbia University campuses, facilities, and property, including but not limited to all academic and recreational spaces,” Khalil’s suspension notice read. “The current unauthorized encampment and disruption on Columbia University is creating an unwelcoming environment for members of our community.”

Similar interim suspension notices with identical language that were reviewed by The Intercept told alleged encampment participants that they could not participate in exams, submit assignments, or “engage in any activities affiliated with Columbia University” during the interim suspensions.

Given the reassurances from the administration, Khalil was “shocked” to receive the suspension notice, he told me in a May 2024 interview conducted for a separate story. The suspension, he thought, was meant “only to intimidate students regardless of their involvement.”

Greer, Khalil’s attorney, told The Intercept that it was possible Mahmoud’s suspension was just a miscommunication.

“It’s either the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing,” she said, “or they thought that they were somehow going to punish him for being a negotiator without anybody caring.”

Immigration Status

Suspensions can have particularly serious effects for international students. According to some immigration law experts, if a suspension prevents an international student from fulfilling a full course load or full-time status, the university may be required to report the student to the Department of Homeland Security within 21 days.

By barring Khalil from campus, his suspension could have qualified him for the DHS notification. At the time, Khalil said he was studying on an F-1 student visa.

The suspension, however, didn’t raise immediate alarms for Khalil about his immigration status.

“I did not worry about my immigration status, to be honest, at that point.”

“I did not worry about my immigration status, to be honest, at that point because there were higher stakes in terms of police coming into campus,” Khalil said in his May interview with me.

His right to be in the country, though, had been more generally hanging over his head.

Before the suspension came down, Khalil had already said he would avoid directly participating in protests because of his visa. The school’s “one-sided statements and inaction” on the Gaza war, he told reporters at a press conference as campus tensions mounted in late April, made him acutely aware of his precarious status in the country.

In May, in the aftermath of the crackdown and his suspension, Khalil told me, “I considered the encampment to be high risk given that the university has threatened to suspend and expel students, which might impact my status here in the States. Not only my immigration but also my university status, my scholarships.”

He added that, though he had earlier expressed reticence about participating, he had nonetheless been “in and out” of the encampment in his capacity as a negotiator.

At some point before his arrest, according to legal filings, he obtained a green card.

Charges Dropped

Things were moving fast on Columbia’s campus. The same evening that Khalil received his suspension notice, Columbia moved to clear the occupation of Hamilton Hall, along with the protest camp.

It would become a harbinger of a deepening crackdown on the nationwide student protest movement, with the university inviting New York City Police Department officers in riot gear onto campus. By midnight on April 30, 109 pro-Palestinian protesters had been arrested.

The next day, on May 1, Khalil received the notice that his disciplinary charges had been dropped. Khalil said in May that the school administration reached out to him unprompted.

“​​They called — the president’s office — to apologize, saying, ‘This shouldn’t have happened,’” Khalil said, recounting the interaction. “They dropped it on their own. Other students — they appealed and got it revoked. I did not have to do anything.”

“​​They called — the president’s office — to apologize, saying, ‘This shouldn’t have happened.’”

Though there were, Khalil said, no additional disciplinary actions against him pending, the rescinded suspension notice said the university reserved the right to add harassment charges or violations of the university’s nondiscrimination policies if he was found to have “contributed to the unwelcome and hostile environment.”

After Khalil’s disciplinary case was dropped by the Center for Student Success, he later came under scrutiny from a controversial new body formed by the university in August: the Office of Institutional Equity. In Khalil’s case and others, his attorney Greer said, the Office of Institutional Equity, has used spurious allegations of discrimination to target pro-Palestinian students making constitutionally protected speech.

Aside from the scrutiny from the Office of Institutional Equity, which Greer said was for protected speech related to social media posts, and the brief suspension, she knows of no other charges against Khalil.

ICE Target

In December, Khalil completed his studies for a master’s degree at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and planned to walk in graduation this May.

In March, though, ICE came for him. During the arrest, captured in a harrowing video taken by Khalil’s eight-months-pregnant wife, shows officers in plain clothes arresting, handcuffing, and whisking Khalil away — refusing to answer questions about their own identities, agency, and reasons for the arrest.

The arrest raised concerns among civil liberties advocates. The government, most prominently Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asserted without citing any evidence that Khalil is a supporter of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip and fought the 18-month war with Israel.

Asked on CBS News if Khalil has any ties to terrorism, Rubio cited only protest activities on Columbia’s campus — referring several times to vandalization, a disciplinary charge that Khalil had specifically been cleared of, and his role as a negotiator for student protesters.

“This specific individual was the negotiator,” Rubio said. “Negotiating on behalf of people that took over a campus? That vandalized buildings? Negotiating over what? That’s a crime in and of itself, that they’re involved in being the negotiator, the spokesperson, this that the other.”

Rubio continued: “The bottom line is this: If you are in this country, to promote Hamas, to promote terrorist organizations, to participate in vandalism, to participate in acts of rebellion and riots on campus. We never would have let you in if we had known that and now that we know it, you’re going to leave.”

He cited no evidence tying Khalil to any acts of vandalism or other crimes, including any terrorism charges.

In a statement released Tuesday through attorneys, Khalil said he was a “political prisoner.”

“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” he wrote. “Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”

Disciplinary Records

It is unclear whether the suspension charge was completely removed from Khalil’s disciplinary record. Those records have become the subject of a civil lawsuit filed last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations against Columbia University administrators and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Khalil is the only named plaintiff in the lawsuit, which alleges the Republican-led House committee attempted to chill speech by commanding Columbia to produce student disciplinary records and other private information on multiple occasions.

The lawsuit says that the plaintiffs’ disciplinary records were handed over to Congress, though the scope of the records is unclear. On August 1, according to the lawsuit, the committee accused the university of not complying with their order to share “more detailed information on disciplinary actions relating to the encampment.”

“An immense number of student records were turned over, as well as faculty and staff,” Greer told The Intercept, adding that records belonging to individuals who may not have had active open cases or known that they were being investigated were also included. It is unclear whether any record of Khalil’s suspension was turned over to Congress.

“An immense number of student records were turned over, as well as faculty and staff.”

By fall, the committee published a 325-page report titled “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” which published redacted incident student records, including disciplinary documents, without university or student consent.

Greer said the information, though parts were redacted, could be used to identify students, including Khalil. The plaintiffs’ sensitive information appeared in the report and led to increased doxxing and safety threats, Greer said.

“The broad-based surveillance the university is undertaking with Mahmoud, but also hundreds of other students, makes us concerned about the breadth of materials that fall under the purview of these letters and subpoenas,” she said.

Last month, the committee demanded the university produce “all disciplinary records,” including “past disciplinary charges” of students implicated in 11 campus incidents after April 30.

Throughout the protests, Khalil had sought to keep things on campus in perspective. The day in April that negotiations failed, he compared the university’s distribution of printed suspension warnings to Israel’s dropping of leaflets on Gaza before an attack.

“The people of Gaza are under occupation, and here, we are under disciplinary charges,” Khalil told students under a threat of suspension. “That’s the difference.”

With disciplinary charges against him dropped, the threat of suspension against Khalil himself never fully materialized. He now finds himself nonetheless under attack from the highest echelons of the American government for his actions on campus.

The post Columbia Apologized to Mahmoud Khalil in May 2024 for One-Day Suspension appeared first on The Intercept.

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder, was an active participant in a political movement on his campus. The political movement called for the university to divest from arms companies and from a state deemed by the International Court of Justice to plausibly be committing genocide. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. His role in the movement was that of negotiator and mediator with the school’s administration — that is, engaging in speech.

