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A federal judge has ordered the release of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil from US immigration detention, where he has been held for three months over his activism against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Khalil is set to be released from Ice detention in Jena, Louisiana, where he has been held since shortly after plainclothes immigration agents detained him in in early March in the lobby of his Columbia building.
The arrest was widely decried as a dangerous escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign against speech protected by the first amendment to the US constitution. Khalil’s was the first in a series of arrests of international student activists, and his release marks the latest in a series of setbacks for the administration, which has promised to deport pro-Palestinian international students en masse.
Three other students detained on similar grounds – Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri and Mohsen Mahdawi – were previously released while their immigration cases are pending. A number of others voluntarily left the country after deportation proceedings against them were opened; another is in hiding as she fights her case.
The judge, Michael E Farbiarz, of the federal district court in Newark, New Jersey, had previously found that the law invoked to detain Khalil – a rarely used immigration provision allowing the secretary of state to order the deportation of anyone found to have an adverse effect on US foreign policy – is probably unconstitutional.
Farbiaz ordered Khalil’s release in his federal court case, which was brought to challenge his detention. His immigration case will proceed on a separate track. The government is likely to continue arguing that its efforts to deport Khalil are also supported by omissions in his green card application – arguments it brought several weeks after he was first detained, and which his attorneys have refuted.
Khalil is married to a US citizen, Noor Abdallah, who gave birth to their first child during her husband’s detention. “I fight for you, and for every Palestinian child whose life deserves safety, tenderness and freedom,” Khalil wrote to his newborn son, Deen, last month in a letter first published in the Guardian. “I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction.”
