Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian activist who was detained by the Trump administration last week, has asked a federal court to block Columbia University from sending his student disciplinary records to a House committee.
The lawsuit argues that the committee’s request and the school’s compliance would violate Khalil’s First Amendment rights. Last month, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent a letter to interim Columbia President Katrina Armstrong and the university board chairs stating that “numerous antisemitic incidents” had taken place and demanding disciplinary records connected to 11 incidents from the last school year.
Khalil is joined by seven unnamed students in the case. The lawsuit was filed in the federal district court in Manhattan and names Columbia and Armstrong, as well as its sister school Barnard College and Barnard President Laura Ann Rosenbury. It also names the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI).
Walberg said in a statement that the lawsuit does not change the committee’s demand and that it “will continue its work to protect Jewish students and hold schools accountable for their failures to address rampant antisemitism on our college campuses.”
Khalil was a prominent figure in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus. He was arrested by federal immigration agents in New York over the weekend and is being held in a Louisiana detention center. He is a green-card holder married to an American citizen, who is eight months pregnant, and in December, he earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
He has not been charged with any crime, but the Trump administration has accused him of siding with Hamas terrorists. His detention has been justified by a statute that allows the secretary of state to deport anyone he or she deems a threat to national security.
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“This is not about free speech,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Wednesday. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
Last spring, Columbia was at the center of various pro-Palestinian encampment protests taking place across the U.S. The Ivy League school has faced the ire of the Trump administration, which recently stripped it of $400 million in federal grants and contracts, claiming the school failed to take action against antisemitism.