Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Friday that it would not release green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, after a federal judge ordered him to be released.
U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz of New Jersey had given the government a deadline of 1:30 p.m. on Friday to appeal his ruling, and in a last-minute filing, the government said that it didn’t have to appeal the decision to keep detaining Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and leader of pro-Palestine campus protests
The government claimed that the judge “did not order” them to release Khalil, but said only that they could not detain him based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that he was a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests because allowing him to remain in the U.S. would create a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.”
The government stated that it was well within its rights to detain Khalil on “other grounds,” namely his removability as “an alien inadmissible at the time of entry or admission, to wit.”
“And while the court made a factual finding that it was unlikely that Khalili would be detained on another basis… the court never held that it would be unlawful for Respondents to detain Khalil based on another charge of removability,” the filing stated.
Last month, the U.S. government alleged that Khalil purposefully failed to divulge his work as an unpaid intern for the United Nationals Relief and Work Agency and “withheld his membership of certain organizations” when applying for a visa, which was grounds for his removal. Khalil entered the U.S. on a student visa in 2022, and later applied for permanent residency in 2024.
UNWRA is a U.S. aid organization in Gaza that Israel had long-sought to shut down. Israeli officials claimed that 12 of the organization’s 32,000 staff members had been complicit in Hamas’s deadly incursion into Israeli territory on October 7, 2023. A U.N.’ investigation found that nine of them could have been involved.
The U.S. government also claimed Khalil had failed to disclose his work with the Syria office in the British embassy in Beirut, as well as his involvement with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian activism group at his school.
But none of this would have likely prevented him from receiving his green card, and serve as weak pretext for his removal.
Across the country, federal judges have ordered the release of multiple students and faculty detained as part of Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. Mahmoud has remained in ICE custody since March, and missed the birth of his child.
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