Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil can remain in federal detention on allegations he lied on his green card application, a federal judge ruled Friday.
U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz said days earlier the Trump administration cannot detain or deport Khalil based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that he could harm foreign policy. The New Jersey judge wrote that Khalil had shown his detention was causing irreparable harm to his career, family and free speech rights.
But the judge acknowledged Friday his earlier ruling did not address the Trump administration’s other stated basis for holding Khalil, that he allegedly left out information about his career and prior associations on his green card form.
Farbiarz said it is now up to Khalil to ask for bail from the immigration judge overseeing his case.
In a filing Friday, the government argued that Farbiarz never said it would be “unlawful” to detain Khalil over concerns about his green card application, even as the judge noted in his Wednesday ruling that evidence suggested that legal permanent residents are virtually never detained for such reasons.
Khalil, for his part, disputes that he wasn’t forthcoming in his application. He maintains, among other things, that he was never employed by or served as an “officer” of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, as the administration claims, but completed an internship approved by the university as part of his graduate studies.
In a letter to Farbiarz, Khalil’s lawyers said he had satisfied all of the court’s requirements to go free and that the government’s lawyers missed a Friday morning deadline to challenge the judge’s Wednesday ruling.
After Farbiarz’s ruling Friday, Khalil’s legal team criticized his continued detention.
“Mahmoud Khalil was detained in retaliation for his advocacy for Palestinian rights. The government is now using cruel, transparent delay tactics to keep him away from his wife and newborn son ahead of their first Father’s Day as a family,” said lawyer Amy Greer, an associate at Dratel & Lewis.
Khalil was detained on March 8 at his apartment building in Manhattan over his links to pro-Palestinian demonstrations. His was the first arrest under President Trump’s crackdown on students who were connected to campus protests, typically citing a law that allows people to be removed from the U.S. if the secretary of state finds their presence could pose “adverse foreign policy consequences.”
Khalil’s lawyers say the Trump administration is simply trying to crack down on free speech.
Khalil isn’t accused of breaking any laws during the protests at Columbia. The international affairs graduate student served as a negotiator and spokesperson for student activists. He wasn’t among the demonstrators arrested, but his prominence in news coverage and willingness to speak publicly made him a target of critics.
