Mahmoud Khalil’s first court hearing was held in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday, March 12, a morning that teetered between sun and clouds. Friends, observers, and journalists had been lining up for hours outside the imposing Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse to witness the standoff between the US government and Khalil, a thirty-year-old former graduate student at Columbia University who faced deportation because of his support for Palestinians’ rights. A vastly larger crowd formed across the street, waving Palestinian flags and signs that read “STOP US/ISRAELI GENOCIDE OF PALESTINIANS NOW!” and “HANDS OFF OUR STUDENTS.”
The previous weekend agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security, had come for three Columbia students. The agents showed up in plain clothes, some obscuring their faces with makeshift masks. At first glance it was unclear whether they represented the US government at all. Ranjani Srinivasan, a Fulbright recipient from India, had learned that week that her student visa was no longer valid; she didn’t answer her door on March 7 when the agents came knocking. A few days later she fled to Canada. Yunseo Chung, a green card holder from South Korea who has lived in the US since age seven, learned that agents visited her parents’ home in search of her. She went into hiding.
On Saturday, March 8, when Khalil and his wife, Noor Abdalla, returned to their Columbia-owned apartment building from an iftar around half past eight, two agents appeared and followed them into the lobby. Another two approached from inside the building, identifying themselves as DHS officers. One of the men told Khalil that his student visa had been revoked. Abdalla, who was eight months pregnant, rushed to their apartment to grab documents while Khalil called his lawyer, Amy Greer.
Greer had been in touch with Khalil in the months prior to navigate disciplinary hearings at Columbia over inflammatory speech that was misattributed to him. At the end of a working Saturday, she had just kicked up her feet and queued an episode of Ted Lasso when her phone rang. Khalil’s voice was low, and he spoke quickly. “They’re here to detain me,” she recalled him saying.
One of the agents grabbed Khalil’s phone, and Greer demanded to know why they were taking him. Did they have a warrant? The agent mumbled some vague answers, and soon the line went dead. (It later emerged that they did not have a warrant at that time.) Greer burst into tears; she contacted a fellow defense attorney, and together they called Khalil. There was no answer.
Meanwhile, Abdalla returned with proof that Khalil wasn’t on a student visa—he was a green card holder. There was a moment of confusion as an agent spoke to somebody over the phone, and then he announced that the green card, too, was revoked. Another agent locked handcuffs around Khalil’s wrists.
Abdalla called Greer—the two had never spoken before—and Greer advised her to look for badge numbers, license plates, anything. Abdalla followed the men to the street, pleading for information. Finally one agent told her that they were taking Khalil to 26 Federal Plaza—the site of many decisive moments in the lives of the city’s immigrants: citizenship tests, detention, deportation.
Within hours Greer and a colleague filed a petition for habeas corpus to challenge Khalil’s arrest, and then an emergency motion to release him from detention. The government responded with its own filings: it was seeking to deport Khalil, an Algerian citizen who was born to Palestinian parents in a refugee camp in Syria. By the time of the hearing on Wednesday morning, five lawyers representing Khalil stood at a wide table in front of a judge for the Southern District of New York, ready to fight off the government’s attempts to remove him from the country.
Many courtroom observers may have hoped the case would be quashed quickly: Khalil was a legal permanent resident, and he was not accused of a crime. His arrest seemed like obvious retribution from a government that did not agree with his views. But no one knew what to expect from a hearing in which the manner of arrest, and the arrest itself, appeared to be a form of political theater. The question “Is Mahmoud Khalil inside?” circulated over text. But he wasn’t.
From 26 Federal Plaza, Khalil had been moved, in shackles, to the Elizabeth Contract Detention Center in New Jersey, where he slept on the ground in the waiting room without a mattress or blanket. The next day he was escorted to John F. Kennedy International Airport and put on a plane to Louisiana. At the time of his hearing, Khalil was still sitting in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, 1,200 miles away.
The Trump administration’s case against Khalil began as a political promise. In mid-October 2023, at a campaign rally in Iowa, Trump declared that if elected he would send ICE officers to “pro-jihadist demonstrations,” revoke the student visas of “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners,” and deport them. Other senior Republicans echoed this position, including the current secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
Trump returned to the idea as the election neared, and on the day of his second inauguration he signed an executive order called Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats. It aims to target those who “espouse hateful ideology,” including “hostile attitudes toward [US] citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles”—a wide category, needless to say.
