The Trump administration invoked an obscure legal statute over the weekend in an attempt to deport a recent Columbia University graduate — and lawful permanent resident of the United States — who helped lead campus protests against Israel last year, people with knowledge of the action said on Monday.
Mahmoud Khalil, 30, who graduated in December from Columbia with a master’s degree from the School of International and Public Affairs, was arrested by immigration officers in New York on Saturday and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. Mr. Khalil, who has Palestinian heritage, holds a green card and is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant.
On Monday, a federal judge in Manhattan ordered the government not to remove Mr. Khalil from the United States while the judge reviewed a petition challenging the legality of his detention. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers also filed a motion on Monday asking the judge to compel the federal government to transfer him back to New York.
President Trump said Mr. Khalil’s case was “the first arrest of many to come.”
“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Mr. Trump said on social media on Monday.
“If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply,” he added.
The arrest and attempted expulsion of Mr. Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has provoked alarm over free-speech rights and the Trump administration’s escalating crackdown on immigration and on universities that Mr. Trump and his aides argue are too liberal.
The administration did not publicly lay out the legal authority for the arrest. But two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.
That provision says any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
Mr. Rubio also reposted a Homeland Security Department statement that accused Mr. Khalil of having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” But officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it.
Rather, the rationale is that the anti-Israel protests Mr. Khalil helped lead were antisemitic and fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia, the people with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Rubio’s argument is that the United States has a foreign policy of combating antisemitism around the world and that it would undermine this policy objective to tolerate Mr. Khalil’s continued presence in the United States, they said.
“We haven’t seen anything like this as far as I’ve been a practicing attorney,” said Robyn Barnard, an immigration lawyer at Human Rights First. “It’s just really deeply concerning to see the U.S. government deciding to use their limited resources in terms of enforcement of immigration laws to target someone whose speech they just disagree with, but otherwise doesn’t seem to violate our First Amendment.”
Mr. Trump has taken measures to try to suppress protests and other activities on campuses that officials in his administration consider anti-Israel or antisemitic, often conflating the two. On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million of grants and contracts with Columbia, citing “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
While a student at Columbia, Mr. Khalil, who was a negotiator and spokesman for the protesters, played a major role in campus protests that broke out after Hamas launched an assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping about 250 others. The Israeli military carried out strikes in Gaza that have killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians, according to health officials there.
Pro-Palestinian protests and a student encampment at Columbia — as well as the university administration’s response, which included asking the police to clear out protesters — became a lightning rod in national debates over public criticism of Israel. Some protesters adopted slogans like “globalize the intifada” and called for freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea,” a phrase that has radically different interpretations by Israelis and Palestinians and which led to accusations of antisemitism.
The State Department declined to comment on Monday. The Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the State Department.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump previewed that he intended to expel foreign students who participated in anti-Israel protests as part of his broader plans for a sweeping crackdown on immigration. He generally framed that plan in terms of canceling student visas, however — not expelling lawful permanent residents.
A lawful permanent resident, or green-card holder, is protected by the Constitution, which includes First Amendment free-speech rights and Fifth Amendment due-process rights. The Trump administration’s attempt to expel Mr. Khalil under that statutory provision is very likely to face a constitutional challenge, several legal experts said.
Amy Belsher, the director of immigrants’ rights litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said she could not recall any previous instances in which a secretary of state had invoked that provision since Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act, or I.N.A., in 1952.
“It’s an escalation,” she said. “This provision has not been historically invoked and is incredibly vague and would raise real concerns about the weaponization of the I.N.A. to remove people who the administration just disagrees with.”
Because any prior use of the provision appears to have been rare at most, legal specialists were still sorting through what it would mean procedurally — including whether an immigration judge would need to formally revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card and issue a final removal order.
It was also not clear whether administrative removal proceedings, should they be a necessary first step, would delay the ability of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers to pursue a constitutional challenge in federal court. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Monday.
Nor was it clear whether any legal challenge to his detention and deportation proceedings would play out in New York, where he was arrested, or in Louisiana. The appeals court that oversees federal judicial proceedings in Louisiana is particularly conservative.
At a rally in Iowa on Oct. 16, 2023, Mr. Trump declared that, “in the wake of the attacks on Israel, Americans have been disgusted to see the open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses. They’re teaching your children hate.” He added: “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical, anti-American and anti-Semitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home.”
At a speech in Las Vegas on Oct. 28, Mr. Trump said that “we’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country.” And at a Nov. 8 campaign stop in Florida, he said he would “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism.”
On Monday, Mr. Rubio met in Jeddah with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia in part to discuss efforts to end the war in Gaza. As a Republican senator representing Florida, Mr. Rubio was a vocal supporter of Israel in the war, telling one protester confronting him in the Capitol that the “vicious animals” of Hamas were to blame for all the devastation and civilian deaths from Israeli military strikes in Gaza.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reported from Washington.