But Khalil is Palestinian, and the movement in question is for Palestinian freedom and against Israel’s eliminationist assault on Gaza. So, as of Saturday night, Khalil, a legal permanent resident, is being held without charge at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention center. His attorney and his wife — a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant — were unable to find Khalil in the sprawling ICE carceral system for over 24 hours.

On Saturday night, Department of Homeland Security agents descended on Khalil’s apartment, a Columbia University-owned property near the school’s Manhattan campus. Khalil called his attorney, Amy Greer, who spoke with the agents on the phone. First, they reportedly said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke the graduate’s student visa. The attorney told them that Khalil has a green card, which Khalil’s wife produced as proof. Then, according to reports, the agent told Greer that they were revoking Khalil’s green card. The agents threatened Khalil’s pregnant wife with arrest too, and then took her husband away.

“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” wrote U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X on Sunday, linking to The Associated Press’s coverage of Khalil’s arrest.

There is no going back from this point: President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to deport a man solely for his First Amendment-protected activity, without due process. By all existing legal standards, this is illegal and unconstitutional: a violation of First Amendment protections, and the Fifth Amendment-protected right to due process. If Khalil’s green card is revoked and he is deported, no one can have any confidence in legal and constitutional protections as a line of defense against arbitrary state violence and punishment. Khalil’s arrest marks an extraordinary fascist escalation.

It is all the more vile that Khalil has been targeted for engaging in protected protest activity calling for an end to the U.S.-backed slaughter of his people. The Trump administration has consistently framed all pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist activists as Hamas supporters. It is worth stressing, though, that even if a protester did express support or sympathy for Hamas in a public speech, or on social media (and I’m not saying Khalil did), such expression is also protected by the First Amendment, a protection extended to citizens and noncitizens alike. This is settled constitutional law: The Supreme Court’s decision in Texas v. Johnson in 1989, for example, reaffirmed the principle that the First Amendment protects even the most controversial and provocative forms of speech. 

Some of the only activity not protected by the First Amendment in this regard is material support for a group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the government. What counts as “material support” has a strict legal standard — even expressing support or sympathy for a foreign terrorist organization is not included in that standard.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Zeteo’s Prem Thakker that Khalil was arrested because he “led activities aligned to Hamas.” The claim is yet another outrageous affront to First Amendment protections, which robustly include political speech and a whole host of protest activities.

Khalil has not been charged with material support for terrorism, nor any other crime. Under law, green cards cannot be summarily revoked; grounds for removal require criminal convictions for specific crimes including assault or theft, or proof of visa fraud. Green card holders facing removal are, under law, given the chance to appeal. They are not simply removed. I repeat “under law,” because Khalil’s case threatens to make that very designation irrelevant.

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The Trump administration has made a series of threats to revoke the visas of students and others involved in Palestine solidarity protests, which it consistently describes as “pro-Hamas.” Following on from President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump’s regime is committed to the dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, as a way to demonize — and criminalize — criticism of Israel. In a fact sheet accompanying the president’s executive order mendaciously titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” Trump threatened to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.”

While still a senator, Rubio recommended the use of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the secretary of state the power to revoke visas from foreigners deemed to be a threat. The very same law was used to enact racist immigrant quotas, and as a red scare weapon to deport or refuse entry to leftists like Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, among others. The law has been amended numerous times since, in efforts to limit its authoritarian and racist uses. With the 1990 Immigration Act, for example, Congress prohibited as grounds for excluding immigrants from the U.S. “advocacy or publication of communist or other subversive views or materials.” Stated plainly: It’s illegal under congressional statute and the Constitution to remove someone from the country due to political speech.

Rubio’s own comments show he seeks to revive the Immigration and Nationality Act’s most harmful form. Just one week after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Rubio invoked the law in a Fox News interview as grounds for deporting pro-Palestine protesters, and posted on X: “Cancel the visa of every foreign national out there supporting Hamas and get them out of America.” Now Rubio is secretary of state and committing in words and deeds to his illegal deportation agenda.

There’s little use in simply pointing to the law, even the Constitution, to oppose these authoritarians. Republicans are well versed in forging new legal realities through force and violence. Legal protections cannot be assumed; they need fighting for, or they simply will not hold. Establishment Democrats and institutions like Columbia University have helped bring us to this grim watershed moment. Every institution that treated support for Palestinian lives and condemnation of Israel’s genocidal war as antisemitic and terroristic laid the ground for Trump’s wholesale attack on basic speech rights.

Palestine solidarity activists and anti-colonial thinkers have long made clear that a government willing to prosecute a genocidal war abroad, as the U.S. has, has no problem enacting exclusionary, discriminatory violence at home. This is not new; these are the inherent contradictions of a purported democracy engaged in colonial domination. It should not take the illegal detention of another Palestinian to expose this, but here we are.

“This is unacceptable. Deporting legal residents solely for expressing their political opinions is a violation of free speech rights,” wrote Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. “Who’s next? Citizens?”

For those of you with any investment in the protection of basic rights and legal protections — in the defense of any shred of democracy against authoritarian rule — the fight to free Khalil and maintain his legal status is your fight too.

The post If Trump Can Deport Mahmoud Khalil, Freedom of Speech Is Dead appeared first on The Intercept.

That reason: Ravi Ragbir, whose court victories against the first Trump administration regarding his own retaliatory detention made New York a far less friendly forum for the government.

“Their intent is to intimidate, to create fear among people who don’t agree with them,” Ragbir told The Intercept in an interview.

Like Khalil, Ragbir is an activist in New York City who was targeted for deportation over his speech during the first Trump administration. Like Khalil, Ragbir was quickly flown to a far-off detention center — in his case, in Miami — as his family, friends, and attorney frantically tried to locate him. And like Khalil, whose attorney worked through the night to file a rapid petition for his release, Ragbir quickly challenged his detention and deportation.

In 2019, Ragbir won a ruling from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — the federal appellate court that covers New York — that affirmed noncitizens’ right to challenge targeted deportations as unconstitutional retaliation under the First Amendment.

The 2nd Circuit’s decision in Ragbir’s favor is a powerful shield, not just for Khalil but also others the Trump administration has vowed to detain and deport based on Palestinian solidarity protests and activism. But that decision is only binding law within the 2nd Circuit’s jurisdiction — and not in states which fall under different federal appellate courts, such as Louisiana.

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ICE Secretly Hauled Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana as Retaliation, Lawyers Allege

Avoiding the Ragbir precedent is precisely why ICE moved Khalil so quickly, his attorneys argued in a motion demanding that ICE bring him back to New York. Indeed, two Department of Homeland Security officials recently told The Atlantic that Khalil was moved to Louisiana “to seek the most favorable venue” for the government’s arguments.

“The Court need not accept such brazen interference with its role in assessing the legality of government action,” Khalil’s attorneys wrote to the federal judge in New York currently overseeing his case. In filings, the government countered that Khalil’s challenge belongs in Louisiana, in what will be the first of many legal battles.

“ICE will want to drag this on as long as possible,” Ragbir said.

Ragbir’s ordeal shows the lengths that Khalil and his legal team will need to go to secure his freedom and his right to stay in the United States. It also underscores just how dramatic an escalation Khalil’s case represents, even judged against the first Trump administration’s weaponization of the immigration system against dissent.

In January 2018, Ragbir was the director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City, an immigrants’ rights group. He was a regular fixture at demonstrations and prayer vigils outside ICE’s office in Manhattan, and over the past year he had generated considerable negative press for the Trump administration’s tactics.

“It was so clear when Ravi was detained back in 2018 that he was being targeted because of his public speaking, his public presence,” his wife, Amy Gottlieb, an immigration attorney at the American Friends Service Committee, told The Intercept. “He was really calling out ICE for its behavior.”

