Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil remains in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention despite a judge ruling last week that the government’s original reason for detaining him was invalid.
On Monday, Khalil’s lawyers and family called on ICE to release him, or at the very least transfer him to a facility closer to his wife and infant son, who was born after his detention.
“The government is making desperate, last ditch attempts to keep my husband unjustly imprisoned,” Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, said in a statement. “The American people are with us, and can see right through the government’s unjust attempts to delay his release. No matter what the government pulls, we will bring Mahmoud home safe.”
U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled last week that the government could not detain Khalil based on its original justification. But instead of releasing him, the government submitted a new reason to keep him detained, alleging that he committed fraud on his green card application.
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Farbiarz on Friday allowed the government to continue holding him under the new allegations.
Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was active in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, has been in ICE detention since March. His arrest garnered national attention after video showed officers handcuffing him next to his then-pregnant wife. Since then, he’s missed the birth of their son and spent months in a detention center despite facing no criminal charges.
Initially, the government justified Khalil’s detention by arguing he could be deported under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows for people whose presence poses “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” to be removed on orders from the secretary of state.
The government is now arguing that Khalil purposely omitted details about his involvement in certain organizations, especially those that help Palestinians. His lawyers have denied the allegations.
“The government’s decision to continue to detain Mahmoud on these patently false and pretextual charges is only more evidence of their cowardly vindictiveness toward him and their unrelenting desire to punish him for speaking out against them and their complicity in genocide,” attorney Baher Azmy said in a statement.
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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