Latest news with #ColumbiaUniversity-owned
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
ICE agents lacked arrest warrant for Mahmoud Khalil when they detained him
Federal immigration authorities did not have a warrant for the arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil when he was taken into custody in the lobby of his Columbia University-owned apartment building last month, according to new filings Thursday in federal court. Marc Van Der Hout, one of Khalil's lawyers, accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of misleading their client. Court documents show the feds logged in their arrest report that agents told Khalil there was a warrant for his arrest — yet the latest filings suggest no warrant was executed until he was transported down to an ICE office in Lower Manhattan for processing. 'The government's admission is astounding,' Van Der Hout said in a statement, 'and it is completely outrageous that they tried to assert to the immigration judge — and the world — in their initial filing of the arrest report that there was an arrest warrant when there was none.' In response, Van Der Hout called on the immigration court to terminate proceedings. The judge in that case, Jamee E. Comans, ruled earlier this month that Khalil could be forced out of the country as a foreign policy risk. The Trump administration maintains that an immigration arrest without a warrant was not unusual, stating: 'It is the pattern and practice of DHS to fully process a respondent once in custody.' The Department of Homeland Security and ICE, which is under the umbrella of DHS, did not immediately return a request for comment. 'Generally, a warrant of arrest must be obtained,' the court documents read. 'However, an exception to the warrant requirement exists where the immigration officer has reason to believe that the individual is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.' The filings were made ahead of a deadline this week in Khalil's immigration case in Louisiana, which gave the Trump administration more time to submit evidence on its second ground for deporting Khalil: claims that he made misrepresentations on his green card application. Lawyers for Khalil deny the claims. Separately, the federal judge in Khalil's case in New Jersey — an independent legal action where the activist is challenging the constitutionality of his detention — asked for copies of the filings the following day, on Thursday. Khalil also submitted an application for asylum in the United States, which was sealed to the public, his lawyers said. Amy Greer, another lawyer for Khalil — who he had retained in response to a separate Columbia disciplinary action prior to being detained by the feds — said she was on the phone with Khalil, his wife and an agent on the night of the arrest. 'Those agents repeatedly failed to show us a warrant,' Greer said. 'Today we now know why they never showed Mahmoud that warrant — they didn't have one.' As part of their rationale for a warrantless arrest, the government offered new claims that Khalil refused to cooperate with the federal agents and threatened to 'leave the scene.' The supervisory agent, the court filings said, 'believed there was a flight risk and arrest was necessary.' Khalil's lawyers denied the new allegations: 'No one should take seriously the government's patent lie, which it offers for the first time many weeks after the fact, that somehow Mahmoud was anything other than compliant when ICE agents unlawfully abducted him under cover of darkness,' said Ramzi Kassem, co-director of CLEAR, and another lawyer for Khalil. Khalil continues to be held in an ICE detention facility in Jena, La., where he missed the birth of his first child on Monday after federal authorities denied his request for temporary release. Khalil, 30, was detained by ICE agents on March 8 after returning home to his Columbia-owned apartment from an iftar dinner with his wife, a U.S. citizen from the Midwest. He was living in the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident with a green card. He was set to graduate in May after completing his master's at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs in December. The student played a leading role in last year's campus protests about the rising death toll in Gaza in Israel's war against Hamas and the university's investment ties to Israel, acting as a mediator between Columbia administrators and student protesters. The government has not accused Khalil of committing any crimes. It says that even if Khalil's actions in the U.S. were 'otherwise lawful,' his political beliefs could have unfavorable repercussions for the Trump administration's foreign policy objectives. Khalil was the first international student targeted in the current crackdown, which has seen hundreds detained, including a Russian scientist working on groundbreaking cancer research at Harvard who has been in ICE detention for two months.
Bloomberg
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
NASA Cancels Columbia University Lease for Climate Science Unit
By and Loren Grush Save NASA is canceling the lease of its New York City climate science unit that has occupied the same Columbia University-owned building since the 1960s. The move is a part of President Donald Trump's review of federal leases, a NASA spokesperson said by email.
