NEW YORK: A US judge on Monday ordered that Palestinian Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil not be deported for now as part of US President Donald Trump\u2019s crackdown on some anti-Israel protesters, and set a court hearing in the case for Wednesday. Trump publicly denounced Khalil and said more arrests would follow. Khalil has been moved to a federal jail for migrants in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings, according to his lawyers and a US detainee database.
\nDemonstrators on the streets of New York City, the state attorney general and the American Civil Liberties Union have denounced his arrest by US Department of Homeland Security agents as an attack on free speech.
\nPolice and hundreds of protesters briefly clashed in lower Manhattan and at least one person was detained, according to a Reuters witness. Khalil, who had held legal permanent resident status and was arrested Saturday, has been a prominent figure in Columbia\u2019s pro-Palestinian student protest movement that set off campus demonstrations across the United States and around the world last year. Trump branded Khalil a \u201cRadical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student\u201d on social media. On Monday, US District Court Judge Jesse Furman put a hold on his deportation \u201cunless and until the Court orders otherwise.\u201d Khalil\u2019s lawyers also urged Furman to order Khalil\u2019s return to New York. They accused the government of seeking to deprive Khalil of access to legal counsel by sending him far from New York.
\nTrump said on social media that Khalil\u2019s \u201cis the first arrest of many to come.\u201d
\nThe Trump administration has not said Khalil is accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump wrote that his presence in the US was \u201ccontrary to national and foreign policy interests.\u201d
\nThe Education Department on Monday sent letters to 60 US universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and four University of California schools, warning them of cuts in federal funding unless they addressed allegations of antisemitism on campus. Even before Khalil\u2019s arrest, students say federal immigration agents have been spotted at student housing around Columbia\u2019s Manhattan campus since Thursday, a day before the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts awarded to the school because of what it described as antisemitic harassment on and near Columbia\u2019s New York City campus.
\nThe federal agents have been trying to detain at least one other international student, according to the Student Workers of Columbia labor union. Spokespeople for DHS and ICE declined to answer questions about the union\u2019s account, which Reuters was unable to independently verify.
\nA spokesperson for the Department of State said visa records are confidential under US law and so the department could not comment.<\/p>\n
\u2019CHILLING EFFECT\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n On Saturday evening, agents from the Department of Homeland Security arrested Khalil in front of his wife, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, telling him his student visa had been revoked, according to Amy Greer, a lawyer for Khalil. NEW YORK: A US judge on Monday ordered that Palestinian Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil not be deported for now as part of US President Donald Trump\u2019s crackdown on some anti-Israel protesters, and set a court hearing in the case for Wednesday. Trump publicly denounced Khalil and said more arrests would follow. Khalil has been moved …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78247,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78248,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78228\/revisions\/78248"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nHis wife showed the agents Khalil\u2019s green card and they also threatened to arrest her if she did not leave her lobby, Greer said. They then said the green card was also revoked and handcuffed Khalil, Greer said.
\nHours before his arrest, Khalil told Reuters he was concerned that the government was targeting him.
\nKhalil and other activists note that Jewish students are among the protest organizers, and say their criticism of Israel and its US government support is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism. Jewish faculty at Columbia held a rally and press conference in support of Khalil outside a university building on Monday, holding signs saying \u201cJews say no to deportations.\u201d \u201cThere is a chill in the air. It\u2019s a chill of fear and despair,\u201d said Marianne Hirsch, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, who grew up in Romania as a child of Holocaust survivors. While the Trump administration has cited concerns over antisemitism, the president and his allies have themselves been accused of enabling antisemitism. Following a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where some demonstrators carried torches and chanted \u201cJews will not replace us,\u201d Trump said there were \u201cfine people on both sides.\u201d Trump, who denies allegations of being antisemitic, also faced criticism in 2022 for dining with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"