A federal judge has ordered the release of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil from US immigration detention, where he has been held for more than three months over his activism against Israel’s war in 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, is set to be released from an Ice facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he has been held since shortly after plainclothes immigration agents detained him in in early March in the lobby of his Columbia building.
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 that took place on Friday.
Farbiarz said that the government had “clearly not met” the standards for detention. He ordered the parties to convene by phone on Friday afternoon to discuss the terms of Khalil’s release.
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.
Khalil’s 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 – Rumeysa Ozturk, 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.
The judge, Michael E 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 antisemitism 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 refuted.
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 in a letter first published in the Guardian. “I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction.”
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”.
