US says Columbia student facing deportation hid UNRWA role on visa application
Trump administration court filing laying out its case against Mahmoud Khalil claims he ‘withheld membership in certain organizations,’ including work for UN agency for Palestinians
The US government has alleged that Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian demonstrator Mahmoud Khalil withheld that he worked for a United Nations Palestinian relief agency in his visa application, saying that should be grounds for deportation.
The UN agency known as UNRWA provides food and healthcare to Palestinian refugees but has become a flashpoint in the Israeli war in Gaza, as Israel contends that several UNRWA employees participated in Hamas’s invasion and slaughter in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, leading the US to halt funding of the group.
The administration of US President Donald Trump on March 8 detained Khalil, a prominent figure in the pro-Palestinian campus protests that rocked the New York City campus last year, and is seeking his deportation.
The case has drawn attention as a test of free speech rights, with supporters of Khalil saying he was targeted for publicly disagreeing with US policy on Israel and its military actions in Gaza. Khalil has called himself a political prisoner.
The US alleges Khalil’s presence or activities in the country would have serious foreign policy consequences.
A judge has ordered Khalil not to be deported while a lawsuit challenging his detention, known as a habeas petition, is heard in another federal court.
Khalil, a native of Syria and citizen of Algeria, entered the US on a student visa in 2022 and later filed to become a permanent resident in 2024.
In a court brief dated Sunday, the US government outlined its arguments for keeping Khalil in custody while his removal proceedings continue, arguing first that the US District Court in New Jersey, where the habeas case is being heard, lacked jurisdiction.
The brief also says Khalil “withheld membership in certain organizations” which should be grounds for his deportation.
It references a March 17 document in his deportation case that informed Khalil he could be removed because he failed to disclose that he was a political officer of UNRWA in 2023.
UNRWA — short for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — provides education, health care and aid to millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The UN says it is the backbone of humanitarian operations for Palestinians.
The UN said in August an investigation found nine of the agency’s 32,000 staff members may have been involved in the October 7 attacks, during which Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 people as hostages, mostly civilians.
Israel alleges that more than 10 percent of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza have ties to terrorist factions and that educational facilities under the organization’s auspices consistently incite hatred of Israel and glorify terror.
The US court notice also accused Khalil of leaving off his visa application that he worked for the Syria office in the British embassy in Beirut and that he was a member of the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
Attorneys for Khalil did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One attorney, Ramie Kassem, a co-director of the legal clinic CLEAR, was quoted in the New York Times as saying the new deportation grounds were “patently weak and pretextual.”
“That the government scrambled to add them at the 11th hour only highlights how its motivation from the start was to retaliate against Mr. Khalil for his protected speech in support of Palestinian rights and lives,” Kassem said, according to the Times.
The Times of Israel Community.