(NewsNation) — President Donald Trump has vowed the arrest of a Columbia University graduate student who organized pro-Palestinian rallies at the school will “be the first of many to come” as immigration advocates push back against the possible deportation of an immigrant who holds legal permanent resident status.
Mahmoud Khalil was sent to a detention center in Louisiana, where he faces deportation after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I think we ought to get them all out of the country,” Trump said about Khalil’s arrest Tuesday. “They’re troublemakers, they’re agitators. They don’t love our country, we ought to get them the hell out. I think that guy—I heard his statements too. They were plenty bad, and I think we had to get him the hell out of the country.”
Khalil was arrested despite holding a green card, which provides him Fifth Amendment due process rights under the U.S. Constitution. Khalil is scheduled to appear at a hearing Wednesday after a federal judge in Manhattan blocked Khalil’s deportation earlier this week.
Rosanna Berardi, the managing partner at Berardi Immigration Law, said Khalil’s case is concerning on several levels and sets a dangerous precedent that should be concerning to other migrants in his position.
“I would gather that anyone that has a political view or has protested and also has a green card would be nervous,” Berardi told NewsNation. “If this is any indication of the administration’s position on green card holders that their own agency vetted at a super-high level and gave a green card to, and this is the behavior of the administration, I would be gravely concerned.”
Why is Mahmoud Khalil facing deportation?
Khalil was arrested on Saturday for “leading activities aligned to Hamas,” a designated terrorist organization, the Department of Homeland Security announced.
The agency said Khalil was arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”
Two people with knowledge of Khalil’s arrest told The New York Times that Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The act states that any alien whom the secretary of state has reasonable grounds to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.
Trump referred to Khalil as a “radical, foreign pro-Hamas student” in a post on Truth Social in which he wrote that ICE “proudly arrested” Khalil.
“We know that 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,” Trump wrote.
He added: “We will find, apprehend and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country – never to return again.”
Trump wrote that the presence of those who support terrorism “is contrary to our national and foreign policy interest and not welcome here.”
U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., told NewsNation that colleges and universities need to “step up to the plate” to prevent rallies like the ones Khalil organized at Columbia from happening. Walberg said that by leading campus protests, Khalil put Jews on campus at risk and kept students from their studies.
“This type of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism cannot go on in our college campuses,” Walberg said. “That’s not what we are.”
Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer, a Cornell Law School professor, told The Associated Press that permanent legal residents have many constitutional protections. However, she said that green card holders can be deported for committing certain crimes or failing to report a change in address or committing marriage fraud.
Did Mahmoud Khalil break the law?
The Center For Constitutional Rights, which is part of Khalil’s legal representation, called Khalil’s arrest, detention and attempted deportation not only “patently unlawful” but said it is “a further dangerous step into modern-day McCarthyism repression.”
Khalil’s attorney, Amy Greer, told ABC News that ICE arrested Khalil, claiming his student visa had been revoked. But when alerted that Khalil had his green card, agents said that it had been revoked as well.
“Agents arrested a U.S. permanent resident as he was walking home at night with his pregnant spouse because his speech and activism are not to the government’s liking,” Ramzi Kassem, the co-director of Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility, said in a statement issued by the organization.
“If our society remains attached to the rule of law, and if speech in the United States remains free, then no one should accept what happened to Mahmoud.”
Berardi, the Buffalo-based immigration attorney, agreed.
“We do not want to be a country in which the government kicks people out because we don’t like what they say,” she said.
What happens to Mahmoud Khalil next?
Berardi, who has practiced law for nearly 30 years, expects a judge to place Khalil’s case in the immigration court system.
He will likely be given a notice to appear, the charging document used in immigration court, which will allege the grounds on which the government is pushing for Khalil’s deportation. The immigration court process drags on for years in some cases, which could keep Khalil in federal custody until he appears before a judge on the charges.
In the meantime, Khalil’s wife, who was with him when he was arrested, is eight months pregnant. In a statement issued through the Center For Constitutional Rights, Khalil’s wife, who prefers not to be named in media reports, described her husband’s arrest as being “kidnapped from home” as the couple awaits their child.
But like many migrants who are arrested by federal immigration agents, Khalil faces a very uncertain future as his case enters a system that already faces a yearslong backlog of cases.
“I’m just concerned this is going to be kicked down the road for a long time,” Berardi told NewsNation. “I don’t see this wrapping up anytime soon, unfortunately.”
