Trump Administration Admits ICE Arrested Mahmoud Khalil Without a Warrant

On Thursday, Trump administration officials admitted that Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested without a warrant. Khalil, a green card holder, has been detained since March, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio cancelled his visa over nebulous allegations of "pro-terrorist" speech.

This admission came as part of a lengthy legal battle over the government's attempt to deport Khalil without criminal charges or due process.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Khalil on March 8 and quickly took him to a detention center in Louisiana. Administration officials have said he was arrested in connection with pro-Palestine protests at Columbia. "This administration is not going tolerate individuals having the privilege of studying in our country and then siding with pro-terrorist organizations that have killed Americans," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in March. "We have a zero-tolerance policy for siding with terrorists, period." On April 11, an immigration judge in Louisiana sided with the administration, stating that the "department has met its burden to establish removability by clear and convincing evidence."

In a Thursday filing, government lawyers admitted that officers who detained Khalil conducted a "warrantless arrest." The attorneys argued that the Department of Homeland Security wasn't required to get a warrant because they had reason to believe that Khalil was likely to "escape" before one would be obtained. 

"He refused to cooperate with the agents, even though they exercised discretion and decided not to arrest him on a misdemeanor charge for failure to possess his green card," reads the filing. "He verbally informed the agents that he was going to leave the scene, even though his wife had not yet returned with his conditional residence card….Thus, the exception to the warrant requirement applied and the agents were within lawful authority to arrest the respondent."

Khalil's legal team views this admission as a victory. "The government now finally admits what the whole world already saw and knows: that ICE had no warrant to apprehend Mahmoud Khalil," Ramzi Kassem, one of Khalil's lawyers, said in a press release. "No one should take seriously the government's patent lie, which it offers for the first time many weeks after the fact, that somehow Mahmoud was anything other than compliant when ICE agents unlawfully abducted him under cover of darkness."

Khalil is far from the first legal resident to face deportation for pro-Palestine speech. Last month Rubio said that he had cancelled around 300 student visas. "We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not become a social activist that tears up our university campuses," Rubio told reporters. "And if we've given you a visa and you decide to do that, we're going to take it away,"

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