Should Mahmoud Khalil be deported? Khalil, 30, was one of the lead organizers of Columbia University’s vile demonstrations supporting the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacres, rapes, and kidnappings. In March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Khalil in Manhattan.
The government alleges that Khalil breached the Immigration and Nationality Act of 19452 by supplying false information on his 2024 green card and is seeking to deport him on the grounds that his remaining in the United States could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
After being held for 104 days at LaSalle Detention Center in Louisiana, Khalil was released in June when a federal judge ruled that he was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the public. However, his deportation proceedings and $20 million claim for damages against the Trump administration are continuing.
The Trump administration is right to seek the deportation of foreign nationals who are actively hostile to the U.S. Khalil’s hostility is not in doubt. His defenders say his speech rights were violated, but the rights of a U.S. citizen are not the same as the duties of a green card holder. After Oct. 7, Khalil actively supported Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization, on Columbia’s campus. He distributed Hamas propaganda, including a leaflet that said “Our Narrative … Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” with the logo of the “Hamas Media Office,” and was caught on film justifying Hamas’s savagery as “armed resistance” and “legitimate under international law.”
Khalil was the lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Disinvest, the student pressure group that organized a frequently violent campus occupation and supported “liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.” CUAD’s multiple breaches of Columbia’s rules should have been reason enough for canceling Khalil’s green card. But Columbia indulged a racist mob, and now has to pay a $221 million settlement with the Trump administration for breaching federal law, too.
Khalil’s case is complicated by his 2023 marriage to a U.S. citizen, which secured his green card, and his parentage of a U.S. citizen. His son was born while he was detained in Louisiana. I’m no lawyer, but it looks to me like we’re stuck with him. So let’s look at the kind of foreign national for whom our top universities roll out the student visas and hand out the credentials.
Khalil was born in Syria in 1995. His grandparents are of Palestinian origin, and he was raised in a refugee camp in southern Damascus. He claims to be a “double refugee,” a descendant of stateless Palestinians on his father’s side and a stateless asylum-seeker in Lebanon after fleeing Syria in the early stages of its civil war in 2013. This is misleading. Khalil also says his mother’s family descended from Algerian immigrants to the Ottoman Empire. He is an Algerian citizen.
Under Algeria’s citizenship law of 1970, the son of an Algerian mother and a stateless father can claim citizenship in the 12 months preceding his coming of age, provided that his “habitual and regular residence” is in Algeria at the time of application. Khalil has never described himself as an Algerian resident. In 2013, he said he was in Beirut earning his B.A. in computer science from the Lebanese American University. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argues that Khalil misrepresented himself on his green card application. Perhaps the State Department and ICE should look into how Khalil obtained Algerian citizenship.
In 2016, Khalil worked for Jusoor, a Beirut-based nongovernmental organization. The BBC called Jusoor a “Syrian-American non-profit.” New York magazine coyly described it as an “education non-profit for youth.” Read Jusoor’s website, and it’s clear that its analysis of the Syrian civil war aligns with that of the jihadists who currently control the Syrian government. Khalil ran Jusoor’s youth program. In 2016, one of the volunteers was his future wife, Noor Abdalla, the daughter of Syrian immigrants living in Flint, Michigan.
In 2018, Khalil worked for the Syrian office of the British Embassy in Beirut. Andrew Waller, who worked with Khalil, called him a “former British government employee who was vetted and well-liked.” Khalil ran a program bringing foreign students to British universities and, according to the Guardian, played a “support role” in which he “helped to inform and shape British foreign policy on Syria through his knowledge and Arabic skills.” From there, Khalil successfully applied for a master’s at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. In 2023, six months after entering the U.S. on an F-1 student visa, and after a seven-year, long-distance correspondence, he married Abdalla.
The government argues that Khalil’s 2024 green card application was fraudulent because he omitted his work shaping Britain’s Syria policy and his six-month internship at UNWRA’s U.N. office in New York City, for which Columbia, incredibly, gave him 3 course credits. Perhaps he will be caught on these technicalities. But there are other, more intriguing questions about Khalil.
Once Rubio has established how Khalil got an Algerian passport, here’s another puzzler: How did Khalil, a self-described double refugee and full-time student, pay for his two-year Columbia master’s degree, which costs over $70,000 a year?
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.