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immigration detention
Judge: Trump Admin Can't Hold or Deport Mahmoud Khalil 'On Rubio's Say-So'
"This is the news we've been waiting over three months for. Mahmoud must be released immediately and safely returned home to New York to be with me and our newborn baby, Deen," his wife, Noor Abdalla, said.
Jun 11, 2025
The Trump administration cannot detain or deport former Columbia University student and Palestinian solidarity advocate Mahmoud Khalil over the claim that he poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.
"The court finds as a matter of fact that [Khalil's] career and reputation are being damaged and his speech is being chilled—and this adds up to irreparable harm," U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz of New Jersey wrote in his preliminary injunction.
While judges have ordered the release of other noncitizen student protesters detained by the Trump administration, the ruling marks the first from a federal court to state that the administration cannot deport or detain noncitizens by arguing they pose a threat to foreign policy under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New York said in a statement.
"Today's ruling is a huge win for the Constitution and the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike."
"This is the news we've been waiting over three months for. Mahmoud must be released immediately and safely returned home to New York to be with me and our newborn baby, Deen," Noor Abdalla, Khalil's wife, said in response. "True justice would mean Mahmoud was never taken away from us in the first place, that no Palestinian father, from New York to Gaza, would have to endure the painful separation of prison walls like Mahmoud has."
Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, has been held in a detention facility in Louisiana since he was seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from his New York City home in early March, missing the birth of his son. He has not been charged with any crime.
Instead, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that Khalil's participation in student Palestine solidarity protests threatened U.S. foreign policy interests, citing Section 1227 of the U.S. Code.
Farbriarz determined late last month that Rubio's argument was "likely" unconstitutional, but stopped short of granting Khalil a preliminary injunction releasing him from detention. Since then, Khalil's legal team filed new evidence detailing the "irreparable harm" he has experienced due to his detention.
"We are relieved that the court documented what was obvious to the world, which is that the government's vindictive and unconstitutional arrest, detention, and attempted deportation of Mahmoud for his Palestinian activism is causing him and his family agonizing personal and professional harm," said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights—one of the organizations involved in Khalil's defense. "We look forward to his reunion with his wife and newborn son, and for this remarkable, brilliant man to reclaim his life and his reputation."
Brett Max Kaufman, a member of Khalil's legal team and senior counsel in the ACLU's Center for Democracy, said: "Today's ruling is a huge win for the Constitution and the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike. No one should be imprisoned or deported for their political beliefs, and the three months that Mahmoud has spent in detention are an affront to the freedoms that this country is supposed to stand for."
Fellow legal team member Ramzi Kassem, the co-founder and director of CLEAR, said, "This vindicates what Mahmoud has maintained since day one—that the government cannot detain or deport him based on Rubio's say-so."
Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said: "We welcome this ruling as yet another example of our nation's judicial system pushing back against the Trump administration's unconstitutional effort to silence all those who speak out against Israel's genocide in Gaza, and against our government's unconscionable complicity with that genocide. Mahmoud Khalil's unlawful and cruel detention deprived him of his liberty and of being with his wife when she gave birth to their first child. This government's war on First Amendment rights must be challenged by all Americans who value free speech and the Constitution."
Yet while Farbiarz's injunction offers hope to Khalil and his supporters, it does not yet guarantee Khalil's freedom. Farbiarz gave the administration until 9:30 am Friday morning to appeal the ruling, after which time it would take effect.
There is a potential opening for the administration to continue to fight Khalil's release.
As Farbiarz noted, the Trump administration also alleges that Khalil falsified his green card application by omitting his previous work at the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut and with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. However, the judge argued that it was unlikely that this was the underlying cause for Khalil's detention.
"The evidence is that lawful permanent residents are virtually never detained pending removal for the sort of alleged omissions in a lawful-permanent-resident application that the petitioner is charged with here. And that strongly suggests that it is the secretary of state's determination that drives the petitioner's ongoing detention—not the other charge," Farbiaz wrote in granting the injunction.
Still, The New York Times reported that it was "not clear that [Khalil] would be released on Friday if the government were to argue that those allegations were, in fact, the reason for his detention."
Khalil's legal team and family vowed to keep working for his release.
"Today was the first step to justice, but we will not stop fighting until Mahmoud is home with his wife and child," Dratel & Lewis associate Amy Greer said.
Noor Abdalla concluded, "I will not rest until Mahmoud is free, and hope that he can be with us to experience his first Father's Day at home in New York with Deen in his arms."
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Can We Stage a Jailbreak From the Grim Prisons Created by the Gaza War?
Life becomes limited when we accept that it must be a nightmare for the weak, when we confess that we are more addicted to comfort than we are to compassion.