Originally from Trinidad, Ragbir has lived in the U.S. since 1991 and got his green card in 1994. But after being convicted of wire fraud — charges he fought unsuccessfully, including on appeal — and serving a federal prison sentence, he was detained by ICE in 2006 and ordered deported by an immigration judge in 2007.

In early 2008, ICE released Ragbir while he appealed the deportation order. For the next nine years, ICE routinely extended his actual deportation date, and he was allowed to work as a full-time organizer with the New Sanctuary Coalition, on condition that he appear at regular check-ins.

Then Donald Trump came to power, and what were once routine check-ins became, for many immigrants, the prospect of an arrest. In March 2017, Ragbir showed up to his check-in with a crowd of supporters, including city and state officials. The spectacle generated some “resentment” within ICE, a top official told Ragbir’s attorney, according to court filings, as did his protest vigils.

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When Ragbir went in for his next check-in with his wife and legal team in January 2018, they “hoped for the best, but prepared for the worst,” Gottlieb said. The week before, ICE had arrested one of Ragbir’s colleagues at his home in Queens, then quickly deported him to Haiti before he could file a challenge.

“When we got there, they told us this is the end of the road,” Ragbir said. When Ragbir fainted at the stress, ICE took him to the hospital before driving him to Newark and putting him on a plane to Miami.

Gottlieb had no idea where her husband was being held until the next morning, she said.

“They did not tell me or his wife where they were taking him,” said Alina Das, a law professor and co-director of New York University’s immigrant rights clinic, who represented Ragbir, “or why they would need to take him all the way down to Florida when there are so many detention centers in the area.”

Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said that “ICE’s normal MO includes transferring people far from their loved ones, often unexpectedly, making it much more difficult for them to successfully defend their deportation.”

“I am sure the administration is realizing they can use it as a form of retaliation,” she added.

This set off the first stage of Ragbir’s legal challenge to his detention: getting him back to New York. Similar to their tactics in Khalil’s case, the government initially argued that, since Ragbir was already out-of-state by the time a judge ordered he not be moved — he was put on the flight to Florida “several minutes” before the order came down, the government claimed — they had no obligation to bring him back. But after some cajoling by the judge, the government agreed to transfer him back after holding him in Florida for a week.

“He’s going to be suffering in Louisiana, his family is going to be suffering,” Ragbir said of Khalil. “Those are the games ICE will play to keep him in detention as long possible, hoping he’ll give up — and also to send a signal to other noncitizens, to quiet them.”

Next, the court considered Ragbir’s petition to be released from custody as he filed more challenges to his deportation. For years, ICE had not considered him a flight or safety risk requiring detention, but still the government fought to keep him in the Orange County jail, near Goshen, New York, a two-hour drive each way for Gottlieb to visit him. 

In late January 2018, the judge granted his petition, ruling that the Trump administration had violated Ragbir’s right to an “orderly departure” — the opportunity to settle affairs and say goodbyes before leaving the country.

“A man we have allowed to live among us for years, to build a family and participate in the life of the community, was detained, handcuffed, forcibly placed on an airplane, and today finds himself in a prison cell,” wrote Judge Katherine B. Forrest. “We as a country need and must not act so. The Constitution demands better.”

Ragbir was released the same afternoon, and two weeks later he filed the lawsuit that would ultimately win the ruling that the government would prefer to avoid in Khalil’s case.

In April 2019, the 2nd Circuit ruled Ragbir’s advocacy “implicates the apex of protection under the First Amendment,” and that he offered “strong” evidence that ICE officials decided to deport him when they did “based on their disfavor of Ragbir’s speech (and its prominence).” Such retaliation was grounds to challenge his deportation, the majority determined.

The government appealed the groundbreaking decision to the Supreme Court, which in October 2020 sent the case back to the district court for additional consideration in light of a recent decision about deportation challenges, but without overruling the 2nd Circuit’s opinion.

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In 2022, under the Biden administration, Ragbir settled his case, and the government agreed not to deport him for three years. And on his last day in office in January, President Joe Biden pardoned Ragbir’s fraud conviction, thus eliminating the grounds for his deportation. Where the Trump administration fought for years to deport Ragbir over his criticism and protest, Biden pardoned him in recognition of his role as a leader and advocate for immigrants’ rights.

“I am numb,” Ragbir said on “Democracy Now!” later that week, “after all those years of living under this, I am numb because I have always had to steel myself against what was going to happen.”

So far, Khalil’s and Ragbir’s cases have followed similar trajectories: high-profile activism contrary to Trump’s tastes, an abrupt arrest, followed by a punitive rendition to detention far from home.

“Khalil was taken from a jurisdiction that has recognized that immigrants have a right to pursue First Amendment retaliation claims,” Das said, “which is another reason why moving him outside this area is extremely disturbing.”

There are key distinctions, however, which only heighten fears about what lies ahead for Khalil and other activists who become targets.

To start, far from having a deportation order based on any underlying crime, Khalil has a valid green card, which the Trump administration argues it can revoke through an arcane, little-used provision of federal law. And unlike with Ragbir, the government has already indicated it will fight to keep Khalil away from New York, in briefs filed late Wednesday.

Most significant, however, is just how much more explicit the Trump administration has been in targeting Khalil for his activism. 

“What’s new here is the blatant retaliation,” said National Immigration Law Center’s Altman. 

“This really comes down to instilling panic, fear, and chaos,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition.

On Wednesday, the Manhattan federal judge overseeing Khalil’s case set an expedited schedule to brief the questions of where he should be held and which court should decide his fate. Khalil also has an initial immigration hearing scheduled for March 21 in Louisiana.

Khalil’s case has simultaneously sparked protests while sending a chilling message to pro-Palestinian activists, with Trump promising that he is the “first of many” to be detained and deported.

Ragbir, who knows the chill of being targeted better than most, has joined the protests in New York City supporting Khalil’s release. He’s been heartened to see broad support for Khalil, particularly the petition signed by more than 3 million people so far.

“We cannot just hide and hope,” he said. “We are going to hope. But we work in that hope.”

The post Why Trump Is So Desperate to Keep Mahmoud Khalil in Louisiana appeared first on The Intercept.

“To preserve the Court’s jurisdiction pending a ruling on the petition, Petitioner shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the Court orders otherwise,” wrote Jesse M. Furman, a district judge in Manhattan, in a court order filed late Monday afternoon. The order also set a conference for attorneys on March 12.

Khalil’s attorney Amy Greer had filed a motion opposing his detention on Sunday and attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights and Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility project at the City University of New York School of Law were expected to file a motion on Monday demanding Khalil’s release.  

During the campus protests that roiled Columbia University over Israel’s war on Gaza, Khalil served as a negotiator and mediator between school administrators and student protesters. A permanent U.S. resident expecting his first child, he graduated in December from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

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If Trump Can Deport Mahmoud Khalil, Freedom of Speech Is Dead

Khalil was taken from his New York apartment Saturday evening by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. He is being held without any criminal charges at the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, a private jail operated by the GEO Group, according to the ICE detainee tracker. For the first 24 hours of his detention, Khalil’s attorneys and family were in the dark about his whereabouts. 

When ICE agents showed up at Khalil’s home on Saturday, they claimed his student visa had been revoked, said Greer, who filed an initial petition challenging his detention over the weekend.

After learning Khalil was a green card holder, agents refused to release him. Greer said the agents even threatened to arrest his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant.

Khalil’s detention has drawn criticism and concern from rights experts, some Democratic lawmakers, and activists across the Palestinian liberation movement. A petition demanding Khalil’s release amassed more than 1.5 million signatures. Activists see the disappearance and potential deportation of an activist who has not been charged with a crime as a violation of the First Amendment and a new escalation in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on speech critical of Israel and its genocide of Palestinians.

