Gabby Del Valle
Appearances
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
This is Today Explained. My name is Gabby Del Valle. I'm a policy reporter at The Verge, where I cover immigration, privacy, and the tech right. Gabby, what happened to Mahmoud Khalil last weekend? So on Saturday night, he was arrested by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations Division in his apartment.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
When the officers asked him to identify himself, they initially said that his student visa had been revoked. I believe at that point, he and his wife had called his attorney. And his wife and his attorney were both saying, he's not here on a student visa. He has a green card. His wife, who is eight months pregnant, got the green card and showed it to the HSI officers.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
That's the division of ICE that handles Homeland Security. And the officer said, well, the green card has been revoked too. Which, to be clear, ICE doesn't have the authority to to revoke a green card, but they arrested him. They took him first, I believe, to a detention center in New York, then transferred him to a different detention center in New Jersey.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
When his wife went to visit him there on Sunday, she was told that he wasn't there. And for a while, his wife and his attorney didn't know where he was until it was revealed that he had been transferred to a different ICE detention facility in rural Louisiana. And so while he was still detained in New York City, 4.40 a.m.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
on Sunday, his attorney filed a habeas petition with the Southern District of New York. So this was before any of the transfers happened. And a federal judge on Monday ordered that he not be deported for now and set a court hearing for today. Who is this guy?
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
Mahmoud Khalil is a recent graduate of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a very prominent pro-Palestine activist on campus.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
So starting in late 2023, Columbia University had a series of protests on campus where student activists were trying to get the university to divest from military contractors and from certain companies that were based in or do business with the Israeli government.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
And those protests kind of culminated in the spring of 2024 with an encampment on Columbia University's lawn that the university ended up calling in the NYPD or allowing the NYPD to arrest students. The protests didn't end at the end of the academic year and have been ongoing.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
In the spring of 2024, when the encampments had, you know, sprung up and had been there for a while, he actually wasn't prominently involved in the encampments. And he spoke at a press conference where he said that he hadn't attended a ton of protests and he hadn't been doing a ton of interviews. He wasn't really in the public eye because he, at that point, was in the U.S. on a student visa.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
But that wasn't to say he wasn't involved with this movement. He was one of the students involved with negotiating with the administration and trying to push the administration to divest while other students were doing like the encampment, the more like on the ground stuff. He was like in these meetings with the university administration. What will happen in court?
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
Has he been charged with anything? This is kind of a tricky thing. The judge that set that hearing is a federal judge in the Southern District of New York. And this is a hearing basically just requesting his release from immigration custody. That isn't going to affect the outcome of his immigration case.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
Because ultimately, an immigration judge is the one who decides whether to order him deported or not. These are two different courts, different jurisdictions. So his hearing today was about whether he should remain in ICE custody or be let out. But it's not about whether he's going to be deported. When asked to explain this, what has the Trump administration said?
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
So a White House official told the free press that he has not been charged with a crime, there's no allegation that he's broken the law, but that he poses a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
The official White House Instagram and Twitter accounts posted this picture of him saying Shalom Mahmoud, and Trump himself has said there will be more. In a post on Truth Social, Trump called him a radical foreign pro-Hamas student and said this is the first arrest of many to come.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
So in most cases, people in deportation proceedings have the right to a hearing before an immigration judge. So despite what the government is saying, despite what the White House is saying, he cannot just be deported today or tomorrow or this week. He has to go before an immigration judge, and only an immigration judge can decide whether Mahmoud will be deported.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
It works differently depending on what the grounds for deportability are. I'm going to give you a kind of unrelated example. If he were a green card holder and he had been charged with certain crimes, crimes including what is called crimes of moral turpitude or aggravated felonies, which are not all felonies, it's kind of a misnomer, that could then trigger deportation proceedings.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
Or if he were an undocumented immigrant who was in the United States without legal authorization, that could trigger deportation proceedings. This is a really... unusual case.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
So because interportability is being argued on this foreign policy ground, I believe the administration is going to have to prove that his activities in the United States are in some way a threat to national security or to the U.S. 's foreign policy interests. The question is what they're going to point to to prove that. Like, is it going to be his involvement in campus protests?
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
And if so, is there then a First Amendment counter argument? Like, will his attorney be able to say he was not doing anything dangerous or anything threatening to national security? He was exercising his First Amendment rights. So will the administration then argue that he was doing something beyond speech is what we should be looking out for.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
As far as I know, he is not accused of any acts of violence, of like the occupations, any of that. In fact, I emailed the NYPD asking if he had any kind of like charges or if he had been arrested in connection with any of those events. And I didn't receive a response. But when I was covering these protests last spring, there was no mention of him as one of the people who had been arrested.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
I think there are a few different reasons why he was singled out. One of them is that he's an easier target than a lot of other students. His name is out there. His information is out there. The government knows that he's not a U.S. citizen.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
There was a report in the Forward that some pro-Israel activists had met with members of Congress, including Ted Cruz and John Fetterman, and had personally named Mahmoud as someone that the government should be looking at.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
And there are also a number of organizations that both before and since Trump's reelection have kind of dedicated themselves to naming and shaming what they say are students on campus who are either promoting anti-Semitism or in some cases promoting terrorism. One of these organizations, Canary Mission, makes these kind of dossiers of pro-Palestine activists on college campuses across America.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
Another more recent one is the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther, which has kind of tried to weaponize the Canary Mission model to encourage retaliation against these students.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
And then there's another group, Batar, which claims it made lists of students who are in the U.S. on visas or otherwise non-citizens and also claims that it showed that list to immigration authorities and has encouraged these students to be arrested and removed from the country.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
We should absolutely expect more of this. Just days before Mahmoud was arrested, Axios reported that the State Department under Marco Rubio was using AI to identify students who were in the US on visas who had either been arrested at pro-Palestine AXA on campus or off campus, or who had posted anti-Israel content on social media.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
It claimed that there were no visas that were revoked under the Biden administration, which was proof that they were not taking this seriously, and that this new administration would be taking this seriously. Reuters and the AAP have also reported that ICE has been looking for at least one other student on campus.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
So when Trump was on the campaign trail, he promised mass deportations. And since then, you know, we have seen an increase in immigration enforcement. But despite what Trump says, despite what other White House officials say, you can't just instantly deport most noncitizens. Because that process is often slow and bureaucratic,
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
The Trump administration is kind of relying on these shock and awe tactics, you know, sending people to Guantanamo, high-profile arrest of activists, sending migrants to Panama, these videos of Kristi Noem wearing bulletproof vests to arrest migrants in New York City.
Today, Explained
Deporting Mahmoud Khalil
They're kind of relying on the public not realizing that an immigration arrest, while it may be the first step in a deportation, there's still a process that they have to adhere to.