Jun 04, 2025
Here at the United Nations in New York City, the Security Council is expected to vote on a resolution calling on all parties to respect an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza.
The slaughter in Gaza entraps and attacks the helpless, turning shelters into mass graves, erasing entire families, weaponizing nutrition and famine. The spiraling violence shrieks for our attention, screams for effective protection. Who will save innocent people from snipers, aerial attacks, tank-fired missiles, poisoned water, and starvation? The U.S. and many allies instead work to insulate Israel from accountability.
“Overcoming this cocoon of protection,” said international human rights lawyer and former U.N. official Craig Mokhiber, “requires solidarity between movements, unions, religious communities, and like-minded states working to isolate the Israeli regime and to impose economic, trade, travel, diplomatic, cultural, and other consequences to compel change.”
Meanwhile, all of Gaza remains an open-air prison containing numerous centers where people, including children, are tortured by Israel’s starvation, siege, and bombing.
In NYC, on day 14 of a Veterans For Peace and Allies Fast for Gaza, a former U.S. Marine who helped initiate the fast, Phil Tottenham, urges us to care about Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman whose witness on behalf of Palestinians apparently led to her unjust imprisonment.
The current administration has slated her for deportation purely on the grounds that she criticized the government of a foreign country. Far from her home in New Jersey, she is trapped in a Texan county jail. Her plight makes me think of another prisoner, Ron Feiner, an IDF soldier who chose to face prison rather than continue attacking people in Gaza. “I’m horrified by the never-ending war in Gaza,” said Feiner, “by the abandonment of the hostages, by the continued killing of innocent people, and by the complete lack of political vision.” He is now on day nine of what could be a quite dangerous 20-day sentence in an Israeli military prison.
The director of Gaza’s now-demolished Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, is suffering a longer and much more perious sentence at Israel’s grim Ofer Prison, where his work to heal the sick has seen him designated an “enemy combatant,” and where multiple protracted beating sessions—torture sessions really—have possibly cost him an eye
I think of pediatrician Dr. Alla al-Najjar, whose valuable work at the Nasser medical complex has cost her the lives of all but one of her 10 children, as well as her husband, also an M.D. They were taken from her in a targeted strike on her home while she was at the hospital complex attempting to save other Gazan children. Now she continues her work, trying mightily to save 11-year-old Adam, her only surviving child.
We must also note the appalling conditions of ordinary Palestinian prisoners, many of them held without charge. “They are subjected to a systematic campaign of abuse, starvation, and deliberate medical neglect,” said a recent Addameer report, which goes on to describe “widespread arrest campaigns across cities, villages, and refugee camps, which have led to a massive increase in the number of prisoners and detainees.” Prisoners survive on minimal rations, and many endure brutal and life-threatening treatment.
Meanwhile, all of Gaza remains an open-air prison containing numerous centers where people, including children, are tortured by Israel’s starvation, siege, and bombing.
None of this has been inflicted for the purposes of freeing the remaining hostages captured by Hamas and by the other armed groups who flooded into Israel on one day of rebellion, 20 months ago. The cease-fire agreed upon last November would, had Israel and the U.S. honored it, have provided for the release of all the hostages. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist collaborators would have lost their excuse for ethnically cleansing Gaza, and after that the West Bank.
In 1972, an iconic photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, “running naked, screaming in agony, her body burned by napalm dropped by the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army,” became a catalyst which helped end the war in Vietnam. Now, 50 years later, images of burning children in Gaza are relentless.
Recently, a video of 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil, her tiny body surrounded by flames, went viral. She and her family were sleeping in a school where forcibly displaced Palestinians had moved into classrooms and the courtyard. She survived Israel’s aerial attack, but her mother and five siblings did not. Her father remains in critical condition.
Life becomes limited when we accept that it must be a nightmare for the weak, when we confess that we are more addicted to comfort than we are to compassion—when the service of our appetites causes us to ignore the starving and those deliberately consigned to flames. We who fast might not succeed in our attempted “jailbreak” from this grim prison where we must watch the inmates die off one by one in the next ward over. But in whatever way you can, we urge you to join the attempt.
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Trump: the Kidnapper-and-Chief
How many other immigrants and refugees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia are now languishing in El Salvadorean prisons without the benefit of public pressure to challenge the conditions of their detention?
May 19, 2025
I don’t know about you, but the news continues to stress me out. Trump administration officials are using any excuse they can think of to detain and deport people whose points of view—or whose very existence on U.S. soil—seem to threaten their agenda.
Deportations to El Salvador
In March, the U.S. government sent 238 men to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison where they no longer have contact with family members or lawyers, and where overcrowding and cruel practices like solitary confinement, or far worse, seem to be commonplace. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released few details about who the men were, but when pressed, DHS officials claimed that most of them were members of Tren de Agua, a Venezuelan criminal gang.
