Jesse Furman, a U.S. district judge in Manhattan, said on Wednesday that the government must allow Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers to speak to him privately on the phone and gave prosecutors and lawyers for the anti-Israel former Columbia University graduates until Friday to tell him in writing when they plan to file written arguments, the Associated Press reported.
The initial hearing, which lasted about 30 minutes, centered on the government’s efforts to move the trial from New York to either New Jersey or Louisiana, where Khalil has been held. He is currently at the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, La., per the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement website.
Federal agents arrested Khalil, who was born in Syria and has ties to Algeria, on Saturday. The recent Columbia graduate holds a green card and is reportedly married to a U.S. citizen. The Trump administration has said that he led anti-Israel protests on Columbia’s campus, and the White House said that he has supported Hamas, which would be grounds for his deportation.
Hundreds of protesters gathered across the street from the federal courthouse at Foley Square in lower Manhattan, where anti-Israel demonstrators, clad in masks and keffiyehs, chanted “we will win” and “free Palestine.”
One of Khalil’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, told reporters and protesters gathered outside the courthouse that “what happened to Mahmoud Khalil is nothing short of extraordinary and shocking and outrageous,” per the Associated Press.
“It should outrage anybody who believes that speech should be free in the United States of America,” he said.
A U.S. State Department spokesperson told JNS that under section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “an alien is deportable from the United States if the secretary of state determines the alien’s presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
“In such cases, the secretary of state notifies the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who has the authority to initiate removal charges,” the Foggy Bottom spokesperson said.
“When you come to the United States as a visitor—which is what a visa is, which is how this individual entered this country,” Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, told reporters on Wednesday in Shannon, Ireland. “We can deny you that, if you tell us when you apply, ‘Hi, I’m trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages.’”
“If you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this, and if you tell us when you apply for your visa, ‘and by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities, I intend to shut down your universities,’” he said. “If you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa. I hope we would.”
“This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with,” Rubio said. “No one has a right to a student visa and no one has a right to a green card.” JNS
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