ICE Secretly Hauled Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana as Retaliation, Lawyers Allege

Mahmoud Khalil’s wife watched as agents from the Department of Homeland Security handcuffed her husband and whisked him away from their New York City apartment in an unmarked vehicle on Saturday evening.

Agents ignored the pleas of Khalil’s wife who tried to show them legal papers proving her husband was a green card holder. They wouldn’t heed her requests to share where they were taking him, according to court filings. Eventually, one of the agents offered a terse response: Check the local immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan.

By next morning, however, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee locator indicated Khalil was no longer in New York. Instead, it showed him at the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. When Khalil’s wife visited the jail, she was turned away.

Without warning to Khalil’s wife or his immigration attorney Amy Greer, who the same morning had filed a petition to challenge her client’s arrest as a violation of his First Amendment free speech rights, ICE agents had transferred Khalil to a different facility. This time, they moved him thousands of miles south of his New York home to a facility in Louisiana. It wasn’t until Monday morning that Khalil’s exact whereabouts were updated in the ICE online system: the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, a private jail operated by the GEO Group.

Attorneys for Khalil allege the move from the New York metropolitan area to Louisiana was a “retaliatory transfer” intended to restrict his access and to lawyers and family, and position what has grown into a closely watched First Amendment case in a jurisdiction more friendly to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies.

Three days after his detention, Khalil still has not been charged with a crime. The Department of Homeland Security has said it arrested Khalil, a lead negotiator for Palestine solidarity protesters at Columbia, for having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” President Donald Trump, who campaigned on deporting pro-Palestinian protesters, pledged that Khalil’s arrest is “the first arrest of many to come” and that his administration would continue to target for deportations “more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” 

Although a Manhattan federal court ordered a temporary halt preventing the Trump administration from immediately deporting Khalil, attorneys remain concerned for his well-being and ability to access proper legal counsel. In a motion filed Monday evening by attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility project at the City University of New York School of Law, attorneys seek to reverse the ICE decision and to transfer Khalil back to New York. 

Khalil is instead in the Western District of Louisiana, a jurisdiction that more often sides with the government in immigration cases. Should Khalil’s case head toward appeals courts, he is now located in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where judges in January ruled against the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The LaSalle facility’s immigration court, which has minimal oversight, has also been used by the previous Trump administration as a site to fast-track deportations.

It is not uncommon for ICE to transfer individuals detained throughout the East Coast to larger facilities in the South. LaSalle, also known as Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, has been the center of multiple allegations of abuse, including beatings from guards, complaints of sexual assault, lack of access for lawyers, and wrongful death complaints of individuals incarcerated there.

Azmy, who called the case against Khalil “blatantly unconstitutional,” added that Greer was told by the Louisiana detention center that she must wait 10 days before she could speak to Khalil for a full legal call. Greer’s call with Khalil on Monday morning lasted only minutes before it was cut off, court filings said. His first call to his wife came more than 30 hours after he was taken into custody, court documents said. 

Greer said in a statement that Khalil “is healthy and his spirits are undaunted by his predicament.” Local attorneys were expected to visit with him Monday and Tuesday.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian, became a permanent U.S. resident in 2023. He served as a negotiator and mediator between school administrators and student protesters during the Columbia University campus protests over Israel’s war on Gaza. Khalil graduated in December from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Calls for Khalil’s release have been widespread. An online petition advocating for his release gathered nearly 2 million signatures by Monday evening. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside a federal building in Manhattan to protest his arrest on Monday. 

Although Trump and his administration have taken credit for the arrest as a part of their crackdown on apparent “Hamas supporters,” authorities have not been forthcoming about the legal grounds for Khalil’s detention. Agents who arrested Khalil claimed to have had an administrative warrant, not a warrant signed by a judge, attorneys said in court papers. The agents, which included an ICE agent honored by Trump in 2019, also alleged that Khalil’s green card had been revoked. Such a decision, however, requires due process before revocation, attorneys noted.

Sabiya Ahmed, staff attorney with Palestine Legal, blasted the vague and broad legal statements of the Trump administration as a common Trump tactic meant to spread fear and to chill advocacy.

She said the massive show of support for Khalil, however, is a sign that the movement for Palestinian rights will persist. 

“This is not something that can go unchecked — that is the message that students and activists and legal organizations are sending to the Trump administration and also to universities,” Ahmed said. “You cannot just throw your students under the bus in this way, and you cannot illegally revoke the lawful status of your students simply because of their advocacy for Palestine without any due process.”

Ahmed also called on Columbia and other universities to do more to protect their students from further attacks. She criticized Columbia’s responses to student protests that shook the campus last year in which administrators called police on students and proceeded to punish activists with lengthy hearings and suspensions, in some cases, with little due process. 

The day before his arrest, Khalil had written an email to Columbia University’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, requesting assistance from administration in the face of growing pressure from an online doxxing campaign by pro-Israel groups. After graduation, Khalil, who was born in 1995, continued living in an apartment owned by the university. In the email, Khalil described “the vicious and dehumanizing doxing campaign against him — including people falsely labeling him a terrorist threat and calling for his deportation,” court filings said.

“He closed the email by saying he was not able to sleep fearing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), or other dangerous individuals would target him and his family and urging Interim President Armstrong to provide legal support and other protections,” the filing said. 

After Khalil’s arrest, Armstrong pledged to support her community but added that she must also “follow the law.” She shot down speculation that suggested Columbia officials had requested ICE agents to come to campus. Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university due to “persistent harassment of Jewish students.” 

“It remains the long-standing practice of the University, and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, that law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including residential University buildings,” Armstrong said in a statement. However, the campus’s ICE policy says there are “exigent circumstances” where the university “may allow for access to University buildings or people without a warrant.” 

Through attorneys, Khalil’s wife, who withheld her name, asked for sustained support to secure Khalil’s release. She described her husband as selfless, sharing that she had in the past asked him to sometimes “put himself first,” to which he replied, “People are made for each other, and you should always be willing to lend a helping hand.”
“It feels like my husband was kidnapped from home,” she said, “and at a time when we were supposed to be planning to welcome our first child into this world.”