However, documents obtained by journalists revealed that about 75% of the detainees—179 of them—had no criminal records. They had, in essence, been kidnapped. Among them was a young Venezuelan make-up artist who was in U.S. custody while awaiting a political asylum hearing. After he made a legal border crossing into this country, immigration officials determined that he was being targeted because he was gay and his political views. However, DHS officials claimed that the man’s crown tattoos meant he was a member of Tren de Agua. It mattered not at all that those crowns had his parents’ names underneath them, suggesting that his father and mother were his king and queen. As they have admitted, government officials are unable to substantiate why men like him were detained and deported without any legal process, though a spokeswoman for DHS claimed that many of them “are actually terrorists… They just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
At the rate we’re going, it’s conceivable that someday you or I might end up in their shoes—at a border crossing in some other country asking to be accepted there because we fear for our lives in our own land.
Among those now detained in El Salvador is much-publicized Maryland resident and construction worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had lived in the U.S. since fleeing gang violence in his native El Salvador as a teenager. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested and detained him while he was driving with his five-year-old son in the backseat of his car. Trump administration officials did finally concede that he had been detained and deported due to an “administrative error.” However, they later backtracked, claiming (without evidence) that he belonged to the violent criminal gang MS-13. The case rose to national prominence thanks to protest demonstrations and federal court orders for the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return. (No such luck, of course!)
I can’t help wondering just how many other immigrants and refugees like him are now languishing in El Salvadorean prisons (or perhaps those of other countries) without the benefit of public pressure to challenge the conditions of their detention. And we can all keep wondering unless the Trump administration offers such deportees due process so that the legal system can vet their identities and the reasons for seizing and imprisoning them.
Asylum Seekers in Panama
These days, the horrors pile up so fast that it’s hard to keep track of them. It seems like ages ago, but only last February the administration sent 300 asylum seekers to Panama City under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows State Department officials to deport citizens of foreign countries whose presence they believe to be contrary to this country’s interests. After the Panamanian authorities locked the migrants in a hotel without access to their families or outsiders, they told them they had to return to their countries of origin.
Many of them feared for their lives if they did so. Among them was a young Cameroonian woman who had fled her country because the government there had imprisoned and tortured her for weeks after soldiers in her town accused her of membership in a separatist political group, and a mother and daughter who had fled Turkey for fear of imprisonment for participating in peaceful anti-government protests there.
When 70 of the asylum seekers refused the government’s order to return to their countries of origin, Panamanian officials sent them to a jungle camp where they lacked adequate food, clean water, or privacy of any sort. After an uproar from human rights activists, the detainees were finally released and left to find legal asylum elsewhere. Several told journalists that they were never even given the opportunity to apply for asylum upon entering the U.S., though American officials claimed—unlikely indeed!—that the migrants hadn’t told them that their lives were in danger.
Most difficult for me to stomach is the thought that those asylum seekers had fled to my country, assuming they would be protected by the rule of law and presumed innocent until proven guilty, not robbed of their freedom. At the rate we’re going, it’s conceivable that someday you or I might end up in their shoes—at a border crossing in some other country asking to be accepted there because we fear for our lives in our own land. And I would hope that whomever we spoke to would at least be willing to hear our stories before deciding to ship us elsewhere.
In their ordinariness, some photos I’ve seen of those deported immigrant families remind me of my own family. In one, for instance, a mother is stroking the face of her distraught young son who, rather than just having a bad day at school as mine might have, was stuck in a foreign city without his belongings, friends, or access to places to play. Many of us, especially military families like mine, know what it’s like to be stuck at a waystation without our possessions and the various contraptions (cooking equipment, kid-sized furniture, cleaning products) that make having a family comfortable. Now, imagine that scenario with no end in sight and no one who even speaks your language to help you out. Imagine parenting through that!
Of course, give the Trump administration some credit. It hasn’t opposed all migrants fleeing persecution. In fact, the president recently invited Afrikaners of South Africa, the White ethnic minority whose grandparents were the architects of that country’s apartheid system of racial segregation, to seek refugee status in the United States on the basis of supposed anti-White racial discrimination in their homeland. (At the same time, of course, Marco Rubio’s State Department tossed the Black South African ambassador out of this county!)
Detaining Student Activists and Expelling U.S. Citizens
As the State Department revokes the green cards of hundreds of students in the U.S. for exercising their first amendment rights, at least several—maybe more—have been detained indefinitely under the Immigration and Nationalities Act. Among them, pro-Palestinian student-activist Mahmoud Khalil is being held at a remote detention facility in Louisiana, separated from his family in New York City, where his son was recently born while Mahmoud was in captivity. The government is considering sending him back to Syria where he grew up in a refugee camp or to Algeria where he is still a citizen. The Trump administration wrote on social media that his is “the first arrest of many to come.”
