A federal judge has ruled that the legal battle over Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation should continue to play out in New Jersey, rejecting the Trump administration’s bid to transfer the Columbia University protester’s case to Louisiana.
In a written decision Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz in Newark said jurisdiction over the case should remain in New Jersey since Khalil was being held there at the time his lawyer’s filed their Habeas Corpus petition.
“The Court’s jurisdiction is not defeated by the Petitioner having been moved to Louisiana,” the judge wrote, describing the government’s argument otherwise as “unpersuasive.”
The ruling does not guarantee that Khalil will be moved out of a detention facility in Louisiana, where he is being held as the government seeks his deportation for his role in campus protests against Israel. But it will allow his attorneys to make their arguments for his release before a judge in New Jersey.
If the case were to go forward in Louisiana, it may have ultimately ended up before one of the nation’s most conservative appeals courts, possibly allowing those judges to issue a precedent-setting ruling on both Khalil’s case and the Trump administration’s broader efforts to deport noncitizen student activists.
“There is still a lot more to be done”
“I am relieved at the court’s decision today to keep my husband’s ongoing case in New Jersey. This is an important step towards securing Mahmoud’s freedom, but there is still a lot more to be done,” Khalil’s wife Dr. Noor Abdalla said. “What happened to Mahmoud is a violation of his rights as a lawful permanent resident of this country. ICE agents ripped him from our home and took him across state lines to Louisiana, violating his rights and holding him as a political prisoner.”
Abdalla said Khalil is being “illegally held.”
“Today we moved one step closer to vindicating Mr. Khalil’s rights by challenging his unlawful detention and the administration’s unconstitutional and retaliatory actions against him,” Khalil’s attorney Amy Greer said.
“We are grateful the court wisely understood that the government cannot try to manipulate the jurisdiction of the United States courts in a transparent attempt to shield their unconstitutional – and frankly chilling – behavior. We look forward to the next phase of this case, which is to get Mahmoud out of detention and into the arms of his family, and then to prove the Trump administration’s attempted deportation of Mahmoud and others is nothing but unconstitutional retaliation for protected speech,” Bazer Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights said.
Khalil, a legal U.S. resident, was detained by federal immigration agents on March 8 in the lobby of his university-owned apartment. It was the first arrest under President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined campus protests against the war in Gaza.
Within hours of his arrest, he was flown to an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana, thousands of miles from his attorneys and his wife, a U.S. citizen who is due to give birth this month.
Khalil’s attorneys have accused the government of advancing a “radical reinterpretation” of existing law to move the case to a more favorable venue, while depriving him of access to his legal team and family.
“They keep passing around the body in an almost Kafkaesque way,” defense attorney Baher Azmy said at a court hearing Friday in New Jersey.