According to legal filings, as Khalil was being processed, an ICE agent told one of the arresting DHS officers, “The White House is requesting an update.” Soon after, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers.” The White House account reshared the statement and added, “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.”
This derision was a stark contrast to the decorum that government lawyers showed in court. In filings they explained that they had to send Khalil miles away, to Louisiana, because there were not enough beds in any detention center in the Northeast. There was some space at Elizabeth, they conceded, but the facility was infested with bedbugs. Of course, this does not explain why other immigrants remain at Elizabeth. Nor does it explain why, in New York, agents had handed Khalil a notice to appear that already listed his hearing at an immigration court in Louisiana—where judges are more likely to favor the government’s agenda. Marc Van Der Hout, one of Khalil’s immigration lawyers, called it “forum shopping.” In other words, the distance from New York was by design.
According to Khalil’s lawyers, his targeting by the government wasn’t entirely random. In April 2024 he had given an interview to CNN in front of the student encampment at Columbia. The following January a Zionist group called Betar US shared the interview on X, stating, “We have provided all his information to multiple contacts. He’s on our deport list!” The attacks against him intensified. According to Khalil, a “vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxing campaign” had incited death threats and calls for deportation.
Khalil laid all of this out to Katrina Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, in an e-mail on March 7—the day before he was taken. “I haven’t been able to sleep,” he wrote. He feared “that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home.” To Greer’s knowledge, Armstrong didn’t respond.
Trump had promised that Khalil’s arrest would be the first of many, and he kept his word. On March 13 ICE agents arrested Leqaa Kordia, a New Jersey resident of Palestinian origin who had participated in a Columbia protest. Officials justified the arrest by claiming that she had overstayed her student visa. The next day the State Department revoked the visa of Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student at Cornell University and a pro-Palestine activist. Taal sued the government for violating his constitutional rights but ultimately decided to leave the country. “I have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,” Taal wrote in a statement. A doctoral student at the University of Alabama, Alireza Doroudi, also elected to leave the country after weeks in detention.
Trump, who hasn’t hidden his disdain for Islam (“I think Islam hates us”), commenced the arrests during Ramadan. On March 17 Badar Khan Suri, a forty-one-year-old postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was cuffed by masked agents outside his apartment building when returning from an iftar and informed he was going to be deported “today.” According to legal filings, an ICE officer told him, “Someone at a very high level” in the secretary of state’s office “does not want” him here.
A week later Rümeysa Öztürk, a student at Tufts University who had also been singled out by a pro-Israel group online, was walking down the street in Massachusetts on her way to an iftar while talking on the phone with her mother. It was still light when six plainclothes officers—again masked—surrounded her. One grabbed her phone. Öztürk screamed. She was handcuffed and rushed away in an unmarked car.
Lawyers and family members have called these arrests abductions. In some cases, those targeted were missing for twenty-four hours before anyone could locate them. The experience is characterized by nothing so much as terror. On the recording of her conversation with Greer, Abdalla’s fear as Khalil is dragged away is unmistakable. As is the panic in Öztürk’s repetition—“OK, OK, OK”—as agents encircle her in footage of the arrest; she stated later she felt “sure they were going to kill me.” Suri, whose child was so shocked by his father’s disappearance that he stopped speaking, said that he thought the agents would deliberately crash the plane he was put on.
Eventually news came that the others, too, had been sent thousands of miles away: Öztürk to Louisiana, and Kordia and Suri to Texas. Each has spoken out against Israel’s war on Palestine, but even on this issue their levels of activism have varied. Each believed they were safe in the US as legal residents, but the administration seeks to deport them. As the months go by, a question looms: How exactly is the American government getting away with this?
Because the targeted are not American citizens, they are fighting two sets of legal battles to win their freedom. The first are the habeas cases, in which they are challenging the government for wrongful detention. Their lawyers have argued that the Trump administration violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights by locking them away for their speech without due process. So far these cases are being heard in federal courts in New Jersey, Vermont, and Virginia.
The second are the immigration cases, in which the government argues for deportation. The battlegrounds for this fight were initially concentrated in immigration courts in Louisiana and Texas, the states where the targeted were being held and from which many deportation flights take off.
