Mahmoud Khalil was never charged with a crime. The provision the Trump administration used to arrest him, Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, doesn’t require one. It lets the Secretary of State declare that a non-citizen’s presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” and that determination, once made, counts in immigration court as what the Board of Immigration Appeals this April called “presumptive and sufficient evidence” of removability on its own, according to a summary of the ruling reported by CIS.org’s immigration-law blog. Neither an immigration judge nor the Board gets to look behind it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s memo, issued within days of Khalil’s arrest, cited his “participation and role[] in antisemitic protests and disruptive activities,” which it said “foster[] a hostile environment for Jewish students.” No specific act was named.
Khalil, 31, a Syrian-born Palestinian and lawful US permanent resident, returned to Columbia University on Tuesday for the first time since plainclothes immigration agents detained him in the lobby of his Morningside Heights apartment building on the night of March 8, 2025, as Al Jazeera reported. About 100 people attended the talk, on his new memoir, No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention, published in September by Metropolitan Books. His wife, Noor Abdalla, a US citizen, was eight months pregnant when he was taken; their son Deen was born during his detention, and Khalil listened by payphone.
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 Columbia encampment | DHS refers Khalil to State Dept | |
| DHS refers Khalil to State Dept | Rubio memo invokes INA §237(a)(4)(C) | days later |
| Rubio memo invokes INA §237(a)(4)(C) | ICE arrest, no warrant, Mar 8 2025 | |
| ICE arrest, no warrant, Mar 8 2025 | 104 days, Jena, Louisiana | transferred |
| 104 days, Jena, Louisiana | Habeas petition, district court | |
| Habeas petition, district court | Judge orders release, Jun 20 2025 | foreign-policy ground 'likely… |
| Habeas petition, district court | BIA: Rubio memo is enough, Apr 2026 | separate removal track |
| BIA: Rubio memo is enough, Apr 2026 | Cert petition filed, Oct 19 2026 |
The chart separates the two tracks the government ran at once: a habeas case over whether Khalil’s detention itself was lawful, and a parallel immigration-court removal case over whether he can be deported at all. They produced contradictory answers. On May 28, 2025, US District Judge Michael Farbiarz issued a 106-page opinion finding the foreign-policy removal ground likely unconstitutional as applied to Khalil; on June 11 he enjoined the government from detaining or removing him on that basis, and on June 20 ordered his release, ending a detention of 104 days. On the immigration side, a separate judge found him removable under the same provision, and the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld that finding on April 9, 2026, ruling that Rubio’s letter is self-sufficient evidence of the Secretary of State’s judgment, not reviewable by the Board itself. Khalil’s petition for review was denied by the Fifth Circuit on September 9, 2026, “without explanation,” according to his subsequent Supreme Court filing.
The habeas fight is where the case now sits. The Third Circuit ruled that federal courts lack jurisdiction to review the legality of a detention like Khalil’s until immigration proceedings are exhausted, and on May 22, 2026, the full Third Circuit denied rehearing en banc by a single vote, 6 to 5, with three dissenting judges writing that the panel’s reading “vitiates the Great Writ.” Khalil filed his petition for certiorari on October 19, 2026, after two extensions, asking the Supreme Court whether a court can ever intervene when, in his lawyers’ words, “the very point of detention is to retaliate and punish someone for constitutionally protected speech.” The government, separately, has asked the Court to hear a similar jurisdictional question in a Fourth Circuit case, Trump v. Suri, filed September 21, 2026, and told the Court it thinks both petitions should be granted together so neither case goes moot first.
In July 2025, a month after his release, Khalil’s lawyers filed an administrative claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act seeking $20 million in damages from the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the State Department, alleging false arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, abuse of process and emotional distress, as reported by The Washington Post and CNN. That is a precursor step the FTCA requires before suing in court; the government had six months to respond. Khalil has said he would accept an apology and the policy’s abandonment in place of the money, which he said he would otherwise use to help others targeted the same way. A DHS spokesperson called the claim “absurd” and cited Khalil’s “hateful behavior and rhetoric.”
The book, and the argument it makes
No Land to Stand On runs the detention story alongside Khalil’s earlier life: a Syrian refugee camp, a move to Lebanon, a teenage gunshot wound from Assad government forces, before Columbia and the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment he helped negotiate. The New York Times Book Review called it “a frightening, important book” that nonetheless carries “a measure of hope.” NPR’s interview with Khalil highlights its turn outward, to the people he met at the Jena, Louisiana facility: long-term US residents and parents separated from children, cases that got no press coverage and no $20 million claim.
At Tuesday’s event, Khalil argued that campus activism had already changed electoral outcomes, pointing to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s US Senate run in Michigan and Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty in New York City as evidence that, in his words, “the American public is finally changing, is finally looking at the Palestinian as an equal human.” That is a causal claim resting on two data points from one election cycle; neither campaign’s own messaging centered on campus protest movements as the deciding factor, and no polling tying campus activism specifically to either result has been published. He called his own return to Columbia a “victory” and accused the university’s leadership of trying “to erase me, to erase any Palestinian voices on campus.” Columbia, through a spokesperson, said it is “committed to rigorous debate, inquiry, and respectful dialogue,” and that hosting a speaker “does not signify university endorsement of a speaker’s views.” Some Jewish student groups objected to the invitation on social media, according to Al Jazeera’s report; Columbia had authorized the NYPD to clear the 2024 encampment, citing safety, a decision Khalil has separately criticized along with what he says was the university’s failure to protect him from harassment before his arrest.
My fight is not only about whether I get to stay in this country. It’s about whether people in this country can speak their minds.
The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to hear Khalil v. Trump or the government’s companion petition in Trump v. Suri. Both turn on the same mechanical question: whether a federal judge can ever examine a detention ordered on foreign-policy grounds before the immigration system has finished working the case through its own, non-reviewable channel. Until the Court rules, Khalil stays out of detention under Judge Farbiarz’s 2025 injunction, removable on paper and free in practice, which is its own kind of answer to the question his memoir asks.