And a federal judge in New Jersey has temporarily barred Khalil’s removal from the country.
The judge is taking it very slow in this case, avoiding any pitfall possible. The parties were briefing the issue of whether and to what extent a District Judge could develop an immigration case record (as opposed to an immigration judge), for example. The judge on his own raised whether his first decision (whether the case should be transferred to Louisiana, where the guy is detained) should be certified as an interlocutory appeal, which is quite rare. The media is presenting this as "barring his removal" but that's really subsequent to just trying to deal with the lawsuit.
They're not saying "you can't remove him because Trump bad," the judge is saying "he's suing so while we figure out this case, which is already quite weird because he's suing for habeas relief while being detained in Louisiana rather than letting the immigration proceedings play out, don't moot the case by deporting him to Syria." It's quite normal.
Khalil isn’t accused of breaking any laws during the protests at Columbia. The government, however, has said that noncitizens who participate in such demonstrations should be expelled from the country for expressing views that the administration considers to be antisemitic and “pro-Hamas,” referring to the Palestinian militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Khalil, a 30-year-old international affairs graduate student, had served as a negotiator and spokesperson for student activists at Columbia University who took over a campus lawn last spring to protest Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
The guy held himself out as a representative of a group that encouraged breaking the law—and whose members did break the law multiple times, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars of damage and disruptions to students paying lots of money to actually study. He then was involved in a library occupation in March, in which the occupiers literally distributed Hamas pamphlets. The pamphlets literally were from the Hamas foreign relations office—the pamphlets were branded and not secretive at all about their origin. The guy is a guest in our country and used his time here to hold himself out as a representative of a group that has committed and which continues to encourage criminal activity, and which explicitly hates the United States.
Khalil also is not a student. He
was a student, but finished his program. How someone can be a serious student while spending all their time trying to foment mobs that hate white people, America, and Israel is another question. Add to that how he can continue to get funding from a university to house him and his wife while he's not even studying anymore because he finished his program. It's almost like half our universities have programs that are incubators for political activism rather than programs of study. Weird how that works.
deporting a Brown University professor who they said had attended the Lebanon funeral of a leader of Hezbollah,
"They said"? She was upfront about it. She said she was there to do that. This isn't in dispute, unless she goes back on her word.
The media truly is the enemy of the people. They obfuscate and lie to present with sympathy the people who hate our country and who support groups that proudly kill Americans. Even when they say a line that is technically true, they omit necessary information that contextualizes things. Journalists are scum.
Edit: They also love to always use the line "no criminal record." That just means they haven't been arrested, not that they're choirboys. A lot of illegal immigrant gang members have "no criminal record," but they're criminals anyways because they're part of criminal gangs. This is like reporting on the arrest of a child rapist and screaming "they're detaining someone without any criminal record."
And it doesn't matter, regardless. The immigration statutes are quite clear that you don't have to be formally arrested or convicted of anything to be deported.
