A federal judge has ruled that the legal battle over Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation should continue to play out in New Jersey, rejecting the Trump administration’s bid to transfer the Columbia University protester’s case to Louisiana.
In a written decision Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz in Newark said jurisdiction over the case should remain in New Jersey since Khalil was being held there at the time his lawyer’s filed their Habeas Corpus petition.
“The Court’s jurisdiction is not defeated by the Petitioner having been moved to Louisiana,” the judge wrote, describing the government’s argument otherwise as “unpersuasive.”
The ruling does not guarantee that Khalil will be moved out of a detention facility in Louisiana, where he is being held as the government seeks his deportation for his role in campus protests against Israel. But it will allow his attorneys to make their arguments for his release before a judge in New Jersey.
If the case were to go forward in Louisiana, it may have ultimately ended up before one of the nation’s most conservative appeals courts, possibly allowing those judges to issue a precedent-setting ruling on both Khalil’s case and the Trump administration’s broader efforts to deport noncitizen student activists.
Khalil, a legal U.S. resident, was detained by federal immigration agents on March 8 in the lobby of his university-owned apartment. It was the first arrest under President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined campus protests against the war in Gaza.
Within hours of his arrest, he was flown to an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana, thousands of miles (kilometers) from his attorneys and his wife, a U.S. citizen who is due to give birth this month.
Khalil’s attorneys have accused the government of advancing a “radical reinterpretation” of existing law to move the case to a more favorable venue, while depriving him of access to his legal team and family.
“They keep passing around the body in an almost Kafkaesque way,” defense attorney Baher Azmy said at a court hearing Friday in New Jersey.
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