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A federal judge has refused to order pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil’s release after a last-minute response from Trump administration officials arguing for his continued imprisonment based on “false and pretextual allegations,” the activists’ legal team has said.
U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz in New Jersey sided with the government’s argument that it can continue holding Khalil based on a charge that Khalil committed fraud when he applied for his green card. The same judge, however, in an order last week had acknowledged that it would be a stretch for the government to apply this charge to his detainment.
Khalil and his legal team had been hoping that the activist would be released on Friday after Farbiarz had said that the government couldn’t hold him on their primary charge.
Last week, Farbiarz ruled that the government cannot hold Khalil based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims that Khalil’s continued presence in the U.S. threatens U.S. foreign policy interests. Farbiarz gave the government until Friday to appeal, seemingly nudging the government to make the argument that it was detaining Khalil based on his green card application.
The government failed to appeal on time, and Khalil’s legal team submitted a letter asking for his immediate release. The judge then gave the government several hours to respond to that letter, when the government said that their interpretation of the ruling was that Farbiarz had, in fact, only narrowly ruled that Khalil couldn’t be held on foreign policy grounds.
Farbiarz said that interpretation is correct, and Khalil continues to be imprisoned, missing his first Father’s Day with his wife and newborn baby.
Khalil’s lawyers have slammed the decision, saying that his detention is “arbitrary” and that the green card application allegations are “false and pretextual,” meaning that they were effectively put forth to justify Khalil’s detainment separately from the government’s primary charges against him.
Indeed, when the administration was initially pressed for their reasoning for seeking Khalil’s detention and deportation in April, the administration only provided a two-page memo from Rubio citing his beliefs — and admitting that Khalil’s participation in Columbia University student protests were “otherwise lawful.”
“Mahmoud Khalil was detained in retaliation for his advocacy for Palestinian rights. The government is now using cruel, transparent delay tactics to keep him away from his wife and newborn son ahead of their first Father’s Day as a family,” said Amy Greer, one of Khalil’s lawyers, in a statement.
“Instead of celebrating together, he is languishing in ICE detention as punishment for his advocacy on behalf of his fellow Palestinians. It is unjust, it is shocking, and it is disgraceful,” Greer said.
The ACLU, which is part of the team representing Khalil, said the ruling makes it clear that the Trump administration is “doing everything in their power to punish Mahmoud for his advocacy for Palestinian rights.”
The ACLU shared a letter that Khalil wrote to his son, Deen, ahead of Mother’s Day, when the baby was two weeks old. The letter shows the pain that Khalil has experienced by being separated from his family and missing the birth of his son, the group said, after Farbiarz had concluded in his initial ruling last week that Khalil would suffer irreparable harm by continuing to be detained.
“Deen, it was not a gap in the law that made me a political prisoner in Louisiana. It was my firm belief that our people deserve to be free, that their lives are worth more than the televised massacre we are witnessing in Gaza, and that the displacement that began in 1948 and culminated in the current genocide must finally end,” Khalil wrote.
“Deen, my love for you is deeper than anything I have ever known,” Khalil went on. “Loving you is not separate from the struggle for liberation. It is liberation itself.”
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