“This Is All Retaliatory”: Judge Blocks Mahmoud Khalil’s Deportation as Trump Vows More Arrests

AMY GOODMAN: A federal judge has blocked the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate who was arrested over the weekend by immigration agents for helping organize campus solidarity protests with Gaza last year. Khalil is a permanent legal resident; he has a green card. His wife is a U.S. citizen who’s eight months pregnant. Khalil was arrested Saturday at his university-owned apartment. He’s now being held in a federal jail for immigrants in Louisiana.

President Trump boasted of Khalil’s arrest, posting on social media, quote, “This is the first arrest of many to come,” unquote.

On Monday, faculty at Columbia University and Barnard College held an emergency press conference, where they were joined by rabbis and immigrant rights advocates. This is Nadia Abu El-Haj, co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia.

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ: Mahmoud Khalil has been a public face of the student movement at Columbia-Barnard since last spring. During the encampment, he served as the lead negotiator with the Columbia administration. A mature and gentle human being and a politically sophisticated thinker, Mahmoud tried his best to bring a peaceful end to that encampment. In the same spirit, Mahmoud tried to negotiate a resolution between students and the Barnard administration last week during a sit-in at Milstein Hall.

AMY GOODMAN: Yinon Cohen is a professor of Israel and Jewish studies at Columbia University.

YINON COHEN: Rescinding visas, canceling green card and intimidating students and staff have become the tool of choice for stifling free speech and undermining the First Amendment. Columbia University includes Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and atheists, and none of us will be safe unless we’re all safe.

AMY GOODMAN: Over a thousand protesters also gathered at Federal Plaza in New York Monday to demand Mahmoud Khalil’s release. These are some of the voices from the protest.

PROTESTERS: Hands off Mahmoud Khalil! Hands off Mahmoud Khalil! ICE off our campus now! ICE off our campus now!

LAYAN FULEIHAN: My name is Layan Fuleihan. I’m with the People’s Forum. The larger context from even before this weekend, I think, is important. The DOJ has been threatening to deport students who have stood up for the Palestinian people over the past 18 months. They have been calling them pro-Hamas. They have been saying they are antisemitic. They have been trying to demonize the students in the face of the American public. They said to Israeli media that they intend on putting these students in jail, not for 24 hours, but for years.

The Columbia administration has been cracking down on the students without even provocation from the federal government. I mean, they only lasted one day before they brought the NYPD onto campus to suppress the encampment. Columbia has absolutely been part and parcel of this crackdown on the students.

PROTESTERS: No fascist U.S.A.! No ICE!

MURAD AWAWDEH: My name is Murad Awawdeh. I am the president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition. It is incredibly shameful that our communities have to continue to endure under this fascist regime simply to deliver on a publicity stunt of a campaign called mass deportation. The message that they are trying to send, which is a deplorable one, is that no one is protected under free speech in this country anymore.

PROTESTERS: Hands off our students now! Hands off our students now!

ANNOUNCER: I’m going to call up now an experienced leader in the immigrant rights movement, Ravi from the New Sanctuary Coalition.

RAVI RAGBIR: They want to terrorize us. They want to intimidate us. This is my home. I was born in Trinidad, but this is my home. This is Khalil’s home. This is Mahmoud’s home. Right? We have been here. We are making this our community. You all are part of our community. We are going to stand up. We are going to fight. We are not going to allow this agency, this administration to instill fear. So we are not fearful. We are strong. We are unafraid. And we are going to stand up and fight. Free Mahmoud!

PROTESTERS: Release Mahmoud Khalil now! Release Mahmoud Khalil now!

ALEXA AVILÉS: My name is Alexa Avilés. I am a councilmember representing District 38 in South Brooklyn. We are standing here in support of a free Palestine. We are standing demanding the freedom of Khalil. If they cannot hear us, we must be louder. We must organize. They are coming for all of us, and it is us who will protect each other. ICE — ICE and the Trump band of bigots have no place here in New York City.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, the news outlet Zeteo reported Mahmoud Khalil had emailed Columbia’s interim President Katrina Armstrong one day before ICE detained him, to ask her to protect him after he was targeted in a doxxing and smear campaign. Khalil wrote, quote, “I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm,” he said.

Meanwhile, Drop Site News reports the ICE agent who detained Khalil was Elvin Hernandez, who was honored by Trump during his State of the Union address in 2019, when Trump was first president.

We’re joined now by two guests. Murad Awawdeh is president of the New York Immigration Coalition, longtime Palestinian American activist. We just saw him in that clip speaking to the crowd yesterday. And Ramzi Kassem is a professor of law at CUNY, the City University of New York, where he founded the legal clinic CLEAR — the acronym stands for Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility. Its mandate is to support Muslims and all other communities “targeted by local, state, or federal government agencies under the guise of national security and counterterrorism,” unquote. On Monday, CLEAR and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal habeas petition in the Southern District of New York challenging Mahmoud Khalil’s detention.

