Mahmoud Khalil is not the victimized cuddlebear the media would have you believe

A federal immigration judge ruled on Friday that the government could deport Mahmoud Khalil, not a student, but a “Columbia University graduate.” Judge Jamee Comans, a former Mississippi police officer and a Biden appointee in 2023, said that Khalil’s political activities posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” for the United States, which is claiming that Khalil is undermining “US policy to fight anti-Semitism.” 

Khalil supporters talk about him like he’s Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, Dr. King writing letters from Birmingham jail or Oscar Wilde staring wistfully at the moon from his cell in Reading Gaol. But anyone looking to ding the Trump administration on its deportation policy could find a better example of injustice. The case surrounding Kimar Albrego Garcia, a Maryland sheet metal worker now imprisoned in El Salvador under accusations that he belongs to the MS-13 gang, is far more ambiguous than the one against Kahlil, though not in the opinion of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, Trump and half the cabinet who presented a united front against Garcia’s return in a White House press conference yesterday.

Then you have Jasmine Mooney, the Canadian actress and water-brand influencer who’s been speaking out against the nightmarish conditions in the ICE private-prison maze that she recently found herself trapped in for a couple of weeks. Or the fact that Trump has been hinting that deporting US criminals to El Salvador is also on the table.

There’s a lot to criticize when it comes to deportation and detention in the US right now. But Mahmoud Kahlil is a shady fellow.

Any accusations that the government is denying Khalil due process rings false. They’re detaining him in Louisiana for violating the terms of his green card, even though he’s no longer a student. But on top of last week’s immigration court decision, there’s a separate New Jersey court case focusing on a habeas petition challenging the legality of his detention. His substantial team of attorneys is appealing Friday’s ruling and is also going to file an asylum claim on his behalf. He’s been subjected to more process than a pack of frozen Jimmy Dean breakfast sausages. This case could go on for months, even years. 

On the one hand, Khalil presents a sympathetic face to the public. His wife is a US citizen, and she’s nine months pregnant. He’s young, intelligent and media-friendly. But he also spent months leading a movement at Columbia that harassed Jewish students, occupied buildings, called for the abolition of Israel and decried Zionists in the most threatening and intimidating way imaginable. This isn’t just someone who posted “Free Palestine” on Instagram or wrote an anti-Israel editorial for the student newspaper. This is someone with clear ideological and political ties to the intifada that Hamas declared on October 7. 

Largely ignored among the dramatic legal shenanigans to defend Khalil was a late March lawsuit filed by the families of October 7 victims, which lists Khalil first among a group of people who organized anti-Israel protests that exploded in New York City on October 8 and have continued almost non-stop for a year and a half. They call Khalil part of Hamas’s “propaganda arm in the United States” and say he has helped distribute “pro-terror propaganda produced by and literally stamped with the logo of the Hamas Media Office.” 

The lawsuit states: 

In June 2024 CUAD [Columbia University Apartheid Divest] publicly called on its followers to replicate October 7 on American soil, specifically guiding CUAD members to “look to the tactics” of the “Palestinian resistance for inspired actions” and instructed them to “rise” “like a flood.” Indeed, CUAD encouraged its followers to emulate specific historical acts, including an attempted firebombing of a federal building in Oakland, California, done in response to the San Francisco Police Department’s response to an illegal encampment in a federal building… Each of these actions was framed by CUAD as part of the inspiration to be drawn from the October 7 attacks, which they had specifically referenced as a model for their followers.

That lawsuit is likely to go nowhere; it’s impossible even to find out who the attorneys are, and the chief plaintiff lives in Singapore. But it does throw into sharp relief the attempts to portray Mahmoud Khalil as some sort of free-speech victimized cuddlebear. He’s a dangerous person. 

The State Department is trying to protect Jewish students in the United States and head off Hamas-style attacks at the pass. If you don’t think this is an authentic threat, then you haven’t been paying attention. Mahmoud Khalil is not just getting his day in court, he’s getting many days in court. If he and his family have to leave the country, it won’t be a blow against free speech, but it will definitely be a blow against Hamas, a terrorist organization that perpetuated the most violent act against Jews in almost a century. We can never allow anything like that to happen on American land. In this one case, and possibly only this one case, a deportation would actually be good for democracy.