A federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that a federal district court acted improperly in releasing Mahmoud Khalil from immigration detention, finding that the pro-Palestinian activist’s claims should have been handled by an immigration court.
The three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled 2-1 that the Immigration and Nationality Act stripped federal district courts of jurisdiction over claims related to the removal proceedings of a noncitizen. U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ruled in June that Khalil should be released from immigration detention, but Thursday’s appeals court ruling tosses that order and tells the district judge to dismiss the case.
“Our holdings vindicate essential principles of habeas and immigration law. The scheme Congress enacted governing immigration proceedings provides Khalil a meaningful forum in which to raise his claims later on—in a petition for review of a final order of removal,” the appeals court ruling said.
While the ruling only directly affects Khalil’s case, it could spell doom for other efforts by illegal immigrants and noncitizens who have tried to fight their deportations in district courts, rather than the separate system of immigration courts created by Congress for such cases.
The process outlined in the appeals court ruling requires Khalil to bring his case through an immigration court until a final removal order has been entered, at which point he can take all his claims to a federal appeals court — not a district court.
“The immigration laws enacted by Congress ordinarily require an alien to challenge his deportation in a [petition for review]” to a federal appeals court, the three-judge panel wrote. “That scheme ensures that petitioners get just one bite at the apple—not zero or two,” their ruling said.
Khalil’s lawyers had attempted to free him from immigration detention last year by filing a habeas corpus petition in a district court. That kind of petition, used frequently by lawyers of noncitizens detained during the first year of the Trump administration, challenges the legality of a person’s detention in any kind of government custody while, in the context of immigration proceedings, avoiding a direct challenge to the government’s basis for deportation.
Democrat-appointed district judges have delivered numerous victories to noncitizens such as Khalil, who have used habeas petitions to escape their removal proceedings. But the appeals court’s ruling this week found district judges shouldn’t have handled those cases in the first place.
“[T]he INA bars him from attacking his detention and removal in a habeas petition,” the appeals court said of Khalil.
Federal immigration authorities detained Khalil in March, after the Trump administration determined he posed a threat to the United States’s diplomatic interests. With Thursday’s ruling, Khalil could be rearrested by federal immigration authorities. An immigration judge ordered in September that he could be deported to his native Syria or Algeria, where he holds citizenship.
The most notable habeas corpus dispute in a federal district court involving an illegal immigrant came in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia last year. The Trump administration has attempted for months to deport Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador.
In the Abrego Garcia case, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, has not allowed the Trump administration to remove him and instead ordered him released from immigration detention late last year, after finding that the government had not obtained a removal order to deport him in 2019 as it had claimed.
The Trump administration went back to an immigration judge to fix the discrepancy and then asked Xinis to permit the detention and removal of Abrego Garica. Xinis is expected to enter an order on that request by next month.
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Bill Shipley, a former federal prosecutor, said in a post on X that Xinis should have a “hard time” ignoring the Third Circuit’s ruling, even though the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rules over her district court.
“Xinis has been so wrong on this issue for so long, she’ll have a hard time ignoring this. DOJ has told her repeatedly she lacks jurisdiction, and she simply waves it off without ever explaining why it is [that] the jurisdiction stripping statute in the INA doesn’t apply to her. He continued efforts are the absolute definition of a judge gone ‘rogue,’” Shipley said.