Mahmoud Khalil hearing: Federal judge in NJ will rule on jurisdiction
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Lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate detained and targeted for deportation over pro-Palestinian activism, fought in a federal court in Newark on Friday to block the government’s efforts to transfer his high-profile case to Louisiana.
The potentially landmark case centers on the right of the U.S. government to deport noncitizens over what civil rights advocates say is constitutionally protected speech. The Trump administration maintains that it has the authority to revoke visas and green cards from people it deems "hostile" to the country or its foreign policy, as it detains and targets supporters of Palestinian causes.
A federal judge in New York ruled that the case should be heard in New Jersey, where Khalil was held for several hours after his arrest on March 8 at the Elizabeth Detention Center, and where a lawsuit to block his deportation was filed.
The Trump administration asked the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey to transfer the case to Louisiana, where Khalil is now held in immigration detention and where appeals would likely end up in a more conservative-leaning court.
“We’re in court today because the U.S. government, after arresting our client Mahmoud Khalil, spirited him overnight to Louisiana in order to avoid the jurisdiction of the courts of New York and New Jersey,” Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said at a press conference after the hearing Friday morning.
“We are here to insist that the court take jurisdiction of this case, bring him back to New Jersey and then immediately thereafter rule on his request for release, his request for bail, and his broader petition that his detention is unconstitutional.”
Khalil, a Palestinian born in a refugee camp in Syria, was a spokesperson and negotiator last year for pro-Palestinian demonstrators against war in Gaza at Columbia.
He was arrested in the lobby of his student apartment building in New York City after returning from iftar, the fast-breaking meal during Ramadan. His wife, who is due to give birth in April, is a U.S. citizen. Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told him his green card was revoked.
The Department of Homeland security has charged Khalil under a rarely-used provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which states that the Secretary of State can move to deport any noncitizen whose presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Administration takes aim at student demonstrators
The administration has targeted other scholars for deportation over pro-Palestinian speech that it equates with support for Hamas or terrorism. They include a Korean American student at Columbia who participated in protests; a Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow who supported Palestinians in social media posts; and a Tufts University student who co-authored a piece published in The Tufts Daily, the school's student newspaper, in favor of divestment from Israeli corporations.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio garnered national news attention on Thursday when he claimed that the State Department may have revoked more than 300 student visas, boasting that “every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
But he appeared to backtrack from his own claims a day later, when he told reporters at a press conference that the alleged 300 revocations weren’t all student visas and included cases that were unrelated to pro-Palestinian protests.
Some of the revoked visas “are people that have criminal charges” and “some are unrelated to any protests and are just having to do with potential criminal charges.”
100 people rally for Khalil's release
About 100 people rallied outside the courthouse in Newark on Friday calling for Khalil’s release and condemning the detention and attempts to deport other activists around the country.
“It’s Palestine today but it’s every single issue we care about tomorrow,” said Amy Torres, executive director for the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. “If we cannot stand up for this, we will not be able to stand up for anything else because there will be fewer and fewer and fewer of us left.”
Azmy said that ICE had taken other detainees it detains across state lines “to take away power from the courts and the courts’ jurisdiction.”
Amol Sinha, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, called the treatment of Khalil “anti-American, illegal and unconstitutional.”
“If you care about free speech, if you care about democracy, if you care about the pro-Palestinian or any other sort of advocacy folks have in this country," he said, "you should be outraged by what the government had done to our client."