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A federal judge has said he will order Mahmoud Khalil released on bail from an immigration detention center in Louisiana, where the Columbia University student activist has been locked up for more than three months for his campus activism against Israel’s war in Gaza.
During a hearing on Friday, New Jersey District Judge Michael Farbiarz said Khalil poses no danger to the community and is not a flight risk. “Period, full stop,” he said.
The judge said it is “highly unusual” for Donald Trump’s administration to continue holding him in detention, with no evidence he committed any crime, and after the judge’s determination that his detention and threat of removal from the country over First Amendment-protected speech is unconstitutional.
Khalil was stripped of his green card and arrested in front of his then-pregnant wife in their New York City apartment building on March 8. He was then sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana, roughly 1,300 miles away from their home in New York.
Following his arrest, Khalil was accused of “antisemitic activities” for his role as a Palestinian student activist that helped organize campus-wide demonstrations against Israel’s war. Officials concede that he did not commit any crime, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sought to justify Khalil’s arrest by invoking a rarely used law claiming that Khalil’s presence in the United States undermines foreign policy interests of preventing antisemitism.
On June 11, Judge Farbiarz ruled that the administration had unconstitutionally wielded the law against Khalil, whose “career and reputation are being damaged and his speech is being chilled,” the judge wrote.
The government has “little or no interest in applying the relevant underlying statutes in what is likely an unconstitutional way,” Farbiarz added.
This is a developing story
