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immigration
Slamming 'Fascist Tactics' of Trump, Mahmoud Khalil Fights Judge's Deportation Decision
A member of his legal team noted that "the immigration prosecutor, judge, and jailer all answer to Donald Trump, and that one man is eager to weaponize the system in a desperate bid to silence Mahmoud Khalil."
Sep 17, 2025
Mahmoud Khalil and his lawyers on Wednesday affirmed their plan to fight an immigration court ruling that paves the way for his deportation, months after plainclothes agents accosted the lawful permanent resident and his US citizen wife outside their home in New York City.
"It is no surprise that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of free speech. Their latest attempt, through a kangaroo immigration court, exposes their true colors once again," Khalil said in a statement.
"When their first effort to deport me was set to fail, they resorted to fabricating baseless and ridiculous allegations in a bid to silence me for speaking out and standing firmly with Palestine, demanding an end to the ongoing genocide," he continued. "Such fascist tactics will never deter me from continuing to advocate for my people's liberation."
While President Donald Trump has a broad goal of mass deportations, his administration has targeted Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student with a valid green card, and other foreign scholars in the United States for criticizing Israel's US-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip.
"We have witnessed a constant lack of humanity and allegiance to the law throughout proceedings in this farcical Louisiana immigration court."
Federal agents arrested Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent, in March. He wasn't released from a federal immigration facility until June. During his 104-day detention, his wife, Noor Abdalla, gave birth to their son. Over the past six months, he has been a part of multiple legal battles: his challenge to being deported in a Louisiana immigration court; a civil rights case before US District Judge Michael Farbiarz in New Jersey; and a fight for $20 million in damages.
In a Wednesday letter to Farbiarz—an appointee of former President Joe Biden who has already blocked his deportation while the civil rights case proceeds—Khalil's legal team explained that on September 12, Jamee Comans, an immigration judge (IJ), "issued three separate orders denying petitioner's (1) motion for an extension of time, (2) motion to change venue, and (3) application for a waiver, without conducting an evidentiary hearing."
"In denying petitioner's request for a waiver absent a hearing, as well as his motions for extension of time and for change of venue, the IJ ordered petitioner removed to Algeria or Syria... while reaffirming her decisions denying petitioner any form of relief from removal," the letter says. Khalil now has 30 days from September 12 to start an appeal with the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA).
Noting "statements targeting petitioner by name for retaliation and deportation made by the president and several senior US government officials," Khalil's lawyers "have ample reason to expect that the BIA process—and an affirmance of the IJ's determination—will be swift," the letter continued. "Upon affirmance by the BIA, petitioner will lose his lawful permanent resident status, including his right to reside and work in the United States, and have a final order of removal against him."
"Compared to other courts of appeals, including those in the 3rd and 2nd Circuits, the 5th Circuit almost never grants stays of removal to noncitizens pursuing petitions for review of BIA decisions. As a result, the only meaningful impediment to petitioner's physical removal from the United States would be this court's important order prohibiting removal during the pendency of his federal habeas case," the letter points out, referring to Farbiarz's previous intervention.
Khalil is represented by Dratel & Lewis, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR), Van Der Hout LLP, Washington Square Legal Services, and the national, New Jersey, New York, and Louisiana arms of the ACLU.
"When the immigration prosecutor, judge, and jailer all answer to Donald Trump, and that one man is eager to weaponize the system in a desperate bid to silence Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident whose only supposed sin is that he stands against an ongoing genocide in Palestine, this is the result," CLEAR co-director Ramzi Kassem said Wednesday. "A plain-as-day First Amendment violation that also puts on sharp display the rapidly free-falling credibility of the entire US immigration system."
In addition to calling out the Trump administration for its unconstitutional conduct, Khalil's lawyers expressed some optimism.
"We have witnessed a constant lack of humanity and allegiance to the law throughout proceedings in this farcical Louisiana immigration court, and the immigration judge's September 12 decision is just the most recent example of what occurs when the system requires an arbiter that is anything but neutral to do the administration's bidding," said Johnny Sinodis, a partner at Van Der Hout LLP. "As with other illegal efforts by the government, this too will be challenged and overcome."
