Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate threatened with deportation for taking a leadership role in peaceful anti-war protests on campus, filed a lawsuit Thursday alongside seven other unnamed individuals to stop the university from providing a list of student activists’ names to lawmakers in Washington.
A House committee demanded to see the disciplinary records of pro-Palestinian students who participated in any of 11 specific demonstrations last year, such as the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall in April. Protesters renamed the building Hind’s Hall, after a Gazan child who was killed by Israeli strikes.
Khalil, a lawful permanent U.S. resident with a green card, is currently being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana after his arrest over the weekend.
He is not charged with any crime. Rather, President Donald Trump’s administration has claimed that Khalil threatens the nation’s international policy interests and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio therefore has the right to revoke his green card.
A federal judge has temporarily barred the government from deporting him.
The new lawsuit responds to a Feb. 13 letter from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, led by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), who claims Columbia is failing to protect Jewish students.
Attorneys for Khalil and the others argued in a court filing that to fully comply with the request, Columbia would “need to turn over entire private files of hundreds of its students, faculty and staff.” That would include sensitive, personally identifiable bits of information that “could be and have been used to harass, make threats against, and dox the individuals whose records are turned over to the Committee.”
Failing to comply carries the implicit threat of cutting off federal funding; the Trump administration has already announced it would withhold $400 million in grants to the institution.
″[T]he Committee has instrumentalized accusations of antisemitism to attack ideas it ideologically opposes,” attorneys for Khalil and the others said in a filing. “It traffics in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic dog whistles to justify unjustifiable intrusions on First Amendment rights.”
Khalil’s attorneys have said he began receiving threats in the days prior to his arrest. During the height of the student protest movement, Khalil served as a liason between the protesters and the university administration, volunteering to speak to the media.
In addition to Columbia University, the suit names Walberg, the entire House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Columbia’s board of trustees, the affiliated institution Barnard College and others.
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Hundreds of students turned out to protest Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, taking over common campus areas until their encampment was ultimately cleared by the New York Police Department.
The House committee also told the institution to hand over disciplinary records connected to a September protest of a class taught by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, several specific demonstrations, the disruption of a class on the history of Israel, and alleged vandalism.