Ramzi Kassem, let’s begin with you. If you can explain what has taken place in the last days, from Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest in Columbia housing after directly appealing to Columbia’s president to protect him, right through to the judge yesterday enjoining his deportation and your emergency submission?

RAMZI KASSEM: Thank you, Amy.

I can start with what happened to Mahmoud and his wife. On Saturday night, they were walking home. As you mentioned earlier, Mahmoud is a U.S. permanent resident. His wife is a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant. This is a family. They were expecting their first child next month. They had every reason to look forward to that momentous event.

And they’re coming home on Saturday night around 8 p.m. As they’re about to enter their building is when they’re approached by men in plainclothes who subsequently identify themselves as DHS agents. And what they say is that they’re going to take Mahmoud away because his student visa has been revoked. His wife protested and said that he doesn’t have a student visa. He’s a permanent resident. He has a green card. She goes upstairs to their apartment, gets the green card, shows it to the agent. The agent seems confused, calls his superiors, who apparently ordered him to take Mahmoud anyway.

And so, from her perspective, understandably, her husband was abducted before her very eyes, disappeared to a location in downtown Manhattan. And later that evening, our colleagues and co-counsel Amy Greer and Kyle Barron filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court in Manhattan on his behalf, asking for him to be released. And what the government did, within hours of that, is to move him a thousand miles away from that courthouse down to Louisiana to complicate, interfere with his access to the court, with his access to his legal team, with his access to his wife and to his family and to his support network.

So, what we ended up having to do yesterday, unfortunately, is filing a motion with that same court, asking, basically, for the court to order the government to return Mahmoud to New York so that he can have access to his legal team, so that he can have access to the court, and so that the court can vindicate his constitutional rights. The court has already issued an order yesterday scheduling a hearing for Wednesday and also barring the government from deporting Mahmoud until the court orders otherwise.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Ramzi, if he is a permanent resident, and he’s not — hasn’t been accused of any lawful violation, what basis do they have, if any, to actually try to revoke his green card?

RAMZI KASSEM: That is the key question, Juan. Our contention is that this is all retaliatory. The reason he was arrested and detained and targeted for arrest and detention was his constitutionally protected, First Amendment-protected speech and activism in support of Palestinian lives and rights in Gaza and beyond, and the fact that he played, as your segment highlighted, a key mediation role between the university administration and student protesters — which, if anything, is laudable. It’s commendable. It’s what you would want any student to do.

So, none of that is criminal. The government hasn’t even contended, really, seriously, that there is any kind of criminal activity. There’s never been an arrest or a conviction that they could point to. As far as we could tell, the government is invoking — and this is a somewhat novel approach — they’re invoking the foreign policy grounds, where the secretary of state is basically saying that this person, who is a noncitizen, who is a permanent resident, by his mere presence or activities in the United States, poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. Now, none of that has been detailed or specified. And frankly, we don’t believe it will fly in court, because that provision of law may exist, but it does not exist to punish constitutionally protected speech. In other words, it doesn’t trump Mr. Khalil’s First Amendment rights.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And when you hear, for instance, that President Trump on Truth Social said, quote, “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,” what does this tell you about where we’re heading?

RAMZI KASSEM: Well, look, I mean, we’ve all, sadly, become accustomed to the sort of inflammatory and, frankly, racist rhetoric that emanates from the Trump administration. This is no different. When it comes to Mahmoud, it’s all entirely baseless. And both Mahmoud and we on his legal team and all of his supporters, including the thousand-plus people who showed up yesterday, intend to fight to bring him back to New York and to vindicate not just his right to free speech, but everyone’s rights to free speech. You know, it can’t be the case that saying something that the government disagrees with becomes cause for a night arrest. No one should accept that. And so, you know, we’ll fight that tooth and nail.

And we don’t believe that this case will set the precedent that the government believes it’s going to set. It’s already backfired. You know, if the intent was to silent speech and to dissuade people from coming out in support of Palestinian human rights, well, we all saw what happened yesterday in Manhattan. Over a thousand people came out, not just in solidarity with Mahmoud, but also in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and beyond. And we don’t believe that people are going to be deterred, nor is the movement that is critical of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and U.S. foreign policy and its support for Israel. Nor is that movement carried mainly by noncitizens. I mean, that’s also a falsehood. Americans are the ones who are driving the movement. And, of course, there are many noncitizen activists among them, but it’s primarily Americans. And so, they’re not going to be able to deport their way out of this movement.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what’s going to happen in court tomorrow, Ramzi Kassem? And also, sending him to Louisiana, was that just outright punitive?

