Judge orders Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil to be deported to Algeria or Syria

A federal immigration judge ordered Mahmoud Khalil – a former student graduated from the University of Columbia linked to pro -Palestinian demonstrations – to be expelled to Algeria or Syria.

The decision was rendered last week, but it was first revealed in the court documents filed Wednesday by Khalil lawyers in the context of its lawsuit against the government. A green card holder Khalil alleges that the Trump administration has held him for months and sought to deport him as part of a broader policy of punishing foreign students for protesting the conduct of Israel in his war against Hamas. Trump administration accused her “Haine behavior and rhetoric”.

On Friday, the judge of immigration based in Louisiana, Jamee Comans, rejected the request of Khalil for a derogation preventing his withdrawal from the United States because he would have distorted his history on his green card documents. COMANS again ordered him to be expelled in Algeria, where Khalil is a citizen or Syria, where he was born.

Khalil now has 30 days to appeal to the decision -making comments to a body of the Ministry of Justice called the Board of Immigration Appeals, and if his appeal is rejected, he will lose his status as a green card and will be condemned to leave the country, his lawyers said in a letter to the American district judge Michael Farbiarz on Wednesday.

Khalil lawyers told Farbiarz that they planned to modify his trial against the administration in the light of “these last very unusual developments”. In a statement on Wednesday, Khalil’s legal team argued that the immigration judge “rushed to a decision without providing a hearing on evidence as required by a regular procedure, engaging in multiple procedural irregularities”.

“It is not surprising that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of freedom of expression,” Khalil said in the press release. “Their last attempt, thanks to an immigration court in Kangaroo, again explains their real colors.”

CBS News contacted the Ministry of Internal Security for Comments.

The legal struggle between Khalil and the federal government dates back to March, when he was first detained by immigration agents in New York. Khalil is one of the many international students who have been detained because of their links with the activism of the Pro -Palestinian campus, which alleges the Trump administration is riddled with anti -Semitism – an accusation that the demonstrators deny.

Initially, the Trump administration argued that Khalil could be expelled under a federal law allowing non-citizens to be deleted if the Secretary of State determine That their presence poses “consequences unfavorable to foreign policy”.

In June, Farbiarz prevented the government from exporting Khalil for reasons of foreign policy, noting that “his career and reputation are damaged and that his speech is refrigerated”. A month later, Khalil was released from immigration detention in Louisiana.

But his immigration affair continued under a separate allegation leveled by the Trump administration. In addition to complaints in terms of foreign policy, the government had accused Khalil of having left details on its associations spent on its immigration documents, including membership of a United Nations agency working with the Palestinians and its “continuous employment” at the British Embassy in Lebanon.

In last week’s decision, Comans noted that Khalil was not legally entitled to a waiver of the expulsion of these allegations. The immigration judge also said that Khalil should not obtain a discretion of the court due to the “gravity of his conduct”. She called Khalil an intelligent and educated person in Ivy-League “who should have known that the disclosure was necessary.

“This court notes that the lack of frankness of the respondent on his [immigration forms] It was not supervision of an uninformed and without investigative applicant, “the judge wrote. “On the contrary, this court concludes that the respondent deliberately distorted material facts for the sole purpose of bypassing the immigration process and reducing the probability that its request would be refused.”

Khalil denied having made false statements, saying that he was not a member of the United Nations agency, but was rather an intern unpaid by Columbia. He also said that he had stopped working at the British Embassy in Beirut in 2022, despite the government’s claims that he continued to work there after that.

In a statement on Wednesday, her lawyers called the “baseless” and “pretextual” claims.