Pro-Palestine Activist Mahmoud Khalil Released After Months in ICE Detention

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University activist, was released from federal custody on Friday. As reported by NPR and CNN, this comes more than three months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested and detained him as the first student to be targeted for deportation due to President Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters.

Wearing a keffiyeh—a scarf seen as a symbol of Palestinian identity and resistance—Khalil smiled as he pumped his fists when he emerged from the detention center on Friday night accompanied by one of his lawyers. Since March, he had been held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in rural town of Jena, Louisiana.

While expressing relief at the upheld justice, Khalil told reporters outside the detention center, “Although justice prevailed but it’s long, very long overdue, and this shouldn’t have taken three months.”

On Friday evening, just hours after a federal judge in New Jersey ordered his release on bail, Khalil left the rural Louisiana immigration detention center where he had been held since early March. He was accompanied by two of his attorneys.

During a previous phone hearing that day, Judge Michael Farbiarz of the U.S. District Court for New Jersey stated that the government's effort to continue detaining Khalil was “highly unusual.” Farbiarz recently ruled that Khalil's arrest and detention for pro-Palestine activism at Columbia University likely violated the Constitution.

Khalil “is not a flight risk, and the evidence that has been presented to me at least is that he is not a danger to the community, period, full stop,” Farbiarz said when ordering Khalil's release.

"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. "And of course that would be unconstitutional."

The decision marks a monumental victory for Khalil, who is the last non-citizen student still in federal detention among others known to have been arrested by the Trump administration for their activism on campus. Khalil is a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, and 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."

Khalil said he left behind immigrants still in detention "who are in a place where they shouldn’t have been.”

“The Trump administration are doing their best to dehumanize everyone here,” he said. “Whether you are a US citizen, an immigrant or just a person on this land, doesn’t mean that you are less of a human.”

After Judge Farbiarz ordered Khalil's release, an attorney from the U.S. Department of Justice requested the judge to postpone his release for a week so the government could appeal the decision.

Farbiarz refused the request but agreed to impose certain conditions on Khalil's freedom. Although stating that he did not consider Khalil a flight risk, he required him to surrender his Algerian passport while his case continues.

Khalil also will not be allowed to travel outside New York and several other states.

He was detained at the Jena immigration detention center while fighting the government's efforts to deport him.

ICE agents arrested him in his New York apartment on March 8 after Secretary of State Marco Rubio cited a rarely used law to initiate Khalil's deportation. Rubio claimed his activism threatened the U.S. foreign policy goal of combating anti-Semitism.

The government has not provided evidence to support that claim and never criminally charged Khalil.

However, the Trump administration made a strong push to deport him. About a week after Khalil was arrested, immigration officials added further accusations, charging him in an immigration court with fraud on his 2024 green card application.

An immigration judge in Louisiana spent months considering the government's charges against Khalil.

On Friday, as Judge Farbiarz was about to conclude his two-hour-long hearing, Khalil's attorney informed him that the immigration judge in Louisiana had just ordered Khalil's deportation.

In a statement following Farbiarz's order to release Khalil, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, claimed that it was not a federal judge's decision to make.

She said that the government's actions to detain Khalil were "well within its constitutional and statutory authority."

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