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The US government's round-up of student protesters is genuinely shocking
The defining feature of American democracy, you could be forgiven for having thought, is that you can say what you think without having to fear that you will be arrested, locked up or deported for it. The United States isn't unique in its commitment to this idea, but this country has taken it unusually seriously. No law has been repudiated as decisively by the US supreme court as the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to publish false or scandalous criticism of government officials. American newspapers, unlike their counterparts in most other nations, can print governmental secrets without fear that the security services will ransack their newsrooms. The first amendment has been understood to protect a very broad range of political speech, including, importantly, by immigrants. As a consequence of all of this, there are – or there were, until very recently – many things one could say in New York that one couldn't say in Istanbul or Mumbai, or even in Berlin or London. The Trump administration's roundup of students who protested Israel's bombardment of Gaza marks an astonishing, radical break with what one might justifiably think of as the central American idea. Immigration agents force a PhD student into an unmarked van in Somerville, Massachusetts, arrest a recent grad in front of his eight-months-pregnant wife in the lobby of a Columbia University-owned building in New York City, seize a Georgetown University postdoc from his home in Washington DC – all, it seems, for their lawful political speech. These are the kinds of scenes we expect to see in the world's most repressive regimes; it's genuinely shocking to see them unfolding here. Thus far the arrests haven't generated widespread outrage in the United States, perhaps because the students are foreign, or because pro-Palestinian protesters have been vilified by both major political parties, many universities and much of the media. But an administration that imprisons and expels foreign students for their pro-Palestinian advocacy is unlikely to stop with foreign students or, for that matter, with pro-Palestinian advocacy. Trump's student roundup has already progressed from visa holders to legal permanent residents, and administration officials have said they intend to come after naturalized citizens as well. And the argument the administration is advancing to justify the cancellation of students' visas – that the students' advocacy undermines US foreign policy – could as easily be made with respect to those who advocate in support of any other cause the Trump administration happens to disfavor. The arrests of pro-Palestinian students have already caused immense damage to this democracy. It's difficult to convey how profoundly these arrests have transformed American universities in just a few weeks. In a legal complaint filed earlier this week, professors describe a 'climate of fear and repression' on university campuses across the United States, with international faculty and students stepping back from groups that engage in political advocacy, forgoing opportunities to publish their work, scrubbing their webpages of references that immigration authorities might find provocative, and no longer engaging with political topics on social media or even in private texts. (The case was filed by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association; the Knight First Amendment Institute, which I direct, is counsel.) Many international students and faculty are genuinely terrified that masked government agents might show up on their doorsteps at any moment. All of this is likely to get worse. The arrests of student protesters are just one manifestation of the Trump administration's broader campaign against democratic institutions and freedoms. As students are being disappeared into Ice's detention centers, Trump is speedrunning the rest of the authoritarian playbook – threatening the media, extorting universities, imposing sanctions on lawyers whom the president perceives to be his political enemies, and intimidating judges. If he continues on this path without encountering more resistance than he's encountered thus far, full-fledged authoritarianism is just around the corner. And yet it may be the arrests of protesters that pose the gravest threat to our fast-fading democracy. Protest has been the engine of social change in this country for many decades, and it is difficult to envision any way for Americans to reclaim their democracy now that doesn't involve millions of people taking to the streets. The arrests of student dissidents are a warning to anyone who might be tempted to try it. If we can do this to them, we can do it to you too, and we will. The students are being persecuted for exercising a right that all of us need now more than ever. Come to their defense for this reason, if for no other. Jameel Jaffer is the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and a former deputy legal director of the ACLU
NBC News
19-03-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Mahmoud Khalil says he was 'targeted' for pro-Palestinian beliefs in letter from ICE facility
Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil says he was "targeted" for advocating for the Palestinian cause in a new letter from the Louisiana detention center where he is being held after his arrest by federal immigration authorities earlier this month. "I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law," Khalil said in the letter dictated over the phone to his family on Monday. The 30-year-old legal U.S. resident, who played a major role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last spring, was arrested by federal immigration agents in New York on March 8. He was briefly detained in New Jersey and transferred to a facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he remains. He is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent and is married to a U.S. citizen. In the letter, Khalil described himself as a "political prisoner," detailed the facility's sordid conditions, and decried Israel's renewed offensive in the Gaza Strip. "Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn't the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo, and his family an ocean away. It isn't the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing,' he said. "Justice escapes the contours of this nation's immigration facilities." He also described his arrest at his Columbia University-owned residence, recalling how Department of Homeland Security agents refused to provide a warrant and "accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner." He said he was handcuffed and forced into an unmarked car. "At that moment, my only concern was for Noor's safety," he said in the letter about his wife, who is eight months pregnant. 'I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side.' Khalil said after his arrest, he was transported to a facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he slept on the ground and was denied a blanket. "My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night," he said. "With January's ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom." DHS has previously said in a statement about Khalil's arrest that he had "led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization." White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged Khalil organized protests that disrupted campus, harassed Jewish American students and distributed pro-Hamas propaganda. A lawyer for Khalil, Samah Sisay, rejected the Trump administration's claim, saying there is no evidence that Khalil provided support of any kind to a terrorist organization. In the letter, Khalil also described his background, noting that he was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria after his family was displaced in the 1948 Nakba. "I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland," he said. "But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel's use of administrative detention — imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights … For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace." Khalil said he believes his arrest was indicative of "anti-Palestinian racism" demonstrated by "both the Biden and Trump administrations" over "the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention." "The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs," Khalil warned. He then urged people to rally together to defend the Palestinian people. "In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all," he said. On Monday, Khalil's legal team filed a preliminary injunction in the federal court in the Southern District of New York asking for his release to return home to his wife. Khalil concluded his letter by saying, "I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child."
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What we know — and don't know — about the Mahmoud Khalil deportation case
The Trump administration's detention of a green-card holder who was a leader in the Columbia University protests against Israel has put a face on the debate over immigration and the limits of free speech, with a sympathetic twist: The man, Mahmoud Khalil, is married to an American, and they are expecting their first child next month. The circumstances of the case have split the country in predictable ways and led to protests in support of Khalil, including one at Trump Tower that resulted in nearly a hundred arrests. They have also given pause to some Republicans who fear the president has gone too far in seeking to deport a legal resident for doing and saying things that many U.S.-born college students did last year. Others have expressed concern about the administration using artificial intelligence to identify people for potential deportation based on things they've said on social media. President Donald Trump had heralded actions like this in January when he promised 'forceful and unprecedented steps to combat anti-semitism,' including the deportation of Hamas sympathizers. 'To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,' Trump said in a Jan. 30 statement. This week, the president said on Truth Social that Khalil's arrest was 'the first of many to come.' Khalil was arrested Saturday in the lobby of his Columbia University-owned apartment building and has since been transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Louisiana. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a press briefing that Khalil distributed flyers in support of Hamas on campus and he has been determined to be 'adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.' Khalil's detention occurred the day after the Trump administration said it would cancel $400 million in grants and contracts awarded to Columbia University, which was the epicenter of student protests after the Israel-Hamas war began. Khalil's attorneys and supporters say that his activism is protected under the First Amendment. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that just as a visa or green card would be denied to anyone who said in advance that they were going to advocate on behalf of a terrorist organization, doing so after being in the U.S. opens them up to deportation. 'This is not about free speech. