Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was released from US immigration detention, where he had been held for more than three months over his activism against Israel’s war on Gaza.
Khalil, the most high profile of the students to be arrested by the Trump administration for their pro-Palestinian activism, and the last of them still in detention, was ordered to be released by a federal judge on Friday afternoon from an Ice facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he had been held since shortly after plainclothes immigration agents detained him in early March in the lobby of his Columbia building.
The 30-year-old emerged from the remote detention centre just after 6.30pm local time, walking through two towering gates topped with razor wire and accompanied by two attorneys into the late afternoon sun and intense humidity.
He briefly addressed the small group of media assembled outside.
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“Although justice prevailed it’s very long overdue and this shouldn’t have taken three months,” he said. “I leave some incredible men behind me, over 1,000 people behind me, in a place where they shouldn’t have been.”
Asked to respond to allegations made by the Trump administration, which has fought for months to keep him detained, that his pro-Palestinian organising constituted a national security threat, he said:
“Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this. That doesn’t mean there is a right person for this. There is no right person who should be detained for actually protesting a genocide.”
Khalil told reporters he was looking forward to returning home to spend time with his infant son, who was born while his father was detained. “I can actually hug him,” Khalil said.
The federal judge, Michael Farbiarz, said during the hearing on Friday that Khalil is not a flight risk, and “is not a danger to the community. Period, full stop.”
“It is highly, highly unusual to be seeking detention of a petitioner given the factual record of today,” Farbiarz also said during the hearing.
Farbiarz said that the government had “clearly not met” the standards for detention.
Later on Friday, Khalil was ordered to surrender his passport and green card to Ice officials in Jena as part of his conditional release. The order also stipulated that Khalil’s travel be limited to a handful of US states, including New York, as Louisiana, Michigan and New Jersey for court appearances.
Khalil’s arrest was widely decried as a dangerous escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign against speech protected by the first amendment to the US constitution. Khalil has not been charged with a crime.
His detention was the first in a series of arrests of international student activists, and his release marks the latest in a series of defeats for the administration, which had promised to deport pro-Palestinian international students en masse.
Three other students detained on similar grounds – Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri and Mohsen Mahdawi – were previously released while their immigration cases are pending. A number of others voluntarily left the country after deportation proceedings against them were opened; another is in hiding as she fights her case.
Farbiarz, of the federal district court in Newark, New Jersey, had previously found that the law invoked to detain Khalil – a rarely used immigration provision allowing the secretary of state to order the deportation of anyone found to have an adverse effect on US foreign policy – is probably unconstitutional.
Government officials had accused Khalil of anti-Semitism and of pro-Hamas advocacy, without providing any evidence. Jewish students and faculty had submitted court documents on Khalil’s behalf, and he was quoted last year on CNN saying that “the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other”.
Farbiaz ordered Khalil’s release in his federal court case, which was brought to challenge his detention. His immigration case will proceed on a separate track. While the government has suffered setbacks to its foreign policy argument in multiple courts, it is likely to continue arguing that its efforts to deport Khalil are also supported by alleged omissions in his green card application – arguments it brought several weeks after he was first detained, and which his attorneys have rejected.
Khalil is married to a US citizen, Noor Abdallah, who gave birth to their first child during her husband’s detention. “I fight for you, and for every Palestinian child whose life deserves safety, tenderness and freedom,” Khalil wrote to his newborn son, Deen, last month. “I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction.”
In a statement provided by Khalil’s lawyers, Abdalla said she can finally “breathe a sigh of relief” after the ruling.
“We know this ruling does not begin to address the injustices the Trump administration has brought upon our family, and so many others, but today we are celebrating Mahmoud coming back to New York to be reunited with our little family.”
In response to the news that the judge had ordered Khalil to be released on Friday, Amnesty International USA celebrated the decision, calling it “overdue” and called on the Trump administration to “immediately comply with this order”. - Guardian
