Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was the first target of President Donald Trump's crusade against foreign students he calls "terrorist sympathizers," could soon be released from custody thanks to a preliminary injunction that a federal judge in New Jersey granted this week. The reasoning behind that injunction underlines the chilling impact of Trump's attempt to treat speech he does not like as a deportable offense.
Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student, was arrested in Manhattan on March 8 and since then has been confined to an immigration detention facility in LaSalle, Louisiana. His case ended up in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey because that is where he was detained when his lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition.
The government "can have little or no interest in applying the relevant underlying statutes in what is likely an unconstitutional way," U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz wrote on Wednesday. His preliminary injunction bars the government from "detaining" or "removing" Khalil "based on" Secretary of State Marco Rubio's determination that his pro-Palestinian activism poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests.
