U.S. immigration judge rules recent Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil can be deported

Arya Sundaram

Published Apr 11, 2025

Modified Apr 11, 2025

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Then Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil talks to the press during a briefing organized by Pro-Palestinian protesters at an encampment at Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus in Manhattan on June 1, 2024.

Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images

Arya Sundaram

Published Apr 11, 2025

Modified Apr 11, 2025

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Mahmoud Khalil hasn’t given up the fight to remain in the United States, despite an immigration judge’s ruling Friday that he can be deported.

“This is not over, and our fight continues,” Marc van der Hout, one of his attorneys, said in a statement after an immigration judge ruled the Trump administration was within its power to deport the recent Columbia graduate student and pro-Palestinian protest leader.

“If Mahmoud can be targeted in this way, simply for speaking out for Palestinians and exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech, this can happen to anyone over any issue the Trump administration dislikes,” van der Hout said in the statement.

Judge Jamee Comans said in a hearing she had no authority to question Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that Khalil should be deported, but she gave Khalil’s lawyers until April 23 to further press their case, the Associated Press reported. The hearing was held in Louisiana, where Khalil has been held since March 8.

The case has gained worldwide attention in part because Mahmoud, who helped anti-war protests on Columbia’s campus last summer, was the first of what has become a steady stream of pro-Palestinian students across the country to be targeted for removal by the Trump administration.

Rubio also invoked a rarely used provision of immigration law that allows the federal government to deport people who threaten the country's foreign policy interests — in this case the Trump administration's efforts to combat anti-Semitism.

Rubio said in a two-page memo submitted to the immigration court head of the hearing that Khalil has not committed any crimes. Rather, Rubio said Khalil was deportable because of his participation in "antisemitic protests and disruptive activities.”

“I would like to quote what you said last time that there's nothing that's more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” Khalil said at the end of the hearing, according to NPR. “Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family.”

Khalil, 30, was detained by immigration officials on March 8 in the lobby of his university-owned apartment complex. Shortly thereafter, he was transported thousands of miles away to an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana, where he is currently being held, away from his U.S. citizen wife who is expected to give birth this month.

Van der Hout condemned the judge’s decision as “a charade of due process, a flagrant violation of his right to a fair hearing, and a weaponization of immigration law to suppress dissent.”

In addition to Khalil’s immigration case in Louisiana, his attorneys have also filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in New Jersey over whether he should have been arrested and detained.

This article has been updated with additional information.

Tagged

Israel-Hamas

new york city

columbia university

Race And Justice Unit

Politics