Anti-Israel Agitator Mahmoud Khalil Set to Be Deported, Likely to Algeria, US Official Says

Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent anti-Israel activist who helped stage riotous demonstrations on New York City college campuses, will likely be repatriated to Algeria following the overturning of a ruling which delayed his deportation by federal law enforcement, according to a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official.

“It looks like he’ll go to Algeria. That’s what the thought is right now,” DHS public affairs official Tricia McLaughlin told NewsNation during an interview on Wednesday night.

“It’s a reminder for those who are in this country on a visa or on a green card. You are a guest in this country — act like it,” she added. “It is a privilege, not a right, to be in this country to live or to study.”

Khalil, an Algerian citizen born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, was detained by the Trump administration in March after federal agents arrested him at his Manhattan apartment for what DHS described as “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” The State Department also alleged that Khalil was supporting Hamas and argued his residing in the US posed “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Immigration officials moved Khalil to New Jersey, leading his case to be transferred there to US District Judge Michael Farbiarz.

Khalil was held without charge for more than 100 days at a facility in Louisiana administered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, until Farbiarz ordered his release in June, ruling that the government failed to prove he posed a threat and suggesting the detention may have violated his First Amendment rights.

Last week, however, a three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the lower court lacked “subject-matter jurisdiction” under federal immigration law to halt the Trump administration’s effort to deport Khalil.

The ruling stressed that Khalil lacks legal standing to challenge the government’s decision to deport him before his case has been adjudicated in immigration court, adding that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) does not allow for a petition to review (PFR) the case at the federal level at this time.

“The scheme Congress enacted governing immigration proceedings provides Khalil a meaningful forum in which to raise his claims later on — in a petition for review of a final order of removal,” an opinion issued by the majority said. “That scheme ensures that petitioners get just one bite at the apple — not zero, or two. But it also means that some petitioners, like Khalil, will have to wait to seek relief for allegedly unlawful government or conduct.”

Khalil’s lawyers, provided by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have vowed to exhaust “every available avenue,” which may include a petition for his case to be decided by the US Supreme Court.

The US government has also accused Khalil of lying to obtain a green card. In court documents it charged that Khalil did not disclose that he had interned for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a group that was found multiple times to have been breached by Hamas members, and also concealed key details about another position he held at the British embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Khalil, the government added, also did not inform immigration officials about his leadership role in the notorious “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” (CUAD) group.

CUAD perpetrated illegal building occupations and severe infrastructure sabotage while Khalil participated in a graduate program at Columbia University in the months after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. The acts stunned Columbia’s campus, prompting fears of imminent revolutionary-style violence on campus even as Jewish students and faculty received antisemitic hate mail and death threats.

Activists of Khalil’s ilk remain at Columbia, as The Algemeiner reported earlier this week.

This semester, a professor who celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel — where the Palestinian terrorist group sexually assaulted women and men, kidnapped the elderly, and murdered children in their beds — is being allowed to teach a course on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Joseph Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history, published an encomium to Hamas in The Electronic Intifada which lauded the Oct. 7 atrocities as “astounding,” “awesome,” “incredible,” and the basis of future assaults on the Jewish state. Additionally, Massad went as far as to exalt the Hamas paragliders who flew into a music festival to slaughter the young people attending it as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance.”

“Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them,” Massad wrote.

According to Columbia University’s website, this academic semester Massad will teach a course titled “Palestinian-Israeli Politics and Society,” which “provides a historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background of the current situation.” The class will also go over the history of “the development of Zionism through the current peace process.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.