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FILE - Student negotiator Mahmoud Khalil is on the Columbia University campus in New York at a pro-Palestinian protest encampment on April 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, file) Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save JENA – An immigration judge on Friday agreed with the Trump administration that Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student activist and legal permanent resident who is accused of speaking out at the expense of U.S.
foreign policy, is deportable. At a hearing inside the heavily secured Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, Judge Jamee Comans that the government had shown that Khalil can be expelled and set an April 23 deadline for his attorneys to prove their case that he should be allowed to stay. If they fail, Khalil would be deported to Syria or Algeria.
The decision won't immediately end Khalil's stay in the Louisiana lockup, which has now run for a month. Wearing prayer beads and a navy jumpsuit, Khalil spoke briefly in court, according to WWL Louisiana reporter Charisse Gibson. "There's nothing more important than due process rights and fundamental fairness," he said.
"It's clear that neither were present today." The arrest of Khalil, 30, was followed by several others of non-citizen activists who are in the U.S.
on visas. It's viewed as a test case for the Trump administration's power to deport protesters. Administration officials have said they are targeting supporters of Hamas for removal, as well as anti-semitic attacks in the U.
S. Khalil's supporters say he is being illegally detained for speech that is protected by the First Amendment. A Palestinian by ethnicity who was born in Syria, Khalil was active in campus protests against Israel and the war in Gaza.
He recently finished master’s coursework at Columbia’s school of international affairs and is married to an American citizen who is due to give birth soon, his lawyers say. Khalil was arrested outside his university-owned apartment and booked in New York on March 8. The next day, he was shuttled on an American Airlines flight to Dallas and another flight to Alexandria, landing him in Louisiana on the morning of March 10, his lawyers say.
He was sent to the ICE processing facility in Jena, where the immigration court also resides, and where a scrum of media and activists gathered Friday in front of the gates. “He sleeps in a bunker without a pillow or blanket,” Khalil's attorneys claimed in an April 3 legal filing. They argue that he's committed no crime and that his speech is protected by the First Amendment.
An ICE official did not respond Friday to questions about Khalil's living situation at the facility. In an undated letter obtained by the Associated Press, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the push to remove Khalil. Rubio cited a relatively obscure section of the Immigrational and Nationality Act that empowers him to find that an “alien’s past, current, or expected beliefs, statements or associations that are otherwise lawful” would spell danger to U.
S. foreign policy if the person stays. The name of another person Rubio found deportable for the same reasons was redacted in the memo released by the Associated Press.
Their presence in the U.S. would “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. Comans, a former ICE attorney who has served as an immigration judge since 2021, on Tuesday gave federal officials 24 hours to submit evidence for removing Khalil from the country.
Khalil’s arrest was the first of several attempted deportations of foreign-born students who joined pro-Palestinian protests or expressed criticism of Israel, or who authorities claim pose a national security concern, to land in Louisiana, where ICE maintains several detention facilities in remote locales such as Jena, four hours by car from New Orleans. Among them: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University doctoral student from Turkey, was detained in a Boston suburb on March 25 and landed at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, where she remained Thursday, ICE records show. Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national and Georgetown scholar, was arrested in his Virginia home last month after his J-1 visa was revoked.
He was flown to an ICE staging facility in Alexandria, then relocated to Texas. Suri awaits a hearing Friday. Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian-born University of Alabama doctoral student, was picked up outside his home last month.
Authorities said his visa was revoked. His attorney says Doroudi awaits a bond hearing next week in Jena, where he remained in detention on Friday. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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