Ex-Columbia Grad Student Khalil Released From ICE Custody

(Bloomberg) — A former Columbia University graduate student detained for more than three months over his role in pro-Palestinian protests was released Friday from immigration detention, allowing him to continue a legal fight to avoid deportation while out on bail.

Mahmoud Khalil, 29, was set free from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana after a judge ordered his release, Khalil’s lawyers said in a court filing. Khalil claimed he’d been unlawfully held in retaliation for his activities to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza with Hamas. 

Khalil, who was born in Syria and is Palestinian, has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus protests over the war. A lawful permanent resident, he was arrested March 8 at off-campus housing and eventually sent to the ICE facility in Louisiana. 

“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,” Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union.

US District Judge Michael Farbiarz in Newark on Friday ordered Khalil be released. The judge previously ruled that the US couldn’t detain or deport him based solely on a determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Khalil’s participation in the campus protests compromised US foreign policy. 

The US had also argued that Khalil, whose wife and infant son are US citizens, should remain in custody because of alleged errors in his 2024 green card application. But Farbiarz ruled Friday that those claims didn’t justify his detention. The government later appealed the judge’s order.

Farbiarz is presiding over the case because Khalil was being held at a New Jersey federal facility when his lawyers filed a petition challenging his detention. He was taken from New York to New Jersey and finally to an ICE center in Louisiana.

The terms of Khalil’s release were set later Friday by US Magistrate Judge Michael Hammer. He ordered Khalil to surrender his passport and agreed to allow Khalil to fly home to New York from Louisiana rather than travel by train.

The case is Khalil v. Joyce, 25-cv-1963, US District Court, District of New Jersey (Newark).

(Updates with court filing, comment from Khalil’s wife.)

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