Updated June 20, 2025 at 10:02 PM EDT
Mahmoud Khalil was released from federal custody on Friday, more than three months after immigration agents arrested and detained him as the first student targeted for deportation by President Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters.
On Friday evening, hours after a federal judge in New Jersey ordered the government to release him, Khalil walked out of the rural Louisiana immigration detention center where he's been held since early March. He was accompanied by two of his lawyers.
During a phone hearing earlier in the day, Judge Michael Farbiarz of the U.S. District Court for New Jersey said that the government's attempt to continue to detain Khalil was "highly, highly, highly unusual." Farbiarz recently ruled that Khalil's arrest and detention over his pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University likely violated the Constitution.
"There is at least something to the underlying claim that there is an effort to use the immigration charge here to punish Mr. Khalil," Farbiarz said in ordering Khalil's release. "And of course that would be unconstitutional."
The decision was a monumental victory for Khalil, who is the last noncitizen student still in federal custody among several that the Trump administration is known to have arrested over their campus activism. Khalil is a legal permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen. Their first child was born in April, while Khalil was detained.
"No one should fear being jailed for speaking out in this country," Alina Das, one of Khalil's lawyers, said in a statement. "We are overjoyed that Mr. Khalil will finally be reunited with his family while we continue to fight his case in court."
After Judge Farbiarz ordered Khalil set free, a Justice Department lawyer asked the judge to delay his release for a week so the government could appeal the decision. Farbiarz denied that request, but he agreed to place certain conditions on Khalil's freedom. While he said he did not consider Khalil a flight risk, he required him to surrender his Algerian passport while his case moves forward.
Khalil will also not be allowed to travel outside of New York and a handful of other states.
He has been held at an immigration detention center in Jena, La. while fighting the government's attempt to deport him. ICE agents arrested him at his New York apartment on March 8 after Secretary of State Marco Rubio cited a rarely used statute to initiate Khalil's deportation, claiming that his activism threatened U.S. foreign policy goals of fighting antisemitism. The government has not produced evidence to support that claim, and it never charged Khalil criminally.
But it has tried aggressively to deport him. About a week after Khalil was arrested, immigration officials added another charge against him, accusing him in immigration court of committing fraud on his 2024 green card application. A Louisiana immigration judge has spent months considering the government's charges against Khalil. On Friday, as Judge Farbiarz was nearing the end of his two-hour hearing, Khalil's lawyers informed him that the immigration judge in Louisiana had just ordered Khalil deported.
In a statement after Farbiarz ordered Khalil released, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security claimed it was not the federal judge's decision to make.
"An immigration judge, not a district judge, has the authority to decide if Mr. Khalil should be released or detained," she said. "This is yet another example of how out-of-control members of the judicial branch are undermining national security," DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
She added the administration's actions to detain Khalil were "well within its constitutional and statutory authority."
Judge Farbiarz told government lawyers that he expected Khalil to be released within hours. Khalil's legal team said they planned to quickly get him on a plane back to New York, where he'll reunite with his wife and his two month old son, who was born while he was in detention.
Copyright 2025 NPR
