𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

A federal judge has said he will order Mahmoud Khalil released on bail from an immigration detention center in Louisiana, where the Columbia University student activist has been locked up for more than three months for his campus activism against Israel’s war in Gaza.

During a bail hearing on Friday, New Jersey District Judge Michael Farbiarz said Khalil poses no danger to the community and is not a flight risk. “Period, full stop,” he said.

The judge said it is “highly unusual” for Donald Trump’s administration to continue holding him in detention, with no evidence he committed any crime, and after the judge’s determination that his detention and threat of removal from the country over First Amendment-protected speech is unconstitutional.

Khalil was stripped of his green card and arrested in front of his then-pregnant wife in their New York City apartment building on March 8. He was then sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana, roughly 1,300 miles away from their home in New York.

Following his arrest, Khalil was accused of “antisemitic activities” for his role as a Palestinian student activist that helped organize campus-wide demonstrations against Israel’s war. Officials concede that he did not commit any crime, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sought to justify Khalil’s arrest by invoking a rarely used law claiming that Khalil’s presence in the United States undermines foreign policy interests of preventing antisemitism.

On June 11, Judge Farbiarz ruled that the administration had unconstitutionally wielded the law against Khalil, whose “career and reputation are being damaged and his speech is being chilled,” the judge wrote.

The government has “little or no interest in applying the relevant underlying statutes in what is likely an unconstitutional way,” Farbiarz added.

The judge said the government could not detain and deport him on those spurious legal grounds.

Khalil and his legal team argue his arrest and detention — and attempted removal from the country, which is currently blocked by court order — are retaliatory violations of his First Amendment right to freedom of speech and his Fifth Amendment right to due process of law, among other claims.

His arrest sparked international outrage over the Trump administration’s attempts to crush campus dissent. Rubio has said he “proudly” revoked hundreds of student visas over campus activism, leading to several high-profile arrests of international scholars.

Khalil, who is Palestinian, grew up in a refugee camp in Syria. He entered the United States on a student visa in 2022 to pursue a master’s degree in public administration, which he completed last year.

He missed his graduation ceremony last month.

“As someone who fled persecution in Syria for my political beliefs, for who I am, I never imagined myself to be in immigration detention, here in the United States,” Khalil wrote in a sworn declaration in court filings.

Khalil’s wife Noor Abdalla gave birth to their son in April. They met for the first and only time before an immigration court hearing last month.

“Instead of holding my wife’s hand in the delivery room, I was crouched on a detention center floor, whispering through a crackling phone line as she labored alone,” Khalil wrote in court filings. “I listened to her pain, trying to comfort her while 70 other men slept around me. When I heard my son’s first cries, I buried my face in my arms so no one would see me weep.”

This is a developing story