It is in the immigration courts that the administration expects to be victorious. The government has repeatedly invoked an obscure provision in Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that gives the secretary of state the power to determine whether someone’s presence is a threat to “a compelling foreign policy interest of the United States,” making them fit for deportation. Though the provision vested this sweeping power in an individual, Congress also spelled out an exception: if the secretary wanted to deport someone for “beliefs, statements, or associations” otherwise legal in the US, he or she would need to notify Congress.
Defense lawyers haven’t found an instance when the provision has been used to deport someone based on their speech alone, but the Trump administration has shown little restraint in employing it. The government states that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that” the presence of the targeted individuals in the country “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” (In a press conference Rubio said, less formally, “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”) Even so, presumably the administration would need to prove why someone poses a threat so critical that it justifies their immediate deportation. Presumably.
In April, Judge Jamee Comans, who is overseeing Khalil’s immigration case, hastily scheduled a hearing after the government shared evidence with defense attorneys: a memo written by Rubio that determined why Khalil, a permanent resident married to a US citizen, should be deported under the INA. The memo was a page and a half long:
These determinations are based on information provided by the DHS/ICE/HSI regarding the participation and roles of…Khalil in antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.
On the day of the hearing Comans arrived with what looked to be a prepared written statement, Van Der Hout told me. She did not allow Khalil’s lawyers to demand more evidence about what, exactly, Khalil did that was “antisemitic” or “adverse” to foreign policy. If Khalil wanted to question Rubio, Comans said, he was “in the wrong court for that.” Instead, she pronounced that the Trump administration had the right to deport Khalil based solely on the Rubio memo.
“It was clear there was going to be no justice in the hearing,” Van Der Hout said. “It was a farce.” NBC later found that the administration appeared to have relied on erroneous tabloid articles about Khalil to make the determination that his presence in the US compromised foreign policy.
About a week after Comans’s pronouncement, Khalil appealed to ICE for temporary release. Abdalla was about to go into labor with their first child, and he wanted to be present. Khalil could wear an ankle monitor, his lawyers offered, or he could check in regularly with ICE. The agency’s gavel came down within an hour: “Your request for furlough is denied.” Abdalla gave birth to their son, without Khalil.
Öztürk, too, filed a request to be released on bond; according to her lawyers, she has asthma and had already suffered five attacks while in detention. In response DHS presented a State Department memo that claimed that Öztürk’s actions “may undermine US foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students.” The immigration judge denied Öztürk’s request.
It is worth stating again that none of the targeted have been accused of committing a crime. Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar, had cowritten an op-ed in the Tufts newspaper criticizing the university’s administration for dismissing student demands to disclose investments in Israel. According to court filings, a DHS agent told one of Chung’s attorneys that they were attempting to detain her “due to the situation with the protesting.” In a statement Kordia explained, “I don’t see myself as an activist, at all. But I am Palestinian so I can never stop advocating for Palestine.”
The administration claimed that Suri’s offense was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.” On October 19, 2023, Suri, a scholar of religion and peace processes, wrote on his X account, “Israel is bombing hospitals in Gaza to turn the land [un]inhabitable.” By then thousands of Palestinians had already been killed and entire neighborhoods destroyed. Today a conservative estimate of the dead is more than 54,000, with 290,000 nearing death by starvation as Israel besieges the Strip. Nearly every international humanitarian organization has called the war on Gaza a genocide.
After Suri’s arrest, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin posted on X that “Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist.” She was likely referring to Suri’s father-in-law, a professor at the Islamic University of Gaza who served as a political adviser and deputy foreign minister in the Hamas government from 2006 to 2010—affiliations that are not evidence of guilt.
The administration and its allies have referred to the targeted as Hamas sympathizers, terrorist sympathizers, or simply terrorists. But despite the United States’ aggressive terrorism laws, the administration has been unable to charge them with terrorism or material support for terrorism. In the absence of any other evidence, it is clear that the government is seeking to deport these students and scholars for their points of view—which ultimately means that the Trump administration is arguing in court that it can expel from the US noncitizens whose political views it disagrees with.
Soon after their arrests, many of the targeted brought habeas cases against the administration. These are the cases in which the government must furnish proof that the targeted are a threat to foreign policy, which is probably why they make the administration nervous. The government has sought to dismiss these cases, insisting that the federal courts simply have no jurisdiction over them.
