ICE Arrests Columbia Student Mahmoud Khalil for Pro-Palestinian Protest, Reviving 1952 Cold War Statute to Deport a Green Card Holder

The Arrest

On the night of March 8, 2025, plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents walked into the lobby of a Columbia University-owned residential building in Morningside Heights and arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. The agents had no judicial warrant. They first told Khalil and his lawyer his student visa had been revoked. When informed Khalil did not have a student visa — he holds a green card, and is married to an American citizen who was eight months pregnant — they said the green card had been revoked instead. ACLU-released building security footage later confirmed that ICE’s stated justification for the arrest was false.

By March 10, Khalil had been put on a plane and flown roughly 1,400 miles south to ICE’s LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana — a remote facility in a deep-red federal district, the same one the administration has used to warehouse other politically inconvenient detainees. He was held there for 104 days. He has not been charged with any crime. He was not accused of any act of violence, vandalism, or material support for terrorism. The administration’s case against him is, on its own terms, that he led campus protests against the war in Gaza.

The 1952 Statute Brought Back to Life

The legal vehicle the Trump administration chose to deport Khalil was Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act — a provision of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, the same Cold War-era statute Senator Pat McCarran wrote to keep suspected communists out of the United States. The provision lets the Secretary of State, acting alone, declare a non-citizen deportable if he personally determines their presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Marco Rubio signed exactly that memo. The Associated Press obtained it; NBC News confirmed its contents. Rubio’s stated justification is not that Khalil violated any law. It is that his political beliefs and protest activity — his “expected beliefs, statements, or associations,” in the memo’s language — would, in the secretary’s personal opinion, embarrass the United States in its dealings with allied governments. It is, in other words, a law that allows a single cabinet officer to deport a green card holder for protected speech. On April 11, an immigration judge in Louisiana — operating inside the Justice Department’s own administrative court system, not the federal judiciary — ruled that the secretary’s say-so was sufficient to deport Khalil.

The McCarran-Walter foreign-policy provision has been used against permanent residents for political speech almost never in its 73-year history; the most famous prior attempt, against PLO supporters in the 1980s, was struck down on First Amendment grounds. The Trump administration has now made it the lead instrument of a campaign that has, by mid-2025, swept up dozens of student visa holders, postdocs, and green card residents at universities across the country.

Why This Case, Why First

Khalil’s case is not random. He was a lead negotiator of the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment in spring 2024 — visible, on camera, a Palestinian-born Algerian citizen with a green card and a pregnant American wife. He was, in other words, the highest-profile possible test case the administration could find: a sympathetic biography, a public role, and immigration paperwork that on any honest reading should have made him untouchable. The point of choosing him was the chilling effect. If a green card holder married to an American citizen can be hauled out of his apartment in the middle of the night and shipped to Louisiana for participating in a protest, no non-citizen on any American campus is safe for participating in any protest the administration disapproves of. That is the program.

In June, after 104 days inside, a federal judge in New Jersey ordered Khalil released on bail, ruling that his detention “likely” violated the Constitution. The deportation case continues, and the administration has signaled it will appeal his release as far as the Supreme Court. Whether or not Khalil is ultimately removed, the Trump White House has already gotten what it wanted from the exercise: a worked example, broadcast on every campus in the country, of what happens to non-citizens who protest the wrong war.

The Pattern

Khalil’s arrest belongs alongside the boat strikes off Latin America, the firings of inspectors general, the redirection of the Civil Rights Division against universities, and the new counterterrorism strategy that names “radically pro-transgender” advocacy as a federal threat. Each one is a separate exercise of executive authority. Together they describe an administration that is reorganizing the immigration, civil-rights, intelligence, and prosecutorial machinery of the federal government around a single project: punishing the people Donald Trump’s coalition treats as enemies, using whatever statute is closest at hand, regardless of how dusty or how plainly written for a different purpose. McCarran-Walter is dusty. It is also exactly what this administration was looking for.