Mahmoud Khalil is the Columbia University pro-Palestinian activist who has been fighting deportation since he was detained by ICE last March. In January of this year, Khalil lost his case before a three judge panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.
On Thursday, the circuit judges found that the New Jersey district judge, Michael E. Farbiarz, lacked what is known as subject-matter jurisdiction, or the power to oversee certain types of matters, and ordered that he dismiss Mr. Khalil’s habeas petition. They suggested that Mr. Khalil’s release had not been Judge Farbiarz’s to grant, throwing his continued freedom into question.
The judges said that provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the key law that governs immigration, suggested that Mr. Khalil could not challenge his detention or the government’s attempt to remove him in Judge Farbiarz’s court without first going through the immigration court process.
That was a 2-1 decision by a panel of judges. His attorneys appealed for another hearing before the full Court of Appeals but in May the full court turned him down.
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which hears cases that originate in New Jersey, declined to review a January decision by three of its own judges that opened the door for Mr. Khalil to be arrested again.
That left Khalil with only one move left, appealing his case to the Supreme Court. He still plans to do that and the 3rd Circuit granted him time to put that case together without fear of deportation. However, given the makeup of the current court, he’s probably not expecting a win there.
Today, Khalil’s lawyers opened a new front by filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration claiming he’s been the victim of a conspiracy.
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protester who became the face of President Trump’s campus crackdown, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing administration officials, pro-Israel groups and a conservative think tank of colluding to suppress his constitutional rights.
The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, yokes together a number of different actors: the Heritage Foundation, several top Trump officials and two groups that targeted campus protesters, Canary Mission and Betar.
Mr. Khalil will seek to convince a judge that the defendants coordinated to a degree that amounted to a conspiracy. His lawyers argue that there was a direct line leading from a Heritage Foundation plan to dismantle pro-Palestinian activism to the targeting of activists, like Mr. Khalil, by Canary Mission and Betar, which led to their arrests and detention by the Trump administration.
So far none of the defendants in the new lawsuit have issued a comment, but even the NY Times can see this for what it is.
The lawsuit is a long-shot attempt to hinder the administration’s effort to deport Mr. Khalil, a green card holder who was a leader in the student protest movement at Columbia and whom the administration has accused of propagating antisemitism to the detriment of American foreign policy aims.
Khalil’s case is that some coordination against him violated the KKK Act.
The “public-private partnership” — first brought to light in a separate trial last year — may violate the Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era law that sought to restrict government coordination with vigilante groups, according to Khalil’s lawyers.
Inquiries to the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission and Betar were not immediately returned on Tuesday.
This case should probably be dismissed once his appeal to SCOTUS is rejected, but it won’t be so long as they can get this before a progressive judge. I haven’t seen the actual text of the lawsuit so I can’t say if they have anything connecting these dots, but it seems like the main goal here is to create another legal process so that some judge can issue an injunction preventing Khalil’s deportation for as long as this drags on. And if he can drag this on beyond Trump’s term and if a Democrat wins the White House, his situation would change. I think that’s the real goal here, to become part of the Democrats plan for revenge.
Meanwhile, Khalil continues to claim that he was never pro-Hamas despite the fact that the group he helped lead was clearly antisemitic and supported Hamas. He’s never been able to explain why that group was handing out actual Hamas propaganda at events he led if he does not support such propaganda. Lucky for him, he has a team of lawyers and no one in the media seems interested in pressing him on these points.
Read this post from last August if you want chapter and verse on what CUAD supported and what Khalil said about it.
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