Houston: A U.S. immigration judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration can deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, on grounds that he threatens U.S. foreign policy for his involvement in last year’s pro-Palestinian campus protests.
Judge Jamee Comans ruled after a hearing at the LaSalle Immigration Court in Jena, Louisiana, that “the court will sustain charge of removability,” while setting a deadline of April 23 for Khalil and his lawyers to file applications for relief to stop his deportation.
Following the ruling, Khalil addressed the court: “There’s nothing more important than due process and fundamental fairness … Neither of those principles were present today.”
“This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court 1,000 miles away from my family,” he said. “I hope your urgency for this is to the thousands of people here in this facility.”
Khalil, a green card holder with no criminal history, was arrested at a university-owned apartment complex in New York City on March 8 and then transferred to an immigration detention center in the southern coastal U.S. state.
Following Khalil’s arrest, U.S. President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social platform, calling Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and declaring, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”
“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country-never to return again,” Trump wrote.
Khalil and his lawyers have denied any support for Hamas or ties to the group. However, the Trump administration cited a rarely invoked provision from a 1952 law, namely the Immigration and Nationality Act which allows the secretary of state to deport noncitizens if their presence in the country threatens U.S. foreign policy.
According to the latest data from the Association of International Educators, a nonprofit education group, nearly 1,000 foreign students and scholars have had their visas revoked or their immigration status marked as terminated in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, known as the SEVIS federal database.
Many of them were reportedly involved in pro-Palestinian campus protests across the country last year.
