Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers requested that Secretary of State Marco Rubio testify in Khalil’s deportation case to expand on the Department of Homeland Security‘s evidence submitted Thursday.
DHS lawyers released a two-page memo from Rubio on Tuesday at the request of a judge. The memo outlined the Trump administration’s case for Khalil’s deportation. Khalil’s lawyers argued the memo lacked evidence, and they requested that Rubio testify in court to explain the administration’s decision.
“Mr. Khalil has the right under due process to confront the evidence against him, and that’s what we want to examine Secretary of State Rubio about,” said Marc Van Der Hout, one of Khalil’s lawyers, according to the New York Times.
In the memo, Rubio said that while Khalil didn’t commit a crime, his presence in the United States endangered its foreign policy objectives.
Khalil’s continued presence in the U.S. “undermines U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States,” he said.
“Condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” Rubio added.
Hout challenged the assertion.
“What is the antisemitism?” he said during a Thursday Zoom meeting with reporters. “It is criticizing Israel and the United States for the slaughter that is going on in Gaza, in Palestine. That’s what this case is about.”
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the Associated Press in a statement that the “DHS did file evidence, but immigration court dockets are not available to the public.”
Rubio’s memo included charges against at least one other person, but the names were blocked out.
His lawyers acknowledged the judge is unlikely to grant Khalil’s request, according to the New York Times. His immigration hearing is scheduled for Friday, when the judge will rule whether he must be released or can be deported.
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Khalil’s detention and possible deportation were based on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that holds that “an 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,” according to a senior homeland security official.
McLaughlin said the arrest was made per President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting campus antisemitism.