On Wednesday, a US judge decided that Mahmoud Khalil, a student of Columbia University, had to stay in the country temporarily but forwarded his challenge to the legitimacy of his arrest over his attendance in pro-Palestinian demonstrations to a court in New Jersey.
While agreeing with the Justice Department that he lacked jurisdiction since Khalil was imprisoned in New Jersey at the time his lawyers first challenged his detention in New York, Manhattan-based US District Judge Jesse Furman rebuffed a bid by the Trump administration to dismiss the case.
The issue has become a flashpoint for Republican President Donald Trump’s promise to deport certain non-US nationals who participated in the demonstrations against Israel’s military assault in Gaza that swept American college campuses including Columbia following the October 2023 attack by Hamas.
The New Jersey court will now decide on Khalil’s attempts to declare his arrest unlawful as well as on his release on bond or move-through action. Because she is eight months pregnant with their first child, Khalil’s attorneys claim his American citizen wife Noor Abdallah cannot see him in Louisiana, where he is now being housed.
In a statement on Wednesday, Khalil’s attorney Samah Sisay alleged the government relocated him to Louisiana in order to evade having the matter adjudicated in New York or New Jersey. “Mr. Khalil should be free and home with his wife waiting for the birth of their first child; we will continue to do everything possible to make that happen,” Sisay added.
On March 8 outside his Manhattan university housing, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials detained thirty-year-old Khalil. His lawyers claim that his advocacy of Palestinian rights led to targeted reprisals, therefore breaching the First Amendment’s protection of free expression under the US Constitution.