“This is a very dangerous road that we’re going down,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “That this administration is targeting students and faculty in this country based on their First Amendment-protected speech is deeply troubling and should be troubling not only for visa holders in this country, but for everyone, because it sets the really dangerous precedent that this administration can punish its political opponents in this way.”

“It means that none of us are really safe.”

Trump Takes Credit

Trump claimed credit for Khalil’s arrest on Monday afternoon, citing his previous executive orders targeting what he calls “pro-Hamas” protesters, pledging “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,” Trump wrote in a statement posted to his Truth Social account. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.” Trump added, “We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”

Trump campaigned on the promise of deporting pro-Palestinian protesters and during his first days in office signed a pair of executive orders that called for crackdowns on the pro-Palestine protest movement. One of the orders that claims to “combat antisemitism” called on the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Education to track students and faculty who are in the U.S. on visas for possible removal.

When confirming Khalil’s arrest, the Department of Homeland Security alleged that he “led activities aligned to Hamas.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said Trump’s administration would be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Trump administration officials have not been forthcoming about the legal grounds for Khalil’s detention, noted Krishnan, the Knight First Amendment Institute attorney.

“They’re deliberately obfuscating the authority that they’re relying on here,” Krishnan said. “It’s possible that they had a justification at that time, but it’s also possible they’re searching for one now that would justify the actions that they’ve taken against a green card holder.”

The Department of Homeland Security has not yet confirmed an immigration court date for Khalil.

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Krishnan said Khalil has a strong First Amendment claim against his deportation. She cited the case of immigrants rights activist Ravi Ragbir, who had been targeted for deportation during Trump’s first term. He deportation was halted after his attorneys successfully argued in a lawsuit that the Trump administration was targeting him based on his speech critical of the administration’s immigration policies.

“It’s part of a broader pattern by this administration of targeting its political enemies.”

Even so, the chilling effect of Khalil’s arrest is already being felt across the movement, Krishnan said. She has heard from student editors of an undergraduate political science journal who shared that international students have requested to have their articles about Gaza be removed online out of fear of immigration consequences.

“It’s also important not to view this incident in isolation,” she said. “It’s part of a broader pattern by this administration of targeting its political enemies and retaliating against them, not only to silence those specific individuals and organizations, but to chill the speech of citizens more broadly.”

The post Court Temporarily Halts Columbia Activist’s Deportation appeared first on The Intercept.

The federal government shut down on Wednesday as President Donald Trump threatened mass federal layoffs. Republicans are blaming Democrats for the shutdown, while Democrats are refusing to support a Republican spending bill without guarantees to extend Obamacare provisions set to expire and reverse GOP health care cuts earlier this year.

“Democrats are … trying to reverse some of the cuts from the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ that was passed earlier this year to Medicaid,” says Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. “So what Democrats are really trying to message here is that they’re fighting for health care, both to reverse some of these Medicaid cuts and also to ensure that the Affordable Care Act subsidies continue.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks to Washington about the government shutdown and the impact it will have on public services, including essential services and federal workers.

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Judge Finds Rubio and Noem Intentionally Targeted Pro-Palestine Activists to Chill Speech

We’re also following a federal court case where an appointee of Ronald Reagan blasted the Trump administration for unlawfully targeting pro-Palestine students for protected speech. 

“It’s a historic ruling that rightly affirms that the First Amendment protects non-citizens lawfully present in the U.S. just as it protects citizens,” says Ramya Krishnan, lecturer at Columbia University Law School and senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented plaintiffs in the case. “And if free speech means anything in this country, it means the government can’t lock you up simply because it disagrees with your political views.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript: 

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy. 

The federal government shut down just after midnight on Wednesday. 

The shutdown could lead to mass federal layoffs and threaten some essential services, though most critical workers in air traffic control and Social Security will work without pay for the time being. 

If this all sounds familiar to you, it should. Shutdowns have become more common over the last 30 years. And the most recent “showdowns” have felt more and more like a charade. Another fight threatened to shut down the government just seven months ago. The most recent shutdown is the second under Donald Trump. The first under Trump, in 2018, marked the longest government shutdown in U.S. history — 35 days — forcing some federal workers to take out loans to make ends meet. 

Republicans, who control both branches of Congress and the White House, have not passed a federal spending bill since Trump took office. They need Democratic votes to do so, but Democrats are currently withholding their support in efforts to show that this time, they really are trying to stand up to Trump.

In the meantime, Trump is using federal workers as pawns — threatening mass permanent layoffs — and delaying the next jobs report. Still, as we’ve discussed on this show before, Republicans, at least for now, appear to be controlling the narrative. 

Joining me now to help us understand the bigger picture is my colleague, Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. 

Jessie, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Jessica Washington: Thanks for having me on. 

AL: And just a note, we’re speaking on Wednesday, October 1. 

So Jess, you were on the hill Wednesday morning. What did you see? 

JW: The vibes are, are definitely a little ominous over there. I think even just walking in, things felt pretty negative.

So I walked past some Capitol Police when I first arrived, and they were talking about the shutdown. I mean, they’ll have to potentially go without pay. And so there was a lot of talk. They were saying, I don’t care about Democrats or Republicans. They need to figure this out. But they’ll still have to work during the government shutdown, potentially without pay.

And then attending the Republican leadership press conference was [a] very different story. They were very angry. They were blaming the shutdown on Democrats wanting health care for undocumented immigrants. Obviously [this] isn’t true, but they were playing this with ominous music videos of Democrats who were opposing the last shutdown. It was just this very heated, very intense blame game. 

I think for Democrats we’re also seeing a lot of anger. And a lot of outrage over Republicans’ refusal to consider bipartisan legislation on this. 

AL: What does a government shutdown actually mean? How will this affect everyday people?

JW: So a government shutdown occurs when Congress fails to pass by the start of the fiscal year — so October 1 — fails to pass the multiple appropriations bills in order to get the government funded. And so what happens here isn’t necessarily that all government functions cease. In fact, essential work has to continue. Medicaid, Medicare payment, Social Security, those are all unaffected by a shutdown. 

But kind of as time goes on, the shutdown becomes more and more dangerous in terms of everyday Americans not getting things like food assistance, or particularly assistance for pregnant women, babies as well.

The bigger impact really is for federal workers who are potentially going to have to go without pay. There are also threats from the Trump administration of mass firing, so we are really not sure what the exact impact is going to be yet. 

It is important to note that Congress and the president will still continue to get paid, while federal workers may have to go without pay. So that’s just an important thing to remember in a government shutdown. 

AL: How did we get here and why hasn’t the government passed a spending bill yet? Is that unusual? 

JW: Yeah. So unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you’re looking at it, it isn’t unusual for the government not to have passed a spending bill at this point.

So continuing resolutions are kind of Congress’s way of getting around having to actually make decisions about the budget and about how they want spending to go forward. So what happens in a continuing resolution is that Congress agrees to fund the government at the same levels as before.

So right now what we’re seeing is both the failure to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded at current levels, and also a larger systemic failure to pass appropriations bills. So since Trump has come into office, we haven’t actually seen one of these larger spending packages passed, and so that’s how we ended up here.

AL: Republicans are obviously blaming Democrats, even though they fully control the government, although they do need 60 votes to pass this kind of spending bill. I saw the official House Democrats Twitter account posted a picture of Democratic leaders taking a selfie at the Capitol on Tuesday night that read “House Democrats are in DC and ready to cancel the cuts, lower the costs, save health care,” which they’re now being dragged for. How are Democratic leaders responding to this shutdown? 

JW: So Democratic leadership is really trying to focus on what they’re trying to accomplish by, I don’t want to say enabling the shutdown. It’s a little more complicated than that, but by not passing this continuing resolution that Republicans want.