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card, by the way,' Rubio told reporters. The case is complicated and will likely still be wending its way through the courts after Khalil's son is born. Here's what we know so far — and, just as importantly, what we don't know. According to the BBC, Khalil was born in Syria to Palestinian parents. After leaving Syria at age 18, he earned a degree in computer science from the Lebanese American University. It's been widely reported that Khalil arrived in the U.S. in December 2022 and began classes at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs the next month. He married American citizen Noor Abdalla sometime in 2023 — the same year that Hamas invaded Israel and student protests broke out throughout the United States. He finished his studies at Columbia in December 2024 and was set to graduate with a master's degree this spring. In an interview with Reuters, Abdalla said she met her husband in Lebanon in 2016 through a volunteer program at a nonprofit where he worked. They had a long-distance relationship for seven years before getting married, she said. It's unclear exactly when and where they were married, but their baby is due in April. In a statement, Abdalla, a dentist, has described her husband's detention as a 'kidnapping.' According to the U.S. government, Khalil is a citizen of Algeria, although it's unclear when or why he lived there. It's also unclear how old he is — some sources give his age as 29, others as 30. His public profile rose after Israel declared war on Hamas, and protests in support of Gaza and the Palestinian people broke out on campuses across the U.S. He told CNN last year that he did not participate in encampments because he was worried about his student visa being revoked. He did, however, give speeches and represented the Columbia protesters in discussions with the administration, and photographs of him were published in news outlets across the country. At a hearing in Manhattan Wednesday, Khalil's attorneys argued that he was wrongfully detained and he cannot be deported because he, like native-born Americans, has the right to free speech. 'It simply cannot be the case that you can disappear at night off the streets of New York City simply because the current U.S. government, the current administration, the White House, dislikes what you have to say. That is not just un-American, it's also unacceptable,' Ramzi Kassem, one of Khalil's attorneys and a professor of law at City University of New York, told reporters outside the courthouse, per USA Today. Khalil's legal team is trying to get him returned to New York. The nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has asked the Trump administration for clarification on the legal grounds for Khalil's detention. In a letter to government officials, the group's legislative and policy director, Carolyn Iodice, wrote, 'The statements the government has released suggest its decision may be based on his constitutionally protected speech. This lack of clarity is chilling protected expression, as other permanent residents cannot know whether their lawful speech could be deemed to 'align to' a terrorist organization and jeopardize their immigration status.' On social media, some people have applauded the arrest. In one viral video called 'Why you deport me?' Canadian professor Gad Saad enacted a person seeking to come to the United States, complaining about the United States once he gets here and then tearfully questioning why he's being deported. Conservative CNN contributor Scott Jennings has forcefully defended the administration, saying that Khalil's actions had contributed to Jewish students feeling unsafe. 'Antisemitism is a scourge on the country,' he said, adding that Khalil is essentially a 'guest' in this country and that if Khalil were a citizen, he might feel differently. But journalist Robby Soave, writing for Reason, argued that the government's case is weak. 'Authorities must persuasively demonstrate that his conduct crosses some very, very red line,' Soave wrote. 'Yet, at present, the government's justifications don't come anywhere close to satisfying such a requirement. On the contrary, the official explanation for Khalil's detention is so woefully insufficient as to be laughable —except, of course, this matter isn't funny at all.' Green-card holders are not citizens of the U.S., but are 'lawful permanent residents' who pay taxes and can qualify for Social Security benefits. That status, however, can be revoked under certain circumstances, such as leaving the United States for more than a year and committing a crime. In addition, Gabriel J. Chin, a professor and immigration law scholar at the University of California, Davis, wrote for The Conversation, 'U.S. law also provides that any non-citizen can be deported if the secretary of state and the attorney general jointly determine that the person is associated with terrorism, or poses a threat to the U.S.' Khalil's supporters point out that he has not been charged with any crime. But that's not necessary to deport a green-card holder. There just has to be 'reasonable grounds to believe they engaged in, or are likely to engage in, terrorist activities,' according to CBS News. And while most green-card holders will never commit a crime or turn on America, occasionally that happens, as in the case of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who had both a green card and an American wife when he worked with his brother to set off two bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line in 2013. As Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, wrote in his 'One First' newsletter, 'Lawyers representing Khalil have already filed a habeas petition in the Southern District of New York — where it has been assigned to Judge Jesse Furman. They've also filed a motion seeking Khalil's return to New York for the duration of the litigation of his habeas petition. Although he hasn't yet ruled on that motion, Judge Furman has already temporarily barred the government from removing Khalil from the United States pending further proceedings in his court.' So some of the legal wrangling this week will simply involve whether Khalil has to stay in Louisiana or can return to New York as his case plays out. And that's just the beginning of the tangle of issues that await the court — and the country, Vladeck said. 'To spoil the punchline, although what the government has done to this point is profoundly disturbing, and is, in my view, unconstitutional retaliation for First Amendment-protected speech, I'm not sure it is as clearly unlawful as a lot of folks online have suggested. And that's a pretty big problem all by itself.'
