A Judge’s Order Freeing Mahmoud Khalil Is Yet Another Loss for the Trump Administration’s Immigration Agenda
A federal judge ordered the release of Mahmoud Khalil from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Louisiana on Friday, three months after Khalil became a major target of the Trump administration’s campaign to deport student visa holders for speaking in favor of Palestine and participating in pro-Palestine protests.
U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz of the District of New Jersey found that Khalil posed little to no flight risk and that his ongoing detention was unusual enough to plausibly suggest, as Khalil’s lawyers argued, that he was being targeted for his political speech.Â
“There is at least something to the underlying claim that there is an effort to use the immigration charge here to punish Mr. Khalil,” Farbiarz said. “And of course that would be unconstitutional.”
Farbiarz rejected a request by Justice Department lawyers to stay his order to give the government time to appeal, and instead said he would order Khalil to be immediately released and allowed to return to New York, where his wife and newborn child, both U.S. citizens, live.
“After more than three months we can finally breathe a sigh of relief and know that Mahmoud is on his way home to me and Deen, who never should have been separated from his father,” Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife, said in a New York Civil Liberties Union press release. “We know this ruling does not begin to address the injustices the Trump administration has brought upon our family, and so many others the government is trying to silence for speaking out against Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians. But today we are celebrating Mahmoud coming back to New York to be reunited with our little family, and the community that has supported us since the day he was unjustly taken for speaking out for Palestinian free
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