Apparently, the administration is casting a very wide net as it detains and deports people. In early April, The Washington Postreported that the authorities had detained at least seven U.S. citizens, among them children, including a 10-year-old who was being rushed to a hospital when immigration officers detained her family and sent them to Mexico, where they remain in hiding. More recently, the administration deported several U.S. citizens, including three children, one of whom, a 4-year-old, had late-stage cancer and was sent off to Honduras without his medications. His mother was given no opportunity to consult with his father who remained in the U.S.
We need to recognize that all too many of us have been looking the other way while “our” government detains people it doesn’t like in settings where it’s ever easier to violate their human rights.
I could go on, including with the recent news that the Trump administration has asked wartime Ukraine to take in deportees and is now reportedly preparing to send migrants to Libya.
These people were all detained and deported without due process, no less being allowed to challenge their detention and deportation through the court system. Due process should afford anyone in this country, no matter their legal status, the right to know why they are being detained and adequate notice of their possible deportation, as well as access to legal counsel so that they could challenge government decisions about their future.
Apparently, for the leaders of this administration, mere words and images—crown tattoos on alleged Venezuelan gang members, students peacefully protesting, or even apparently simply having brown skin—trigger fear and the impulse to detain and deport.
The Legacies of America’s War on Terror
None of this is entirely new. During the first two decades after the attacks of September 11, 2001, our government normalized extrajudicial detention and deportation as part of its Global War on Terror under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney announced that the government would “need to work the dark side” and “use any means at our disposal” to eradicate terror. According to a joint report by the Costs of War Project and Human Rights Watch, the U.S. extrajudicially moved at least 119 foreign Muslims who were considered terror suspects to “black sites” (secret CIA prisons) in foreign countries with more lax human rights standards, including Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, and Syria. There, those U.S. detainees underwent torture and mistreatment, including solitary confinement, electrocution, rape, sleep deprivation, and sometimes being hung upside down for hours at a time.
Even today, at Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba, where the U.S. government set up an offshore prison in January 2002, the government continues to hold 15 terror suspects from those years without the opportunity to challenge their status. And though that base has (as of yet at least) not come to house the thousands of migrants President Donald Trump initially imagined might be sent there, it has been one of the way stations through which the government has dispatched flights of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador via Honduras.
Though the U.S. did formally end its program of “extraordinary rendition” (that is, state-sponsored abductions), as the Costs of War Project and Human Rights Watch have suggested, such war on terror practices effectively “lowered the bar” for the way the U.S. and its allies would in the future treat all too many people.
A Way Forward?
And here we are in another nightmare moment. As historian Adam Hochschild has reminded us, America has indeed had “Trumpy”—maybe even “Trumpier”—moments in the past when the government empowered vigilantes to suppress peaceful dissent, censor media outlets, and imprison people for exercising their first amendment rights. Take the 1917 Espionage Act, which President Woodrow Wilson successfully lobbied for. It allowed prison terms of up to 20 years for anybody making “false reports” that might interfere with the government’s involvement in World War I or what were then considered “disloyal” or “abusive” statements about the U.S. government. In the years immediately following that law’s passage, dozens of peaceful Americans were sentenced to years of hard labor or detention in prisons.
During World War II, of course, the U.S. used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to detain tens of thousands of people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent for no other reason than their cultural heritage.
I cite such horrific examples not out of despair but from a strange sense of hopefulness. After all, in the end, this country did somehow manage to move past such horrors—even if, it seems, to turn to similar ones in the future. With that in mind, we must try to chart a better way forward today, so that you or I don’t end up behind bars, too. You’ve probably heard that President Trump is even talking about rebuilding and reopening Alcatraz, that infamous prison off the coast of San Francisco, a symbol of past mistreatment. (At least in his mind, Donald Trump’s archipelago of prisons is expanding fast.)
At a minimum, I think we need to recognize that all too many of us have been looking the other way while “our” government detains people it doesn’t like in settings where it’s ever easier to violate their human rights. And we need to acknowledge that the current administration is not simply an aberration but reflects past practices from periods in our history with which Americans were once comfortable. In other words, during certain eras, this country has proven to be all too Trumpy.
When I was a research fellow at Human Rights Watch, I was often asked to write press releases or short reports on violations of civil liberties in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Back then, however, I never imagined that I would witness my own government similarly depriving people of their rights to due process here in the United States—even though that was already happening at those all-American CIA “black sites” globally and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
If Americans don’t unite around basic principles like due process, equal application of the law, and open and fact-based debate and inquiry, count on one thing: We’re in for a rough three years and eight months—and probably longer.
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