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'I've Never Seen Anything Like It': Trump Policies Leave US Farmers in Dire Straits
"It's a five-alarm fire," one Kentucky soybean farmer said, describing the harmful effects of the president's tariffs.
Sep 16, 2025
As anticipated, US President Donald Trump's economic and immigration policies are harming American farmers' ability to earn a living—and testing the loyalty of one of the president's staunchest bases of support, according to reports published this week.
After Trump slapped 30% tariffs on Chinese imports in May, Beijing retaliated with measures including stopping all purchases of US soybeans. Before the trade war, a quarter of the soybeans—the nation's number one export crop—produced in the United States were exported to China. Trump's tariffs mean American soybean growers can't compete with countries like Brazil, the world's leading producer and exporter of the staple crop and itself the target of a 50% US tariff.
"We depend on the Chinese market. The reason we depend so much on this market is China consumes 61% of soybeans produced worldwide," Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, who is president of the American Soybean Association, told News Nation on Monday. "Right now, we have zero sold for this crop that’s starting to be harvested right now.”
Ragland continued:
It’s a five-alarm fire for our industry that 25% of our total sales is currently missing. And right now we are not competitive with Brazil due to the retaliatory tariffs that are in place. Our prices are about 20% higher, and that means that the Chinese are going elsewhere because they can find a better value.
And the American soybean farmers and their families are suffering. They are 500,000 of us that produce soybeans, and we desperately need markets, and we need opportunity and a leveled playing field.
“There’s an artificial barrier that is built with these tariffs that makes us not be competitive," Ragland added.
Tennessee Soybean Promotion Council executive director Stefan Maupin likened the tariffs to "death by a thousand cuts."
“We’re in a significant and desperate situation where... none of the crops that farmers grow right now return a profit,” Maupin told the Tennessee Lookout Monday. “They don’t even break even.”
Alan Meadows, a fifth-generation soybean farmer in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, said that “this has been a really tough year for us."
“It started off really good," Meadows said. "We were in the field in late March, which is early for us. But then the wheels came off, so to speak, pretty quick.”
It started with devastating flooding in April, followed by a drier-than-usual summer. Higher supply costs due to inflation and Trump's tariffs exacerbated the dire situation.
“So much of what has happened and what’s going on here is totally out of our control,” Meadows said. “We just want a free, fair, and open market where we can sell our goods... as competitively as anybody else around the world. And we do feel that we produce a superior product here in the United States, and we just need to have the markets.”
Farmers are desperate for help from the federal government. However, Congress has not passed a new Farm Bill—legislation authorizing funding for agriculture and food programs—since 2018, without which "we do not have a workable safety net program when things like this happen in our economy," according to Maupin.
Maupin added that farmers “have done everything right, they’ve managed their finances well, they have put in a good crop... but they cannot change the weather, they cannot change the economy, they cannot change the markets."
"The weather is in the control of a higher power," he added, "and the economy and the markets are in control of Washington, DC."
It's not just soybean farmers who are hurting. Tim Maxwell, a 65-year-old Iowa grain and hog farmer, told the BBC Sunday that "our yields, crops, and weather are pretty good—but our [interest from] markets right now is on a low."
Despite his troubles, Maxwell remains supportive of Trump, saying that he is "going to be patient," adding, "I believe in our president."
However, there is a limit to Maxwell's patience with Trump.
"We're giving him the chance to follow through with the tariffs, but there had better be results," he said. "I think we need to be seeing something in 18 months or less. We understand risk—and it had better pay off."
It's also not just Trump's economic policies that are putting farmers in a squeeze. The president's anti-immigrant crackdown has left many farmers without the labor they need to operate.
“The whole thing is screwed up,” John Painter, a Pennsylvania organic dairy farmer and three-time Trump voter, told Politico Monday. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”
As Politico noted:
The US agricultural workforce fell by 155,000—about 7%—between March and July, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That tracks with Pew Research Center data that shows total immigrant labor fell by 750,000 from January through July. The labor shortage piles onto an ongoing economic crisis for farmers exacerbated by dwindling export markets that could leave them with crop surpluses.
