For weeks, President Donald Trump and other federal officials have made it clear that they want to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States, because they do not like what he had to say as an organizer of anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. Last week, the government began citing an additional justification, saying Khalil, who is married to a U.S. citizen, was not completely forthcoming about his employment history when he applied for a green card last March.
Those belated allegations, the government's lawyers say, provide an "independent basis" for deporting Khalil. "The new deportation grounds are patently weak and pretextual," one of Khalil's lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, told The New York Times, which notes that "the Trump administration appears to be using the new allegations in part to sidestep the First Amendment issues raised by Mr. Khalil's case." As a brief from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) shows, those issues pose a real problem for Trump's plan to expel legal residents he perceives as "terrorist sympathizers."
Immigration agents arrested Khalil in New York City on March 8 and briefly held him in New Jersey before taking him to a detention center in Louisiana. Last week, Jesse Furman, a federal judge in Manhattan, transferred the case, Khalil v. Joyce, to New Jersey because that is where Khalil was when his lawyers first challenged his detention. FIRE, joined by several other civil liberties groups, including the Rutherford Institute and the First Amendment Lawyers Association, therefore filed its brief in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
