Mahmoud Khalil, the most prominent of the pro-Palestinian students the Trump administration targeted for deportation last year, has lost his deportation case after the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected his request for leniency Thursday.
The ruling does not mean he will be immediately deported. He already has another case pending in a regular circuit court of appeals and vowed to appeal this latest decision, too. While those cases are pending, he is likely to be able to stave off deportation.
Mr. Khalil called the court “biased and politically motivated.”
The administration declared him an obstruction to U.S. foreign policy last year, and began deportation proceedings against him. He challenged that move, and the administration then added another grounds of deportation, saying he had misled officials in his immigration documents by not reporting a past association with a U.N. agency that worked in Gaza.
A federal district judge said neither of those was sufficient reason to speed his deportation, and ordered him released from custody.
But that didn’t end the deportation case itself.
And an immigration judge — who is part of the Justice Department — ruled that there were grounds to deport him. It is that ruling that the BIA, also a part of DOJ, upheld Thursday.
“I have broken no law. The only thing I am guilty of is speaking out against the genocide in Palestine — and this administration has weaponized the immigration system to punish me for it,” Mr. Khalil said Thursday in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is helping defend him.
Mr. Khalil, born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and a citizen of Algeria, came to the U.S. on a student visa to study at Columbia University.
He married a U.S. citizen in 2023 and obtained lawful permanent residency. It is that application where the Trump administration says fraud took place.
He was at the school in the aftermath of Hamas’s murderous 2023 sneak attack on Israel, and Israel’s overwhelming retaliatory response. He was a leader in student protests against Israel and against what they saw as their school’s refusal to more forcefully condemn Israel.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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