RAMZI KASSEM: Absolutely, Amy. I mean, our view is that his detention itself was punitive and retaliatory for his First Amendment-protected speech in support of Palestinian lives and rights. And then, subsequently, moving him to Louisiana was retaliatory and punitive, because he filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court contesting the legality and constitutionality of his detention. And so, the government’s response was to try to interfere with the court’s jurisdiction, to try to interfere with his access to counsel and to his family and to his support network by moving him a thousand miles away to Louisiana, where it believes it will have access to, you know, friendlier immigration courts and whatnot.

So, you know, we hope, even though we don’t expect the government to do the reasonable thing and voluntarily bring him back to New York — and if they don’t tell us today that they’re going to do that, then we’ll be in court tomorrow asking the court to order them to do that. And we will litigate the rest of the issues, including the free speech issues, from there.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the Columbia University —Mahmoud lives in Columbia University housing. This direct appeal to the president of Columbia saying he was living in fear, that he couldn’t sleep. How could Columbia have protected him? Did ICE enter private Columbia housing illegally?

RAMZI KASSEM: There have been numerous reports of ICE in various Columbia housing facilities in the last couple of weeks, some substantiated, some not. That certainly raises a question about Columbia’s role.

Bigger picture, though, Columbia’s silence — well, I should say the Columbia administration’s silence has been noteworthy and shameful. For a university that has so often professed its concern for students, it is remarkably silent now that students are literally being abducted off of the streets surrounding Columbia’s campus. And I stress that this is the administration that I’m pointing a finger towards, because, you know, as your segment showed, other segments, other parts of the Columbia community, whether it’s the faculty or the students, have come out. And that’s commendable. They’ve come out in support of Mahmoud and of his family, and that’s great to see. But the university itself and its role in all of this has been, sadly, shameful to date.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring in Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, into the conversation. Murad, your response to what has been happening now with Mahmoud Khalil?

MURAD AWAWDEH: You know, this is, unfortunately, part and parcel to the Trump immigration agenda that we’re seeing play out, from his family separation agenda to his mass deportation plans. Mahmoud Khalil also falls under the category of this Trump administration trying to do everything it can to stymie people’s rights. You know, we’ve seen Tom Homan go out across Fox News, CNN and other networks talking about how individuals who are immigrants don’t have any rights. And this is sort of the rhetoric that they continue to hammer down on.

But fortunately, for everyone who calls his country home, they have constitutional rights, and Mahmoud Khalil is entitled to those rights, as well. And what we’re seeing right now with the Department of Homeland Security, and thankful for the CUNY CLEAR, as well as Center on Constitutional Rights, for stepping in and supporting Mahmoud in this moment, is that he has a right to due process, and that in this moment, he has done nothing wrong. He’s not been charged nor convicted with any crimes.

And it’s incredibly shameful that we continue to see Columbia spiral downward. This university used to be something that was considered the cream of the crop of universities, one of the top Ivy Leagues. There was a report from The Forward yesterday indicating that it may have been some board members of the university who actually called authorities on Mahmoud, which is incredibly disingenuous for an institution that continues to parade itself as an institution that wants to champion its students and build new leaders that we need for this world. What message is this sending to not just to their immigrant students, but all their students and families, that this is something that they would be participating in?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mentioned the possibility of a connection directly to the university about his arrest. What about — has the university issued any statement, given the fact that they’ve been talking so much in recent months about free speech and protection of free speech?

MURAD AWAWDEH: It does not seem that they have yet. They did send out an email to students shortly after the incident, indicating that they were, you know, aware of situations occurring — which only begs the question: If, you know, Mahmoud is living in university-owned property, and Columbia has policies on the books that says that they will not cooperate or allow ICE onto their properties without a judicial warrant, why was ICE allowed onto that property? This only even more so begs the question: What is Columbia’s role in this moment?

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about a New York Times piece that came out right before Mahmoud was taken by ICE, saying, “The Trump administration is finalizing a new ban on travel to the United States for citizens of certain countries that would be broader than the versions President Trump issued in [his] first term. … A draft recommendation circulating inside the executive branch proposes a ‘red’ list of countries whose citizens Mr. Trump could bar from entering the United States,” referring essentially to a new Muslim ban.

MURAD AWAWDEH: Yeah, and this is part and parcel to, again, Trump’s racist and fascist agenda that he campaigned on and, now that he is in office, is trying to deliver on. We saw this happen in part one of Trump when he was in office, and he’s looking to revive that policy and actually put another ban in place. We believe that it’s imminent, any day now. So, folks who are intending to travel outside of the country should reconsider their travels. And people who are outside of the country who have visas or are LPRs, green card holders, should be considering to travel back as soon as possible.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us. We’ve been speaking with Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, and with, as well, one of the attorneys for Mahmoud. He is Ramzi Kassem, professor of law at CUNY, the City University of New York, where he founded the legal clinic CLEAR. CLEAR and Center for Constitutional Rights have filed a federal habeas petition in the Southern District of New York challenging Mahmoud Khalil’s detention.