Judge rejects Trump admin’s bid to move Mahmoud Khalil’s legal case to Louisiana
A New Jersey-based federal judge rejected the Trump administration’s bid to move Columbia grad and anti-Israel demonstration leader Mahmoud Khalil’s legal case to Louisiana — where he is locked up in an ICE detention center.
US District Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled Tuesday that the Garden State will maintain jurisdiction over the high-profile deportation case since it’s where Khalil was briefly detained when his lawyers filed their legal challenge following his contested arrest.
“The case as filed can go forward only here,” Farbiarz wrote in his 67-page ruling, where he described the government’s argument otherwise as “unpersuasive.”
“The other 93 districts, where the Petitioner was nowhere to be found, are out of the question.”
While the ruling does not guarantee that Khalil will be transferred from his detention center in Jena, it allows his legal team the opportunity to argue for his potential release.
Khalil — a 30-year-old native of Syria of Palestinian descent and a citizen of Algeria — was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at his university-owned apartment on March 8 after he helped fuel back-to-back anti-Israel protests at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College last month.
Khalil, a spokesman for the anti-Israel group Columbia Apartheid United Divest, was shipped to an ICE detention center in Louisiana and is waging a court battle against the Trump administration, which is looking to deport the green-card and student-visa holder over his role in disruptive and, at times, violent protests at the Ivy League.
The Palestinian activist’s group is responsible for the riotous takeover at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last April.
The latest justification behind the push to boot him out of the country is that he allegedly hid ties to the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees — UNRWA — on his green-card application.
UNRWA was infamously stripped of tens of millions of dollars in federal funding after an explosive report that some of its members took part in the Oct. 7 terror attacks.
His attorneys have since accused the Trump administration of advancing a “radical reinterpretation” of existing law to move the case to a more conservative venue that deprives Khalil of his legal team and family.
The Columbia grad is married to an American who is eight-months pregnant with his child.
“We are grateful the court wisely understood that the government cannot try to manipulate the jurisdiction of the United States courts in a transparent attempt to shield their unconstitutional – and frankly chilling – behavior,” defense attorney Baher Azmy said.
“We look forward to the next phase of this case, which is to get Mahmoud out of detention and into the arms of his family, and then to prove the Trump administration’s attempted deportation of Mahmoud and others is nothing but unconstitutional retaliation for protected speech.”
With Post wires
