A federal judge on Friday ordered pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil released from immigration detention, more than three months after the Trump administration jailed him while attempting to deport him on foreign policy grounds.
U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz determined that Khalil isn’t a flight risk or a danger to the community, and lightly rebuked the government, calling its effort to continue seeking his detention “highly, highly unusual.”
The judge ordered Khalil to be released from custody at some point Friday, a step that will allow him to return to New York to be reunited with his wife and newborn baby, who was born during Khalil’s detention.
Khalil has a green card and helped organize pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University as a graduate student there. He has not been charged with any crime. But the Trump administration wants to deport him anyway, invoking a rarely used provision of immigration law that allows the secretary of state to deport any noncitizen — even a legal resident — if the secretary of state determines that the person’s continued presence harms U.S. foreign policy interests.
For the majority of the time since his arrest at his Columbia residence on March 9, Khalil has been held in a detention center in Jena, Louisiana, a location his lawyers have argued is retaliatory.
“There is at least something to the underlying claim that there is an effort to use immigration proceedings here to punish the petitioner here, and of course that would be unconstitutional,” Farbiarz said Friday.
Farbiarz, a New Jersey-based appointee of President Joe Biden, agreed last week that the Trump administration’s effort to detain Khalil was likely an unconstitutional affront to his First Amendment rights. But the judge, at the time, stopped short of ordering Khalil’s immediate release, noting that the administration had also accused Khalil of omitting information on his green card application.
The Trump administration indicated that it intended to continue detaining Khalil on that basis, but Farbiarz on Friday rejected that effort.
The judge also said that Khalil’s continued detention was part of the Trump administration’s attempt to prevent him from engaging in constitutionally protected political speech, “and that chilling effect is another part of the extraordinary circumstance that is here.”
The decision is the latest setback for the Trump administration’s effort to detain and deport foreign academics who have been involved in pro-Palestinian campus activism. Judges have ordered the release of Georgetown researcher Badar Khan Suri, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk and Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, who were similarly detained after Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked the same law used against Khalil.
Another judge barred immigration authorities from arresting Columbia student Yunseo Chung, who was identified alongside Khalil in Rubio’s initial determination. Judges in each case found Rubio’s determination was likely unconstitutional and intended to chill the speech of those taking positions contrary to the Trump administration’s preferred stance on Israel.
Although the government asked Farbiarz to pause the effect of his release order to give it time to appeal the decision, the judge denied that request.
Winning release from custody is just one step in Khalil’s effort to fight the Trump administration’s effort to remove him from the country. He faces numerous hurdles ahead, including that an immigration judge in Louisiana has ruled that Khalil can be deported as a national security risk.
On Friday, Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, celebrated the impending release of her husband, saying she “can finally breathe a sigh of relief and know that Mahmoud is on his way home to me and Deen, who never should have been separated from his father.”
“We know this ruling does not begin to address the injustices the Trump administration has brought upon our family, and so many others the government is trying to silence for speaking out against Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians,” she said in a statement. “But today we are celebrating Mahmoud coming back to New York to be reunited with our little family, and the community that has supported us since the day he was unjustly taken for speaking out for Palestinian freedom.”
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