A green card holder who led pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and was recently arrested by federal immigration authorities must be allowed to have private calls with his lawyers, a federal judge in New York City said on March 12.
U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman said during a hearing in Manhattan that Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at Columbia when he organized the protests, could make at least one call on March 12 and at least one call on March 13 on unrecorded lines.
The order came after Ramzi Kassem, one of the attorneys representing Khalil, told the court that his client had been allowed to make only one call to his counsel.
Furman said the calls would help Khalil’s lawyers prepare a revised petition challenging the constitutionality of his arrest.
Khalil was taken into custody over the weekend by Department of Homeland Security agents outside his university residence in Manhattan.
He was transported to Louisiana, where he remains in detention. Furman previously blocked any attempt to deport Khalil after the activist lodged a petition over his arrest. Furman said during the hearing that because the government did not challenge that block, it would remain in effect.
Brandon Waterman, a lawyer representing the government, told the court that he was not aware of any issues with Khalil’s access to his attorneys. Waterman said that he would look into the matter.
Waterman also said that the government plans to lodge a challenge to the judge’s authority because, he said, Khalil’s suit should have been filed in Louisiana or New Jersey, where he was initially taken after his arrest.
Khalil, who led protests against Israel in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel in October 2023, is a permanent resident of the United States. He is married to a U.S. citizen, who is pregnant, according to his lawyers.
“He was taken by U.S. government agents in retaliation, essentially, for exercising his First Amendment rights, for speaking up in defense of Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for being critical of the U.S. government and of the Israeli government,” Kassem told reporters after the hearing.
The Trump administration says pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, including Columbia, have included support for terrorist group Hamas and anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students. Student protest organizers say criticism of Israel is being wrongly conflated with anti-Semitism.
“Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the secretary of state has the right to revoke a green card or a visa for individuals who serve or are adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters this week. “And Mahmoud Khalil was an individual who was given the privilege of coming to this country to study at one of our nation’s finest universities and colleges. And he took advantage of that opportunity, of that privilege, by siding with terrorists.”
Kassem said that the grounds cited by the government are vague and “rarely used,” alleging they “are a form of punishment and retaliation for the exercise of free speech” that will not hold up in court.
Leavitt told reporters, “I don’t have a readout on how many arrests will come, but I do know that DHS is actively working on it.”
