OPINION:
Last week, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals made the smart decision to issue a final removal order for Palestinian terrorist sympathizer and agitator Mahmoud Khalil.
The 31-year-old former Columbia University graduate student, who was arrested in March 2025 for his role in violent anti-Israel campus protests, should not be allowed to remain in the United States.
Mr. Khalil and his supporters, including dozens of House and Senate Democrats, would have you believe that the issue at hand is free speech. It is not.
After the Justice Department’s decision Thursday, the Syrian-born 2024 Columbia graduate said, “I have committed no crime. I have broken no law. The only thing I am guilty of is speaking out against the genocide in Palestine.”
Yet Mr. Khalil was deeply involved in the Columbia University protests as Israel tried to root out Hamas in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023. Easily accessible photos and videos online show him among the mob that took over a Barnard College building, littering the place with pamphlets bearing the “Hamas Media Office” name and reading “Our narrative … Al-Aqsa Flood” and “Death to Amerika.”
Mr. Khalil has denied being a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition whose best-known member is the Hamas-aligned Students for Justice in Palestine. Yet he reportedly met with school officials on the group’s behalf during the protests and served as co-president of the School of International and Public Affairs’ Palestine Working Group, which in 2023 was listed as a CUAD member.
It was to CUAD’s three demands — divestment from Israel, financial transparency and amnesty — that protesters involved in the violent and illegal 2024 takeover of the university’s Hamilton Hall demanded the school accede before they would leave. Some of these protesters reportedly assaulted, beat and held hostage several school staffers, calling them “Jew lovers,” “Jew workers” and “Zionists” as they did so.
As Brandeis Center founder Ken Marcus said: “This was not mere protest activity, but involved some degree of criminality. The federal government is not prosecuting people for engaging in political speech. The federal government is addressing criminality, violation of school rules and violation of the terms of either green cards or student visas.”
Mr. Khalil is not an American citizen. He is a green card holder, which means he is a guest in our country. He does not have First Amendment rights. (Even if he did, unlawful conduct and incitement to violence are not protected by the free speech clause.)
It has been the law for more than 20 years that any alien who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity” can be deported.
When asked last year (by a Jewish journalist) about Hamas’ Oct. 7 slaughter of men, women, children and babies, Mr. Khalil responded that “we couldn’t avoid such a moment.” Is there any firmer endorsement of terrorism than that?
Mr. Khalil holds Algerian citizenship through a relative. The Trump administration has every legal right to put him on the next plane to Algiers or Damascus, and it should do so.
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