{"id":260,"date":"2025-06-20T21:30:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T21:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/260\/"},"modified":"2025-06-20T21:30:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T21:30:10","slug":"judge-orders-release-of-columbia-protester-mahmoud-khalil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/260\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge orders release of Columbia protester Mahmoud Khalil"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. government to free former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil<\/a> from the immigration detention center where he has been held since early March while the Trump administration sought to deport him over his role in pro-Palestinian protests.<\/p>\n

Ruling from the bench in New Jersey, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz said it would be \u201chighly, highly unusual\u201d for the government to continue to detain a legal U.S. resident who was unlikely to flee and hadn\u2019t been accused of any violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cPetitioner is not a flight risk and the evidence presented is that he is not a danger to the community,\u201d he said. \u201cPeriod, full stop.\u201d <\/p>\n

Later in the hourlong hearing, which took place by phone, the judge said the government had \u201cclearly not met\u201d the standards for detention. <\/p>\n

Khalil could walk out of the detention center in rural Louisiana by Friday evening, which is when lawyers for the Trump administration said they expect to release him.<\/p>\n

He must surrender his passport and can\u2019t travel internationally, but he will get his green card back and be given official documents permitting limited travel within the country, including New York and Michigan to visit family, New Jersey and Louisiana for court appearances and Washington to lobby Congress.<\/p>\n

Khalil was the first person arrested under President Donald Trump<\/a> \u2019s crackdown on students who joined campus protests against Israel\u2019s devastating war in Gaza<\/a>. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said Khalil must be expelled from the country because his continued presence could harm American foreign policy. <\/p>\n

Farbiarz had ruled earlier that the government couldn\u2019t deport Khalil on those grounds, but gave it leeway to continue pursuing a potential deportation based on allegations that he lied on his green card application. Trump administration lawyers repeated that accusation at Friday\u2019s court hearing. It\u2019s an accusation Khalil disputes. <\/p>\n

In issuing his ruling Friday, the judge agreed with Khalil\u2019s lawyers that the protest leader was being prevented from exercising his free speech and due process rights despite no obvious reason for his continued detention. The judge noted that Khalil is now clearly a public figure.<\/p>\n

Khalil\u2019s lawyers had asked that he either be freed on bail or, at the very least, moved from Louisiana to New Jersey so he can be closer to his wife and newborn son, who are both U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n

Khalil\u2019s wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, said she can finally \u201cbreathe a sigh of relief\u201d after her husband\u2019s three months in detention.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know this ruling does not begin to address the injustices the Trump administration has brought upon our family, and so many others,\u201d she said in a statement provided by Khalil\u2019s lawyers. \u201cBut today we are celebrating Mahmoud coming back to New York to be reunited with our little family.\u201d<\/p>\n

The judge\u2019s decision comes after several other scholars targeted for their activism have been released from custody, including another former Palestinian student at Columbia, Mohsen Mahdawi<\/a>; a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk<\/a>; and a Georgetown University scholar, Badar Khan Suri<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Khalil was detained on March 8<\/a> at his apartment building in Manhattan over his participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. <\/p>\n

The international affairs graduate student isn\u2019t accused of breaking any laws during the protests at Columbia. He served as a negotiator and spokesperson for student activists and wasn\u2019t among the demonstrators arrested, but his prominence in news coverage and willingness to speak publicly made him a target of critics.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has argued that noncitizens who participate in such demonstrations should be expelled from the country as it considers their views antisemitic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. government to free former Columbia University…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[411,413,400,414,84,69,407,57,86,51,118,409,353,410,408,214,401,405,403,404,50,412,415,406,80,402,365,52,61,67,370,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-260","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-censorship","9":"tag-civil-rights","10":"tag-costin-paval","11":"tag-daryl-dike","12":"tag-district-of-columbia","13":"tag-donald-trump","14":"tag-education","15":"tag-general-news","16":"tag-government-policy","17":"tag-headlines","18":"tag-human-rights","19":"tag-immigration","20":"tag-louisiana","21":"tag-marco-rubio","22":"tag-michael-farbiarz","23":"tag-michigan","24":"tag-new-jersey","25":"tag-new-york","26":"tag-new-york-city","27":"tag-new-york-city-wire","28":"tag-news","29":"tag-noor-abdalla","30":"tag-nunzio-lombardi","31":"tag-ny-state-wire","32":"tag-politics","33":"tag-protests-and-demonstrations","34":"tag-religion","35":"tag-top-stories","36":"tag-u-s-news","37":"tag-united-states","38":"tag-united-states-government","39":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}