As the government pushes to resolve the immigration cases quickly, it is doing its best to slow down the habeas proceedings. In every one of the habeas cases, government lawyers have lobbied the same set of arguments: the immigration proceedings must be resolved first; the federal courts have no say because the INA gives the executive branch the power to deport; the specific federal court is not an appropriate venue to hear the concerns of the targeted.
When Öztürk’s habeas case came up at an April hearing where her lawyers were hoping to win her release, Judge William Sessions of Vermont explicitly asked whether the government was really arguing that a federal court had no jurisdiction to grant Öztürk bail. “It’s not just me as a lawyer saying that. It’s what Congress said,” the government attorney replied.
Moreover, the attorney argued, the habeas suit was being heard in the wrong venue: Öztürk was being held not in Vermont but in Louisiana, which is where she should have filed the habeas petition. At this even Sessions seemed befuddled. After Öztürk was taken from Massachusetts, she was moved across state lines to Vermont and finally put on a plane to Louisiana—with no ability to contact anyone. “Do you agree that counsel for the petitioner had no idea where she was; that counsel had called DOJ, ICE, et cetera, trying to locate her. Nobody would respond, and as a result…they had no idea where she was?” Sessions asked.
The judge might as well have been quoting Kafka. And yet what government attorneys continue to offer in response in these cases, what they believe should override all objections, is simply that the courts don’t need to peer behind the curtain of the executive’s authority:
Those First Amendment considerations do not overcome the Executive’s prerogative and control over immigration. (Khalil v. Joyce)
Secretary of State’s discretion. (Öztürk v. Trump)
Courts “cannot entertain challenges to the enumerated executive branch decisions or actions.” (Chung v. Trump)
One arrest, though, threw a small wrench into the government’s machinations. On the morning of April 14 Mohsen Mahdawi, a Buddhist philosophy major at Columbia, arrived for his citizenship test at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont. The lobby was eerily empty. Mahdawi, a cofounder of the Palestinian student union at Columbia, had lived in the US for ten years. He had spoken at protest rallies but tried to keep a low profile after Khalil’s arrest. (He, too, had been targeted by Betar.)
Mahdawi passed his citizenship test and had just signed a document stating that he was willing to take the oath of allegiance to the Constitution when his interviewer said he needed to check on something. He left the room, and four people entered: three masked agents in Homeland Security Investigations jackets and their supervisor. Again, they offered no warrant.
Mahdawi was handcuffed and escorted to a black SUV. Someone stuffed a notice to appear in his jacket pocket that announced he was removable because the secretary of state determined his presence “would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” The letter stated that Mahdawi would appear in front of an immigration judge in Louisiana.
Agents rushed Mahdawi to the Burlington airport. Feeling sick, he insisted on using the bathroom, and by the time they arrived at the gate, the plane had already taken off. They missed the flight by nine minutes. The agents looked “visibly upset,” Mahdawi later recalled. His lawyer, who had accompanied him to the citizenship test, had hurriedly filed a habeas petition, and a court ordered the government not to remove Mahdawi from Vermont. Mahdawi would be detained at an ICE facility there, so both his immigration and habeas cases would be heard in one state—certainly not the state the Trump administration would have preferred.
When the government shocks us, we often turn to history to measure what is a norm, what is a deviation. Critics and defense lawyers have likened these arrests to the McCarthy era, when people were deported or blacklisted merely for their political views. In federal court Khalil’s and Öztürk’s lawyers have harked back to another dark period by citing Ex parte Endo (1944), a significant Supreme Court decision, which found that the habeas suit of an interned Japanese American woman that was originally filed in California could still be heard there, even after her captors (the US government) had moved her to Utah.
Four decades later another civil case rattled lawyers. In 1987 the government attempted to deport a group of young pro-Palestine activists, all legal immigrants. The group, who became known as the Los Angeles Eight, stood accused of providing material support to a terrorist organization. What they had done was attend protests, raise money for charity, and distribute pamphlets for a Palestinian Marxist militant group—none of which was a crime. The immigration case dragged on for twenty years, but eventually the Los Angeles Eight won. Not once did the government invoke the INA provision to secure their deportation, Van Der Hout, who defended the group, told me. Nor did the government accuse them of spreading antisemitism.
The Trump administration, for its part, seems unable to decide how unique the present-day cases are. It contends that Khalil, Öztürk, Suri, Chung, Kordia, and Mahdawi are so dangerous that the government must turn to extreme and unusual legal premises to deport them for speech that is otherwise protected under the Constitution. Yet it also claims that these cases are not so unusual that federal courts should step in—ICE, DHS, and the secretary of state are just doing their jobs. With striking irony, government attorneys argued in Khalil’s habeas case that “there is no basis for this Court to break new ground.”