“People don’t understand that if we don’t get more labor, our cows don’t get milked and our crops don’t get picked,” said Tim Wood, another Pennsylvania dairy farmer and a member of the state's Farm Bureau board of directors.
Charlie Porter, who heads the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau’s Ag Labor and Safety Committee, told Politico that “it’s a shame you have hard-working people who need labor, and a group of people who are willing to work, and they have to look over their shoulder like they’re criminals—they're not."
Painter also said that he is "very disappointed" by Trump's immigration policies.
“It’s not right, what they’re doing,” he said of the administration. “All of us, if we look back in history, including the president, we have somebody that came to this country for the American dream.”
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Human Rights Watch Demands Probe of Fatal ICE Shooting Near Chicago as Video Undermines DHS Claims
"As ICE ramps up its violent and discriminatory campaign of raids and detention against migrants and their communities, injuries and deaths will likely continue to rise," said a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch.
Sep 16, 2025
Human Rights Watch on Tuesday called for an independent probe into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's fatal shooting of a Mexican immigrant outside Chicago on Friday, as new video evidence seems to undermine the government's claims about what led to the shooting.
On Friday, as part of President Donald Trump's "Operation Midway Blitz," an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old Mexican immigrant, during what the agency called "targeted law enforcement activity."
Villegas-Gonzalez was pronounced dead at the hospital, where the agent who shot him was also taken to be treated for severe injuries. On a GoFundMe page set up after his shooting, Villegas-Gonzalez's family revealed that he was killed "shortly after he dropped off his sons at school."
In a statement released after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security said that Villegas-Gonzalez "refused to follow law enforcement's commands and drove his car at law enforcement officers. One of the ICE officers was hit by the car and dragged a significant distance. Fearing for his own life, the officer fired his weapon." They described Villegas-Gonzalez as "a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving."
According to a report on Tuesday from the Chicago Sun-Times, the ICE agents at the scene were not wearing body cameras after Trump scrapped a policy requiring them. CCTV footage from local businesses has captured some of the events leading up to the shooting.
Human Rights Watch said that the publicly available footage contradicts DHS's version of events.
(Video: CBS News)
Belkis Wille, the associate director of the Human Rights Watch's crisis, conflict, and arms division, described the discrepancy:
The CCTV footage that has emerged does not show Villegas-Gonzalez’s car driving at or hitting law enforcement officers. In the footage, two officers stand on either side of Villegas-Gonzalez’ vehicle as he reverses away from the officers. One of the officers appears to hold onto the window frame on the driver's side, moving backward with the vehicle, and then forward as the vehicle drives out of frame of the CCTV camera. It is unclear why the ICE officer moves with the vehicle or whether he is being dragged.
"Law enforcement officers," Wille noted, "can only use lethal force when an individual poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or another person."
As protests erupted around the Chicagoland area, numerous public officials called for ICE to release more information about the shooting of Villegas-Gonzalez. According to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI have all refused to clarify who is investigating the incident.
"We’ve asked ICE for all of the information around it," Pritzker said Monday. "They have given very little."
He added that "if this were the Chicago Police Department, if this were the sheriff’s office in Cook County, if this were Illinois State Police, you would have had a lot more information already released."
Human Rights Watch said that instead of an internal investigation, there must be an independent probe that is not controlled by the Trump administration.
"As ICE ramps up its violent and discriminatory campaign of raids and detention against migrants and their communities, injuries and deaths will likely continue to rise," Wille said.
As of late August, ICE had deported more than 200,000 people since Trump returned to office. But while the Trump administration says they are going after "the worst of the worst," ICE data from early September shows that 71% held in ICE detention have no criminal convictions, while most of those who do have only minor offenses.
Only about 12% of those deported have been convicted of a crime that was violent or potentially violent. The Marshall Project reports that as of August, over 1,800 people with traffic violations, like Villegas-Gonzalez, had been deported.
At least 14 people, not including Villegas-Gonzalez, have died while in ICE custody since Trump retook office, a significant uptick from recent years.
"In the face of these developments and this fatal incident, transparent investigations into the causes of deaths and injuries during ICE actions are more critical than ever," Wille said. "Those responsible for violations of US law, as well as international human rights standards, should be held to account."
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