So they’re really trying to highlight what their asks are. And what those asks are, are an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies to make sure that Americans who get their health care through that program are able to get their subsidies at the existing level and don’t have to spend more on health care.

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Democrats are also interested in trying to reverse some of the cuts from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that was passed earlier this year to Medicaid, so also to ensure that more Americans can continue to access Medicaid. So what Democrats are really trying to message here is that they’re fighting for health care, both to reverse some of these Medicaid cuts and also to ensure that the Affordable Care Act subsidies continue.

AL: Democrats also came under fire for voting to extend funding the last time this happened in March. They seem dug in for the moment. Why is their strategy different here and will it work?

JW: I mean, I would have to imagine, and I haven’t had conversations with Democratic leadership about this, but I would have to imagine a lot of the strategy here, the strategy shift is that they were really attacked last time around for essentially just agreeing to let Republicans continue to make massive cuts to health care and a bunch of other things that Republicans wanted last time around. And so they’re using this spending fight, which they didn’t last time. But what they’re trying to do this time around, which is very different from the last time around, is not just simply capitulate and agree to keep the government spending levels and then just continue to pass Republican measures, which obviously cut health care as well as a bunch of other things that Americans rely on every day.

And so what Democrats are trying to do here is take a stand and not take that hit that they did last time. Particularly Minority Leader [Chuck] Schumer took a massive hit, by capitulating to Republicans. And we’re seeing a very different strategy this time around. 

AL: The Trump administration and Republicans are using this shutdown as an opportunity to permanently lay off a significant number of federal workers. Can you tell us more about that? What would that mean? 

JW: So President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought have both threatened to mass-fire federal employees during the government shutdown. Now, obviously, they’re using this both as leverage, but also a very real threat. We know that they have been targeting federal employees who have in some cases won, in some cases not. 

And so the unions representing these federal employees have sued the Trump administration and have said that this is an illegal action, that the administration cannot go ahead and just mass-fire federal workers during a government shutdown, that there are legal protections that should keep these workers in place and should even if they have to temporarily go without pay, get them back pay once the government reopens. Obviously the pain of a government shutdown is going to be felt by federal workers regardless, especially if it continues into the next month or so.

AL: So essentially what you’re saying is that this is all happening without any congressional oversight, right? 

JW: Yeah. This would be happening without Congress’s input. 

AL: So I mean, it sounds like it’s also potentially a way for the government to permanently fire employees in programs at their discretion. I mean, is that a possibility? 

JW: Yeah, so it’s definitely— and we’re getting into complicated legal territory here in terms of what the government can do, what they can get away with, what the Supreme Court will allow them to get away with, what district courts will allow them to get away with. But what the Trump administration is trying to do is — without Congress’s input, without the judiciary’s input — they’re trying to just mass-fire these employees. And we know this has been a goal from the administration. 

I think it also has to be understood as a threat and leverage against Democrats who obviously, you know, would like to keep federal employees in their agencies and with pay. And so this is definitely both a threat and then also a real policy goal that this administration has been pursuing since they started 

AL: At this point, what would it take to reopen the government? What happens next? 

JW: Likely it would take a bipartisan bill, something where Democrats could feel as if they got a win on health care. However, we could see more Democrats peel off. Republicans only need seven Democrats in the Senate to pass their continuing resolution. We already saw on Tuesday night that a few Democratic senators, including [John] Fetterman — he’s obviously a notable person to the Intercept audience — we already saw some senators side with Republicans and agree to pass this continuing resolution. Now, if they’re able to get enough Democrats in the Senate to peel off, then they’ll be able to fund the government.

Now an alternative, obviously, is that Republicans come together with Democrats and actually make some level of agreement on healthcare in order to prevent these massive Medicaid cuts that we know are coming as a result of the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

AL: What is the long-term effect of putting the government through this kind of stress? I mean, we already saw this happen back in March. It feels like it’s becoming more frequent. This used to not happen. I mean, prior to 1980, shutdown threats came on the table, but more often Congress just went through a funding gap where the government actually didn’t shut down, but this is becoming a more common thing. I mean, does this cause permanent damage? 

JW: I mean, certainly it causes institutional damage in a number of ways. I mean, one, you have public trust that erodes as a result of a government shutdown. So we know that’s part of it. Obviously federal employees are going to be furloughed. They’re going to go without pay. After they receive their next paycheck, [they] will then have to go without pay during the shutdown. So obviously they’re feeling a huge amount of this burden. But then the American public more broadly will also start to feel this if it continues. So a lot of these agencies have funding that will last them for a short period of time.

But as the time period goes on, we’re going to see certain services cut. So, for example, food assistance programs currently have enough funding to continue for a little while and to keep giving people their subsidies. But eventually those programs will run out of money. If the government isn’t funded on a larger level, agencies will have to furlough their employees, which means they won’t be at work, which means that vital government services won’t be getting the attention that they need, obviously, aside from essential carveouts that statutorily have to continue even during a government shutdown. 

AL: Thank you so much, Jessie, for walking us through all of that. We’re going to leave it there. 

JW: Thank you for having me.

Break 

AL: Next we’re going to turn to a scathing ruling out of a federal court in Massachusetts that blasts Trump’s attacks on pro-Palestine students. Judge William G. Young, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, said Trump weaponized an unconstitutional definition of antisemitism to intimidate and deport pro-Palestine activists. 

Joining me now to break it all down is Ramya Krishnan, a lecturer at Columbia Law School and a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented the plaintiffs. Also joining is my colleague, Intercept newsroom counsel and reporter, Shawn Musgrave. 

Ramya and Shawn, welcome to the show. 

Ramya Krishnan: Thanks for having me. 

Shawn Musgrave: Thanks, Akela. 

AL: Ramya, I’ll start with you. What is so remarkable about this ruling? 

RK: Well, it’s a historic ruling that rightly affirms that the First Amendment protects non-citizens lawfully present in the U.S. just as it protects citizens. And that if free speech means anything in this country, it means the government can’t lock you up simply because it disagrees with your political views. And that principle, that basic idea, is foundational to our democracy.

So what Judge [William G.] Young held is that the secretaries of state and homeland security intentionally and in concert engaged in a campaign of intimidation, a campaign that involved arresting, detaining and deporting individuals like Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi in order to chill pro-Palestinian speech and speech critical of Israel. And it held that this campaign, this policy, is viewpoint discriminatory and in violation of the First Amendment.

AL: Ramya, let’s back up a bit. Can you give some background on the case and the trial? What’s at stake? 

RK: This case is a challenge to the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining and deporting non-citizen students and faculty based on their pro-Palestinian advocacy. So since Trump took office, we’ve seen a number of non-citizens targeted under this policy of ideological deportation. Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University undergraduate, was arrested when he attended his naturalization interview. Rümeysa Öztürk, a grad student at Tufts University, was seized by masked ICE agents from a public street in Somerville, Massachusetts, because she wrote an op-ed that was critical of her university’s failure to divest from Israel. And then you had Mahmoud Khalil, of course, who helped lead student protests at Columbia, who was arrested in the lobby of his apartment building in New York and spirited away to a detention center in Louisiana and locked up there for more than three months. And these are just a handful of the examples we’ve seen. 

And these actions have cast a really powerful chill on university campuses across the country, causing students and faculty to self-censor. We’ve seen non-citizen scholars and students who have withdrawn from political protests, purge their social media, and declining to publish scholarly and other public writing that they fear will put them in the administration’s crosshairs. Some are even self-censoring in the classroom.

So we brought this case on behalf of the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association because we believe, as they believe, that no student or faculty member should have to live in fear that they could be seized at any moment by ICE agents from their homes or from the street simply for engaging in lawful political expression.

AL: Shawn, when we were discussing this with our colleagues the other day, you said this judge could be impeached. Why? 

