Lawyers representing Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate arrested by ICE this weekend for his pro–Palestinian campus activism, will appear before federal District Court Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan Wednesday morning.
Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian graduate student who served as a key negotiator for Columbia students demanding the university divest from companies that support Israel’s war in Gaza, is being detained in Louisiana and is not expected to appear in court.
Judge Furman scheduled the hearing while ordering the government not to deport Khalil, a green card holder, on Monday afternoon. He gave attorneys until the end of Tuesday to work out a resolution or else appear in court the following morning.
The order came two days after Khalil’s arrest by immigration authorities at his off-campus housing and a day after he was shipped to an immigrant detention center in Louisiana — a move his attorneys say was intended to disrupt his legal defense.
In a statement Monday evening, Amy Greer, a member of his defense team, said Khalil was “undaunted by his predicament” and moved by an outpouring of support on his behalf, including a petition demanding his release that’s already collected 2.4 million signatures and an impromptu march in Lower Manhattan Monday that drew hundreds of supporters.
Greer said Khalil “was chosen as an example to stifle entirely lawful dissent in violation of the First Amendment.”
Khalil’s attorneys also shared a statement from his wife, who is eight-months pregnant and a U.S. citizen. She had been with Khalil when ICE agents detained him and was threatened with arrest herself. They did not release her name.
“For everyone reading this, I urge you to see Mahmoud through my eyes as a loving husband and the future father to our baby,” the letter read. “I need your help to bring Mahmoud home, so he is here beside me, holding my hand in the delivery room as we welcome our first child into this world.”
Mayor Decries ‘Inconsistent Call for Justice’
President Donald Trump this weekend said that Khalil’s arrest would be the “first of many to come” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he would be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters.” The Department of Homeland Security said his detention was in “support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”
Attorneys for Khalil said that ICE agents first told him during his arrest that his student visa had been revoked. When Greer, who was able to speak to the agents over the phone, told them Khalil had a green card, the agents said his green card had also been revoked.
“While tomorrow or thereafter the government may cite the law or process, that toothpaste is out of the tube and irreversibly so,” Greer said. “The government’s objective is as transparent as it is unlawful, and our role as Mahmoud’s lawyers is to ensure it does not prevail.”
As a briefing on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt laid out further justification for Khalil’s arrest, saying Secretary Rubio had the right to revoke visas of people who are “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America,” citing a provision in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.
She went on to say Khalil had “organized group protests” that “disrupted college campuses” and made Jewish students feel unsafe including by distributing “flyers with the logo of Hamas.” Khalil’s attorneys didn’t return a request for comment immediately on the allegation.
Many of the candidates running for New York City mayor have decried Khalil’s arrest.
But asked repeatedly about Khalil’s detention at his weekly off-topic press briefing Tuesday morning, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who’s said he won’t publicly criticize the Trump administration, cited pamphlets he’d seen on Columbia university grounds during last year’s protests.
“I saw some of the anti-Semitic terminologies that are being used. And so we will always have to have to stomach comments like that because that’s what this country is,” Adams said. “Deportation, how that’s carried out is the federal government’s job.”
Adams also charged the reporters there for his briefing with showing more sympathy for Khalil than they had for him when he was slapped with federal corruption charges that the Trump administration is now trying to drop.
“What I’m finding surprising is the level of support you are all displaying. But I didn’t see that support for me,” Adams said. “If you’re about justice, don’t be inconsistent in your call for justice.”
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