Much has changed since the McCarthy era: we have made extraordinary strides in recognizing civil and constitutional rights, a deliberate effort not to return to those times. Much has also changed since the Los Angeles Eight were arrested.
Another case that comes up often in the recent filings is that of José Padilla, a US citizen whom the Bush administration labeled an enemy combatant in 2002 and locked away in military detention without access to lawyers. Multiple habeas petitions, appeals, and parallel cases later (how could the government even do this?), the Supreme Court decided that such a citizen still had a right to challenge his detention in court. But it also conceded that when it came to national security, the president had broad powers—for example, to quietly hold a citizen as an enemy combatant. “The domestic rendition ICE attempted in these cases is a throwback to the early post-9/11 period,” Ramzi Kassem, a law professor and the codirector of CLEAR, a legal nonprofit that is representing several of the targeted, told me. By whisking the students away “across state lines under the cover of night, the government hoped to avoid federal court scrutiny altogether.”
Two visions of what is and should be legally possible in America are now being fought for in the courts. In one, the president has the power to determine the fate of his enemies; in the other, constitutional rights must be preserved. “As someone who’s had their heart broken a lot over the last twenty years,” Brett Max Kaufman, a lawyer for the ACLU, which is representing several of the targeted, told me, “it would be a pretty sickening feeling to see the government win this one.”
In recent weeks federal judges have served a series of blows to the administration. In Vermont, Judge Geoffrey Crawford considered whether Mahdawi should be released from detention. Government lawyers argued that Mahdawi was a threat to the public because in 2015 he had visited a gun shop where, according to the store owner, Mahdawi said that he used to build “submachine guns to kill Jews while he was in Palestine.” An FBI agent had questioned Mahdawi and found the store owner’s story had little credibility. One could reasonably infer “that the agency charged with the protection of the public from crime found no basis for proceeding against Mr. Mahdawi in any venue,” Crawford wrote in his opinion. He ordered Mahdawi released from detention.
Not long after, another federal judge ordered Öztürk released on bail, and her immigration case was transferred from Louisiana to Massachusetts. Days later a third judge decided that Suri, too, could walk free.
As of this writing, Khalil and Kordia—who only recently filed a habeas petition—remain in detention. Judge Michael Farbiarz recently wrote a one-hundred-page opinion in which he described the administration’s use of the INA provision to detain Khalil as “unprecedented” and “likely” unconstitutional. But he still has not ruled on Khalil’s release.
In mid-May Khalil’s lawyers obtained video evidence showing that Khalil had not fought back or threatened to flee at the time of his arrest, contrary to what the government had claimed in order to justify arresting him without a warrant. It was clear the administration had lied. In a hearing in Louisiana, Khalil’s lawyers pushed Judge Comans to dismiss the deportation proceedings altogether.
Abdalla traveled to Louisiana to attend the hearing and to finally see Khalil. The government refused them a contact visit, insisting that it would be breaking standard protocol. Only after an order from Judge Farbiarz was Khalil able to embrace his wife and hold his son for the first time. For her part, Comans rejected Khalil’s lawyers’ request to terminate the government’s efforts to deport him. If the government succeeded, Khalil testified, his life would be in danger. He then went back to his cell. His detention is nearing three months.
The legal cases grind on as deliberations over the immigration status and the constitutional rights of the accused twist through a tangle of filings and hearings. What each is guilty of is being on a college campus and voicing opinions about a war thousands of miles away.
The recent rulings suggest that federal courts will likely succeed in stopping the administration from immediately deporting the targeted as well as setting a dangerous precedent. Yet history has a way of revealing that the parameters of power are defined not by the limits that the courts impose, but by the ambition of the executive. Recently Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, announced that the White House was “actively looking” into suspending the writ of habeas corpus—a fantastical and unlikely move, but one that would crush attempts to win freedom for the targeted and irrevocably shape the character of the American legal system.
Between this push and pull of executive and judiciary hangs the ultimate, vexing question of what Americans are willing to accept. As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man.” And the way to do that, she went on, is to convince the public that certain categories of people don’t deserve legal protections—that for those people, the law goes only so far.
—May 29, 2025