SM: So that might have been an inflammatory way of putting it. This is an extraordinary ruling — not just for the holding itself, but also the way in which Judge Young, a Reagan appointee, set about his task of ruling on it. I mean, as I was writing this up, it kind of felt like I was doing a literary review of a piece of creative nonfiction. There’s some fascinating things in the format that we can talk about, but it also is very much a broadside on how the Trump administration has carried out not only this policy that has been found unconstitutional, but also immigration enforcement generally since January.

In discussing the cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, [he] talks about masked agents and calls the testimony of the acting ICE director, I think, squalid and dishonorable — uses the type of language that is much more typical of litigants than of judges in their rulings. And so, I’m not sure if this is impeachable material, but it’ll certainly be attacked, I think, as being very direct and honest about the state of our democracy. And so for that reason, it was striking in addition to the actual constitutional holdings, which I think are also so important. 

AL: I’m glad you’re getting into this because it strikes me as worth noting that perhaps the reaction to this really dense ruling that might not ordinarily draw attention is in part, maybe, surprise that, as you’re saying, Shawn, a judge is speaking so plainly about what the administration is doing. Is that sort of pushback from judges becoming less common under this administration, or what’s going on there? 

SM: I don’t know if it’s becoming less common. I mean, one of the interesting things that we’re seeing — and I say “interesting” and, I don’t know, another word to use there is maybe “terrifying” — is that judges in the various cases dealing, especially with deportations, are applying less of a deference to the administration. There’s this idea in litigation that this presumption of regularity that is often given to the government in different contexts, essentially the assumption on the part of judges is often, “The government is telling the truth, they’re going to do what they said that they were going to do, they’re going to comply with rulings.” Things like that, that’s becoming less common. And in fact, I think we are seeing plenty of rulings, including from Trump appointees, Bush appointees — typically conservative judges — not taking for granted that this administration is going to follow through.

And we saw, actually, plenty of that in the very end of Judge Young’s ruling, this kind of thinking: All right, he’s found that this policy was unconstitutional. What is he as a judge going to do about it in face of defiance of orders by this administration? So we are seeing a real shift. I think this is part of an extreme example, perhaps, but an example still of a shift in tone among the judiciary in this administration. 

AL: What is the next step in the case? 

RK: The next step in the case is that Judge Young is going to hold a hearing on remedy. So in this first phase of the case, which followed a trial, he determined that the administration has been engaged in a policy of targeting non-citizens based on their pro-Palestinian viewpoints, and that this practice, this policy violates the First Amendment. In the second phase of the proceedings, Judge Young will be deciding how best to remedy the unlawful conduct of the administration.

SM: Ramya, can I ask: What did you think about the last section of Judge Young’s opinion about remedies? Because he previewed some restrictions that he saw on both the potential efficacy of remedies on this administration and also in terms of his role as a judge in crafting a remedy to unconstitutional conduct. What did you take from those last couple pages of the ruling on that front? 

RK: Well, I think that fundamentally he recognized that there has to be a remedy to the administration’s unconstitutional conduct.

If he didn’t believe that he was empowered to issue a remedy in this case, then he wouldn’t have been able to issue this ruling at all. Because a key component of establishing your ability to bring a case, what’s called standing, is that the injuries that you assert can actually be redressed by the court.

So he clearly believes that he can issue a remedy here. And what we’ll be asking for is a declaration that what the administration did hear was unlawful, which would be entirely in line with the ruling that he has just issued; and secondly, an order forbidding the administration from engaging in this conduct in the future.

AL: For listeners who are unfamiliar with this case, it received a lot of attention earlier this year when a federal official admitted in court that the government had used information from far-right Zionist groups like Betar and Canary Mission to target students. Ramya, have you learned any more about that?

RK: Yeah, I mean in in some ways, what we heard at trial confirmed what we knew all along, which is that the administration was targeting these non-citizens students and faculty based solely on their pro-Palestinian advocacy. But in many ways, we learn new details that add to this picture of just the scale and the scope and the intensity of the operation the government was engaged in. And as you said, we heard testimony from DHS officials describing the large-scale operation they launched to identify pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses. An operation that by their own admission involves scouring lists of suspected protesters from the likes of Canary Mission and producing reports that repeated those organizations’ unvetted allegations that the protestors are antisemitic and pro-Hamas.

That revelation was clearly influential in Judge Young’s decision, and in particular his determination that the whole reason — the whole purpose — of the government’s policy here, its campaign was to chill the speech of students and faculty who would otherwise engage in pro-Palestinian expression and association.

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SM: In the various petitions that Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi and the others have brought, we learned a little bit about each of their cases: how they were targeted, the timeline for their particular case, and how they were targeted for detention. What I think was most valuable about this litigation effort was how much it — using those handful of examples — still zoomed out to honestly the very mundane, what Judge Young called the “frictionless,” review process that resulted in Rümeysa Öztürk being grabbed off off the street.

And we saw how the combination of bureaucratic resources combined with the Department of Homeland Security, specifically Homeland Security Investigations, and then passing that information to the State Department to very quickly decide that these folks should either be detained or deported. So I think we got a massive amount of information in particular from the bench trial that Judge Young held over the summer. 

AL: I want to raise one other point, which is that I’m not sure — and please correct me if I’m wrong — I’m not sure that we’ve seen another federal judge isolate the administration’s use of and what he describes as its weaponization of antisemitism in this way. Which I think, at least for me, is significant given the amount of federal and state legislation moving around adopting this definition of antisemitism, the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition, which they’re talking about a broader, more amorphous form of how the administration has shifted its own definition of antisemitism, but they are effectively one and the same.

I’m wondering if you all can respond to that. 

RK: Yeah. I mean, I think part of that arises from the frankly, astonishing testimony we heard at trial from Senior State Department official John Armstrong, who personally made the decision to revoke Rümeysa Öztürk’s visa, and who authored the memos that went to Secretary [Marco] Rubio recommending that he revoke the green cards of people like Mahmoud Khalil.

What he said on the stand was that on his understanding of antisemitism and support for terrorism — by the way, his understanding matters because apparently there has been no official guidance issued in the State Department or DHS about how to define these incredibly controversial concepts. And on his understanding of those terms, criticism of Israel — including its actions in Gaza — is grounds for deporting non-citizens. In fact, he said that criticism of the Trump administration’s policies or actions toward Israel may qualify. And I think Young was really taken aback by that admission and made clear both at trial and in his decision that, in his view, those definitions sweep in a great deal of constitutionally protected and legitimate political speech. 

AL: Which is what we’ve been saying this whole time, right? Like this is not shocking to anyone who has been covering these cases or writing about this phenomenon of this weaponization of antisemitism. This is the conversation we’ve been having for so long, but the fact that, again, this is being issued in a federal court and it’s being issued also by Reagan appointee, which is not, whatever that significant, but will it have an effect, I guess, is the question. Will this have any material effect on the cases of students like Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi?

RK: I mean, I think it gives them additional ammunition in their own cases against the Trump administration on which they’re challenging as unlawful their arrests and detentions; and the administration’s attempted deportation of them.

Because the government, in their cases, has been claiming that they have this secret evidence that establishes that in fact they were targeting these individuals based not only on their political speech, but based on other legitimate factors. And Judge Young, he saw all of the underlying evidence from those cases, and he emphatically reached the conclusion that these individuals were being targeted based on their political viewpoints alone.

SM: Yeah. And there are other folks who are still in ICE detention who were targeted this way. Leqaa Kordia, who’s in detention in Prairieland, where I think Dr. [Badar Khan] Suri was also held. [Kordia] is still trying to make arguments both in federal court and in immigration court, that she should be released either on bond or or in the habeas petition because her detention is unconstitutional is her argument.

