Judge Orders Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil Deported to Algeria or Syria
Finds "underlying fraud” and “willfully misrepresented material fact(s).”
A Columbia University anti-Israel activist named Mahmoud Khalil had a moment in the spotlight earlier this year as a supposedly sympathetic free speech hero.
At Harvard Law School’s Class Day, part of the graduation ceremonies at the school, the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard, Andrew Manuel Crespo, described Khalil as among “multiple scholars targeted in this way for their constitutionally protected speech, including Mahmoud Khalil, the first to be arrested, who remains detained even now, and who the federal government has fought to prevent from so much as touching his newborn baby boy. This is what authoritarianism looks like.”
At a Harvard Graduate School of Education graduation convocation, student speaker C. Emmanuel Wright also spoke about the Khalil case, likening it to the anti-black racism of the 1960s south:
Today, we are seeing the same tactics return, dressed in new clothes: policies that seem neutral but disproportionately punish the marginalized. Tests of worthiness. Standards not designed for equity, but exclusion.
It has been two months since Mahmoud Khalil, a student activist at Columbia University, was detained in an immigration facility in Louisiana. He wrote a letter welcoming his newborn son. In it, he asked: “Why do faceless politicians have the power to strip human beings of their divine moments?”
That question does not just haunt. It exposes. It reminds us that the violence we fight is embedded in the systems that surround us — systems designed to surveil, to silence, to discipline anyone who dares to speak truths institutions would rather suppress.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression weighed in with a statement denouncing Khalil’s deportation. “The only ‘crime’ the government has offered was that Mahmoud Khalil expressed a disfavored political opinion. If that’s a crime in America, every single one of us is guilty,” it said.
Columbia president Claire Shipman acknowledged him by name in her 2025 Commencement address: “we firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to freedom of speech as everyone else, and should not be targeted by the government for exercising that right. And let me also say that I know many in our community today are mourning the absence of our graduate, Mahmoud Khalil.”
The New York Times had Khalil on the Ezra Klein show to talk about “manufactured hysteria about antisemitism at Columbia” and to defend “Globalize the intifada” (“overwhelmingly civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation,” Khalil claimed). Khalil said, “There is a moral imperative for me to speak up.” The Times headlined it, “The Trump Administration Tried to Silence Mahmoud Khalil, So I Asked Him to Talk.” The Times described Khalil’s arrest as part of an intimidation effort: “It wanted everyone to ask: If they could do this to Khalil, could they do it to me? If they could detain him on such flimsy grounds, could they not come up with a reason to detain me?”
Even the sensible editorialists at the Wall Street Journal weighed in with a March 12 editorial, “Mahmoud Khalil and His Green Card,” averring, “The Administration needs to be careful that it is targeting real promoters of terrorism, and not breaking the great promise of a green card by deporting anyone with controversial political views.” It said, “Mr. Khalil may deserve deportation, but he also deserves due process.” Hard to argue with that.
So it’s interesting to observe the silence now that, after some protracted due process, United States Immigration Judge Jamee Comans has ordered Khalil “be removed from the United States to Algeria, or in the alternative to Syria.” Here are the details on Comans’s decision and what might, or should, come next:
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