Explained | What to know about US trying to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident

The Trump administration is moving to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident of the United States who recently graduated from Columbia University and had helped lead high-profile campus protests against Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.

Speaking to reporters in Ireland on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Khalil of participating in protests that he described as antisemitic and supportive of the terrorist group Hamas. Foreigners who come to the United States and do such things, he said, will have their visas or green cards revoked and be kicked out.

“This is not about free speech,” Rubio said. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card, by the way.”

Khalil’s arrest ignited protests in New York and set up a fight over free speech.

Here’s what to know about the administration’s attempt to deport him.

Who is Mahmoud Khalil?

Khalil, 30, earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December. He has Palestinian heritage and is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant.

Khalil’s lawyers say he was arrested by immigration officers on Saturday in his apartment in Manhattan even though he told the agents that he had a green card. He was then sent to a detention center in Louisiana.

At Columbia last spring, Khalil assumed a major role in student-led protests on campus against Israel’s war efforts in Gaza. He described his position as a negotiator and spokesperson for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian group.

What’s the legal basis for his arrest and possible deportation?

Khalil has not faced any criminal charges, and deportation proceedings are a civil, not criminal, matter. In arresting Khalil and working to remove him from the United States, Rubio is relying on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.

The provision says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the secretary of state has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”

The administration’s rationale for why Rubio can invoke that provision to expel Khalil, according to people with knowledge of the matter, is that the United States has a foreign policy of combating antisemitism around the world. Khalil’s presence in the United States, the people said, would undermine that objective because the protests he helped lead were antisemitic and fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students.

President Donald Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, echoed some of that reasoning while speaking to reporters in Albany, New York, on Wednesday. He described Khalil as a “national security threat.”

“When you hand out leaflets inciting violence on a college campus, that’s illegal,” Homan said. “Being in this country with a visa or a resident card is a privilege, and you got to follow certain rules.”

At a news briefing on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, accused Khalil of “siding with terrorists.” She asserted that “pro-Hamas propaganda flyers” with the organization’s logo were distributed at the protests Khalil led at Columbia.

She declined to share the purported flyers with reporters, saying that doing so would corrupt the dignity of the White House briefing room, and presented no evidence that Khalil had produced or distributed any flyers.

Nor have officials accused Khalil of having any contact with Hamas, taking direction from it or providing material support to it.

Because lawful permanent residents are protected by the Constitution — including First Amendment free-speech rights and Fifth Amendment due-process rights — the case appears likely to set up a major test of whether that statute, at least as applied to this situation, is constitutional.

Immigration law specialists have struggled to find much guiding precedent for previous uses of the provision of the Immigration and National Act the administration is invoking.

The Clinton administration invoked the provision in 1995 in an attempt to deport a former Mexican government official, but the constitutional issues were never resolved. The ex-official, who was in the United States on a visa, filed a lawsuit, and in 1996, a federal judge in New Jersey — Maryanne Trump Barry, the sister of the president — struck the provision down as unconstitutional, noting that it had not been interpreted in any reported judicial opinion.

But an appeals court overturned her ruling, saying the former official had to go through the administrative immigration process before federal courts could address his case. In 1999, the Board of Immigration Appeals said the administration could use the provision to deport him, but two months later it changed course and instead indicted him. The former official died a month later, so the case ended.

What happens next?

A federal judge in Manhattan has ordered the government not to remove Khalil from the United States while his case is pending. But it is not yet clear whether that judge has jurisdiction over him now that he has been moved to Louisiana.

The judge did not make any immediate decisions about the detention of Khalil at a hearing on Wednesday, but he did allow Khalil’s lawyer two phone calls, their first privileged contact since his arrest. A lawyer for the government said that Khalil, a legal permanent resident, has been placed in removal proceedings in Louisiana, where he is being held.

Khalil’s lawyers also filed a motion on Monday asking the judge to compel the federal government to transfer him back to New York to reunite him with his wife, who is expected to give birth next month.

His immigration status will be decided in a separate process, presided over by an immigration judge who could determine whether to revoke Khalil’s green card. There is little precedent for deporting a legal permanent resident based on the 1952 law giving the secretary of state the power to do so on foreign policy grounds.

Could this happen to other visa or green card holders?

Trump said Khalil’s case was “the first arrest of many to come.” Leavitt echoed that warning and said that Columbia had the names of others who had “engaged in pro-Hamas activity” and that the school was “refusing to help” the Homeland Security Department identify them.

One of Khalil’s lawyers, Amy Greer, said that homeland security agents told her they had a warrant to revoke his student visa. When she informed them that Khalil did not have one, given that he was a permanent resident, she was told that the department had revoked his green card.

What has Trump said about pro-Palestinian protesters?

Since 2023, Trump has repeatedly vowed to revoke visas of international students who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and criticize Israel’s war efforts.

“Americans have been disgusted to see the open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses,” Trump declared at a rally in Iowa on Oct. 16, 2023. “They’re teaching your children hate.”

He added: “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical, anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home.”

At a speech in Las Vegas on Oct. 28 of that year, Trump said that “we’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country.”