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I do think this ruling will be cited frequently in those challenges, including because in the immigration proceedings that are ongoing for, I believe, all of these individuals, the burden is typically on the non-citizen to at different stages of the immigration proceedings. And I think what Judge Young really did by putting together this authoritative timeline of how this policy played out over these cases is show how thin the evidence was against some of these most high-profile cases where the secretary of homeland security was going on Twitter to make all kinds of claims that they couldn’t back up in in court.

And so I think that does just cast significant doubt in every other case about the strength of evidence used to detain other people. 

AL: Is that enough to stop them from going after other pro-Palestine student activists or —

RK: Well, with any other administration, we would expect this decision to have an immediate impact.

I think what will be crucial here is the precise relief that we ultimately get from Judge Young. That’s why we’ll be vigorously arguing that we need robust relief that will get this administration to cease and desist from its efforts to exact retribution on people for their political speech. 

SM: And I think Judge Young closes by asking if, essentially, the American people will sleepwalk into fascism. He, I think, is very much throwing up a flare that this one ruling — even if he can fashion the perfect “was targeted” remedy — is not going to fix the situation we find ourselves in. He didn’t say what else was necessary, but I think implicit in that acknowledgment from the judge is that it will take political action. [That] political leaders need to stop looking to courts — I mean, the courts need to keep issuing clear-eyed rulings like this — but that’s not the way that you stop an administration like this one from doing blatantly unconstitutional things. It requires other levers.

RK: I think that’s such an important observation.

I read his conclusion to really be a call to arms: a recognition that if we are to protect our most fundamental freedoms, if we’re to protect our democracy, then we, all of us, need to show up, stand up and show courage and meet this moment. And it won’t do for people to sit on the sidelines. 

SM: And I do think in his own way, he was calling out conservatives. I mean, he closed his opinion by quoting from Reagan, who appointed him, who gave a speech saying that freedom needed to be protected every generation. Essentially, that we can’t bank on freedom just continuing just because we’ve had it in the past. So I think he’s leaning into his own bonafide as a conservative judge, I think is a signal across the political spectrum.

AL: We’re going to leave it there. Thank you both for joining me on the Intercept Briefing. 

RK: Thanks, Akela. 

SM: Thanks. 

AL: Before we close, a quick update on last week’s episode. We spoke to Tommy Marcus, who joined the Global Sumud Flotilla convoy delivering food and medical supplies to Gaza.

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On Wednesday, Israeli forces intercepted the fleet of small boats as it attempted to break the aid blockade. Marcus now appears to be among the hundreds of volunteers Israel is detaining, according to organizers.  

We’ll continue to follow the story. 

That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

But we want to hear from you. 

Share your story with us at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278. You can also email us at podcasts at the intercept dot com. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. 

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And tell all of your friends about us, and better yet, leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy. 

Thanks for listening.

The post Government Shutdown and Free Speech Showdown appeared first on The Intercept.

One of the top job requirements for attorneys in Donald Trump’s Justice Department seems to be an abundance of shamelessness.

A lot of legal professionals have to defend the indefensible as part of their jobs, but arguing that rampant lawlessness is legal — as government attorneys now do in many of the 240-plus lawsuits filed against the current Trump administration — requires a particular flair for impudence.

The effort to deport Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil offers a case in point. The Trump regime abducted Khalil, a green card holder, in the lobby of his New York apartment building in March, and has since held him in a sprawling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana.

Last week, the New Jersey judge hearing Khalil’s habeas corpus challenge against the government made a simple demand: Present the legal precedent. Against this most basic directive to do their jobs, the government’s attorneys filed a whiny formal objection.

The Trump administration complained that it was “misguided” to demand it swiftly present the legal basis for its extreme actions.

They should know the precedents because that is part of arguing the legality of a government action.

The government is trying to use an obscure provision under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the secretary of state the power to deport people whose presence it deems to create “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio made just such a determination in his effort to deport Khalil, as well as Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, who is also a green card holder, and Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk.

Judge Michael Farbiarz’s response to invocation of the obscure law seemed reasonable. Last Friday morning, he asked that the government provide examples of “other instances” of the provision’s use by 5 p.m. that day.

Were the government’s case anything but an authoritarian gambit, Justice Department attorneys would be able to present relevant precedent on demand.

They should know the precedents because that is, surely, part of arguing the legality of a government action. And the government has had plenty of time to construct this argument: Khalil’s attorneys filed the habeas petition the night he was detained by ICE, over two months ago.

Instead, the attorneys scrambled that day to produce a bare-bones response, and complained that “limited staff have been searching for records in response to the Court’s orders as well as managing competing litigation requests and other priorities.”

“The Government has made a good faith effort to comply with the Court’s most recent orders,” the attorneys wrote in the objection. “But the Government believes that those orders are misguided, and lodges this formal objection.”

They went on: “Government counsel has also appeared before the Court for conferences scheduled hours beforehand” — complaining that “those instances have adversely affected the Government and counsel’s work on other cases.”

The attorneys said that the judge asking for this extremely basic information about the case’s legal basis amounted to expedited discovery, which Khalil’s team, rather than the judge, should request.

“Give Me a Break!”

The objection means nothing for Khalil’s ongoing case, but it’s a telling example of the Justice Department’s churlish position when it comes to offering legal justifications for government actions.

Numerous judges have now scolded government attorneys in an array of cases, from attacks on law firms to deportation cases to student visa removals. Judges have berated “shoddy work,” “Kafkaesque” arguments, and “disrespectful” behavior from attorneys.

Legal work that leaves something to be desired may in part be due to a dearth of talent in government. Hundreds of attorneys have left the Justice Department since Trump’s return; the department’s civil rights division has seen a 70 percent reduction in attorneys through resignations and reassignments.

“The Trump administration has melted down the DOJ we once knew,” wrote journalist Piper French, “and used the raw material to forge a sleek machine with a unified purpose and total vision.”

Whether the department’s operations are always sleek is questionable: Attorneys have appeared unprepared or evasive and failed to defend Trump’s executive actions against full or partial blocks in courts at least 64 times since January.

“Give me a break!” scoffed one judge, an appointee of George W. Bush, when a Justice Department lawyer tried to argue that Trump’s attack on a major law firm was necessary to defend against racial discrimination. The judge blocked the order.

I don’t envy the job of defending illegal, unconstitutional dreck, but I don’t have to do it — and neither do these lawyers. They ought to save themselves the embarrassment and just quit.

French is right: The Justice Department is unwavering in its ideological backing of Trump’s fascistic agenda. And shamelessness when it comes to the work of defending shameful acts is no doubt a more useful quality than legal wisdom and respect for judicial processes.

The reason many of these lawyers haven’t left, however, is because they believe their own bullshit. Those who remain, along with new staff hired by Trump loyalist Pam Bondi commit themselves to the devil’s work. It offers only minimal comfort that they sometimes do it badly. The U.S. legal system is hardly immune from upholding repressive laws and violently discriminatory government actions.

In Khalil’s case, for example, the Justice Department attorneys are arguing for a gross violation of First Amendment protections, but that’s no assurance that they will lose.

While petulant, the attorneys did comply with the judge’s order. The lawyers proffered two short filings that listed seven examples of the law’s invocation — with two of the listed cases being Mahdawi and Öztürk.

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The other five cases listed included Osama Bin-Laden’s brother; the leader of a paramilitary group in Haiti; a Palestinian deported in 1997 who, according to the government, “was a top leader of a designated foreign terrorist organization”; an “African national” the government said had contributed to “violent political activity” in Somalia; and the 1995 case of Mario Ruiz Massieu, a former assistant attorney general of Mexico.

