NEW YORK — A US immigration judge on Wednesday ordered the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, an anti-Israel protest leader at Columbia University in New York City.
Khalil became a high-profile figure after his arrest by the Trump administration in March, part of the government’s crackdown on anti-Israel activism and antisemitism on college campuses.
Khalil was held in custody for several months until he secured a court-ordered release in June. He has waged a legal battle against deportation since then as authorities continued to seek his removal from the US.
The immigration judge in one of his cases, Jamee Comans, in Louisiana, ordered Khalil be deported to Algeria or Syria in a Wednesday court filing. Khalil is an Algerian citizen who was born in Syria to a Palestinian family.
Comans said the grounds for the deportation included that Khalil committed “fraud” during the immigration process by deliberately concealing his past involvement with the UN agency for the Palestinians, UNRWA, and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a coalition of anti-Israel campus activists.
“This court finds that respondent willfully misrepresented material fact(s) for the sole purpose of circumventing the immigration process and reducing the likelihood his application would be denied,” the judge said.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also said Khalil’s presence in the US could hurt national interests, the judge noted.
Rubio has invoked a law approved during the 1950s that allows the US to remove foreigners seen as adverse to US foreign policy. Rubio argued that US constitutional free speech protections do not apply to foreigners.
Comans also noted some “positives” for Khalil, including his family ties to the US, including his wife and infant son, who are citizens, and that Khalil has no criminal history, but said the negatives outweighed those attributes.
Khalil is also involved in a legal case in New Jersey, where a judge in June ruled against his deportation during the legal proceedings.
His legal team said it appealed to the New Jersey court to challenge the deportation ruling.
A statement from his legal team said the Louisiana immigration judge had failed to provide due process, engaged in procedural irregularities, and bought into false charges against Khalil.
“It is no surprise that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of free speech. Their latest attempt, through a kangaroo immigration court, exposes their true colors once again,” Khalil said in a statement. “When their first effort to deport me was set to fail, they resorted to fabricating baseless and ridiculous allegations in a bid to silence me for speaking out and standing firmly with Palestine.”
Khalil, who had a green card, was in the US legally at the time of his arrest and has not been charged with a crime.
Khalil was one of the leaders of CUAD while he was a graduate student at Columbia.
CUAD led disruptive protests at Columbia as the campus became an epicenter of anti-Israel activism following the outbreak of the Gaza war. Israelis and Jews at Columbia, and a university antisemitism task force, reported widespread antisemitism during the turmoil.
CUAD has endorsed violence, called for “the total eradication of Western civilization,” backed the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, applauded US-designated terror groups, distributed Hamas propaganda at a university library, and supported an activist imprisoned for assaulting Jewish Columbia students.
During his release, Khalil resumed his activism, appearing at protests and in the media. He has recently defended the Hamas invasion of Israel, denied any antisemitism at Columbia, met with Sen. Bernie Sanders, called for the “collapse” of the “Zionist genocidal project,” and applauded anti-Zionist Jews.
The Trump administration’s deportation effort, despite its stated goal of combating antisemitism, has alarmed many Jews, who feel that a broader degradation of civil rights could ultimately threaten the American Jewish community.