A pro-Palestine activist and Columbia University graduate student was ordered freed by a judge three months after ICE took him into custody over claims he is a Hamas supporter.
Mahmoud Khalil, 30, must be freed on bail, a New Jersey federal judge ruled on Friday in a major victory for the protestor.
A lawful resident in the US, Khalil was taken into custody on March 8, 2025, as the Trump administration cracked down on pro-Palestine demonstrations on college campuses.
Khalil was one of the primary organizers of protests that took over Columbia as the Israel – Hamas conflict was ignited.
In the ruling Friday, Judge Michael E. Farbiaz that none of the Trump administration’s allegations against Khalil justified his continued detention, and sided with Khalil’s argument that he was locked up as an unlawful retaliation for his activism.
In his ruling on Friday, Farbiarz said: ‘There is at least something to the underlying claim that there is an effort to use the immigration charge here to punish Mr. Khalil – And of course that would be unconstitutional.’
Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but the judge’s order to free him comes as the Trump White House continues efforts to deport him back to Algeria, where he is a citizen.
When he was detained earlier this year, Khalil’s case gained national attention as he was the first pro-Palestinian protester to be arrested by the Trump administration in its crackdown on college campuses.
Several protests he organized and led at Columbia turned violent, with one seeing 112 students arrested when they stormed a campus building and occupied it as NYPD officers tried to shut their demonstration down.
His arrest sparked protests across the country as critics accused the Trump administration of unlawfully arresting a legal resident without charging him with a crime in violation of his free speech.
He was detained under the Cold War–era Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which states that non-US citizens can be deported if they are antagonistic against US foreign policy.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Khalil of spreading anti-Semitism, and White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said he was ‘siding with terrorists.’
But in the three months that Khalil has been detained, the Justice Department hasn’t disclosed any substantive connection between Khalil and Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and killed around 1,200 civilians.
In their successful filing to free Khalil this week, the graduate student’s attorneys argued that he was not spreading anti-Semitism when he campaigned for Palestine in its war with Israel.
They cited past quotes from him such as comments he made to CNN during a campus protest, where he said that ‘he liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand by hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.’
Judge Farbiarz had previously ruled that the foreign policy law was not enough to justify Khalil’s detention, and his ruling on Friday shot down further allegations from the Trump administration that Khalil made paperwork errors when applying for citizenship last year.
A number of other pro-Palestine protestors have been arrested and freed in the time that Khalil was detained.
Following Friday’s ruling, Khalil’s attorneys say he will be able to return to New York to be with his wife and baby son, both of whom are US citizens.
‘Today’s ruling underscores a vital First Amendment principle: The government cannot abuse immigration law to punish speech it disavows,’ Noor Zafar, one of Khalil’s attorneys, said.