Massieu was the only one to challenge his detention in court, in a case overseen by Trump’s older sister, the late federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. Barry ruled the deportation provision unconstitutional, but that ruling was reversed on a technicality by none other than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was then a 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge.

Ripe for Abuse

The “foreign policy” provision is ripe for abuse. It places all too much discretion in the hands of the secretary of state in a deportation system that had little in the way of due process even before Trump got ahold of it.

Yet even the previous cases listed by the government make clear that using the law to deport Khalil, Mahdawi, or Öztürk would be an unprecedented overreach.

Rubio has argued that Khalil should be removed for his role in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States” — a reprise of the spurious link between protesting Israel and antisemitism. A wealth of Khalil’s Jewish friends and fellow organizers have also spoken out in support of him.

Yet even if Rubio’s lies were true, deporting someone on those grounds alone would be an extraordinary expansion of the “foreign policy” provision’s application, and an unambiguous violation of the First Amendment.

Compared to the rare use of the provision in the last decades — one of which was found to be unconstitutional by a judge — the cases against Khalil, Mahdawi, and Öztürk appear risible additions to the list.

Based on the discretion granted to Rubio under the law, however, an immigration judge deemed Khalil deportable.

The post Government Lawyers Trying to Deport Mahmoud Khalil Won’t Stop Whining appeared first on The Intercept.

Agents ignored the pleas of Khalil’s wife who tried to show them legal papers proving her husband was a green card holder. They wouldn’t heed her requests to share where they were taking him, according to court filings. Eventually, one of the agents offered a terse response: Check the local immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan.

By next morning, however, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee locator indicated Khalil was no longer in New York. Instead, it showed him at the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. When Khalil’s wife visited the jail, she was turned away.

Without warning to Khalil’s wife or his immigration attorney Amy Greer, who the same morning had filed a petition to challenge her client’s arrest as a violation of his First Amendment free speech rights, ICE agents had transferred Khalil to a different facility. This time, they moved him thousands of miles south of his New York home to a facility in Louisiana. It wasn’t until Monday morning that Khalil’s exact whereabouts were updated in the ICE online system: the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, a private jail operated by the GEO Group.

Attorneys for Khalil allege the move from the New York metropolitan area to Louisiana was a “retaliatory transfer” intended to restrict his access and to lawyers and family, and position what has grown into a closely watched First Amendment case in a jurisdiction more friendly to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies.

Three days after his detention, Khalil still has not been charged with a crime. The Department of Homeland Security has said it arrested Khalil, a lead negotiator for Palestine solidarity protesters at Columbia, for having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” President Donald Trump, who campaigned on deporting pro-Palestinian protesters, pledged that Khalil’s arrest is “the first arrest of many to come” and that his administration would continue to target for deportations “more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” 

Although a Manhattan federal court ordered a temporary halt preventing the Trump administration from immediately deporting Khalil, attorneys remain concerned for his well-being and ability to access proper legal counsel. In a motion filed Monday evening by attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility project at the City University of New York School of Law, attorneys seek to reverse the ICE decision and to transfer Khalil back to New York. 

Attorneys accused ICE of deploying the transfer as a way to intentionally disrupt court proceedings in New York and his access to legal representation and his family. On Sunday, Greer had filed an initial petition for his release in hopes that it would be argued in New York where she could continue to represent her client.

“The government just willfully ignored it to disrupt the natural adjudication of that and sent him 1,000 miles away,” said Baher Azmy, the legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who helped draft the motion. “Now his wife can’t visit him, his attorneys will have a hard time visiting him, and his long-term immigration attorney can’t represent him in that jurisdiction.”

Khalil is instead in the Western District of Louisiana, a jurisdiction that more often sides with the government in immigration cases. Should Khalil’s case head toward appeals courts, he is now located in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where judges in January ruled against the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The LaSalle facility’s immigration court, which has minimal oversight, has also been used by the previous Trump administration as a site to fast-track deportations.

It is not uncommon for ICE to transfer individuals detained throughout the East Coast to larger facilities in the South. LaSalle, also known as Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, has been the center of multiple allegations of abuse, including beatings from guards, complaints of sexual assault, lack of access for lawyers, and wrongful death complaints of individuals incarcerated there.

Azmy, who called the case against Khalil “blatantly unconstitutional,” added that Greer was told by the Louisiana detention center that she must wait 10 days before she could speak to Khalil for a full legal call. Greer’s call with Khalil on Monday morning lasted only minutes before it was cut off, court filings said. His first call to his wife came more than 30 hours after he was taken into custody, court documents said. 

Greer said in a statement that Khalil “is healthy and his spirits are undaunted by his predicament.” Local attorneys were expected to visit with him Monday and Tuesday.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian, became a permanent U.S. resident in 2023. He served as a negotiator and mediator between school administrators and student protesters during the Columbia University campus protests over Israel’s war on Gaza. Khalil graduated in December from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Calls for Khalil’s release have been widespread. An online petition advocating for his release gathered nearly 2 million signatures by Monday evening. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside a federal building in Manhattan to protest his arrest on Monday. 

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Although Trump and his administration have taken credit for the arrest as a part of their crackdown on apparent “Hamas supporters,” authorities have not been forthcoming about the legal grounds for Khalil’s detention. Agents who arrested Khalil claimed to have had an administrative warrant, not a warrant signed by a judge, attorneys said in court papers. The agents, which included an ICE agent honored by Trump in 2019, also alleged that Khalil’s green card had been revoked. Such a decision, however, requires due process before revocation, attorneys noted.

Sabiya Ahamed, staff attorney with Palestine Legal, blasted the vague and broad legal statements of the Trump administration as a common Trump tactic meant to spread fear and to chill advocacy.

She said the massive show of support for Khalil, however, is a sign that the movement for Palestinian rights will persist. 

“This is not something that can go unchecked — that is the message that students and activists and legal organizations are sending to the Trump administration and also to universities,” Ahamed said. “You cannot just throw your students under the bus in this way, and you cannot illegally revoke the lawful status of your students simply because of their advocacy for Palestine without any due process.”

Ahamed also called on Columbia and other universities to do more to protect their students from further attacks. She criticized Columbia’s responses to student protests that shook the campus last year in which administrators called police on students and proceeded to punish activists with lengthy hearings and suspensions, in some cases, with little due process. 

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The day before his arrest, Khalil had written an email to Columbia University’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, requesting assistance from administration in the face of growing pressure from an online doxxing campaign by pro-Israel groups. After graduation, Khalil, who was born in 1995, continued living in an apartment owned by the university. In the email, Khalil described “the vicious and dehumanizing doxing campaign against him — including people falsely labeling him a terrorist threat and calling for his deportation,” court filings said.

“He closed the email by saying he was not able to sleep fearing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), or other dangerous individuals would target him and his family and urging Interim President Armstrong to provide legal support and other protections,” the filing said. 

After Khalil’s arrest, Armstrong pledged to support her community but added that she must also “follow the law.” She shot down speculation that suggested Columbia officials had requested ICE agents to come to campus. Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university due to “persistent harassment of Jewish students.” 

“It remains the long-standing practice of the University, and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, that law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including residential University buildings,” Armstrong said in a statement. However, the campus’s ICE policy says there are “exigent circumstances” where the university “may allow for access to University buildings or people without a warrant.” 

Through attorneys, Khalil’s wife, who withheld her name, asked for sustained support to secure Khalil’s release. She described her husband as selfless, sharing that she had in the past asked him to sometimes “put himself first,” to which he replied, “People are made for each other, and you should always be willing to lend a helping hand.”
“It feels like my husband was kidnapped from home,” she said, “and at a time when we were supposed to be planning to welcome our first child into this world.”

The post ICE Secretly Hauled Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana as Retaliation, Lawyers Allege appeared first on The Intercept.