ICE Refuses to Release Mahmoud Khalil in Violation of Court Order

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Friday that it would not release green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, after a federal judge ordered him to be released.

U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz of New Jersey had given the government a deadline of 1:30 p.m. on Friday to appeal his ruling, and in a last-minute filing, the government said that it didn’t have to appeal the decision to keep detaining Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and leader of pro-Palestine campus protests.

The government claimed that the judge “did not order” them to release Khalil, but said only that they could not detain him based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that he was a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests because allowing him to remain in the U.S. would create a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.”

The government stated that it was well within its rights to detain Khalil on “other grounds,” namely his removability as “an alien inadmissible at the time of entry or admission, to wit.

“And while the court made a factual finding that it was unlikely that Khalili would be detained on another basis … the court never held that it would be unlawful for Respondents to detain Khalil based on another charge of removability,” the filing stated.  

Last month, the U.S. government alleged that Khalil purposefully failed to divulge his work as an unpaid intern for the United Nationals Relief and Work Agency and “withheld his membership of certain organizations” when applying for a visa, which was grounds for his removal. Khalil entered the U.S. on a student visa in 2022, and later applied for permanent residency in 2024. 

UNWRA is a U.S. aid organization in Gaza that Israel has long sought to shut down. Israeli officials claimed that 12 of the organization’s 32,000 staff members had been complicit in Hamas’s deadly incursion into Israeli territory on October 7, 2023. A U.N. investigation found that nine of them could have been involved. 

The U.S. government also claimed Khalil had failed to disclose his work with the Syria office in the British Embassy in Beirut, as well as his involvement with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian activism group at his school. 

But none of this would have likely prevented him from receiving his green card, and it serves as weak pretext for his removal.

Across the country, federal judges have ordered the release of multiple students and faculty detained as part of Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. Mahmoud has remained in ICE custody since March, and missed the birth of his child. 

A revolt at a controversial New Jersey ICE facility morphed into a jailbreak late Thursday.

Four detainees were unaccounted for at Delaney Hall detention center after about 50 captives pushed down a dormitory wall in protest of their living conditions, an immigration attorney representing one of the men told NJ Advance Media.

Detainees were starving, reportedly having been made to wait hours for their next meal, when the literal pushback began.

“It’s about the food, and some of the detainees were getting aggressive and it turned violent,” the lawyer, Mustafa Cetin, told NJ Advance Media. “Based on what he told me, it was an outer wall, not very strong, and they were able to push it down.”

But the crowd was not alone in their protest—instead, a gathering of people outside the facility mobilized to block ICE activity, barricading the gate to prevent more officers from entering the center.

Amy Torres, executive director of New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, told NPR affiliate WHYY that officers had used “pepper spray and tackled and dragged protesters away from the facility.”

“She said some protesters had minor injuries, but no one was hit by the vehicles,” WHYY reported.

Delaney Hall is run by a private prison company, GEO Group, that made $2.24 billion in revenue in 2024, according to its fourth-quarter earnings report. The company currently has a $60 million contract with the Trump administration to hold up to 1,000 people in the New Jersey detention center.

Shortly after the ICE facility reopened in May, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and New Jersey Representative LaMonica McIver were arrested and charged while touring the facility. The lawmakers were reportedly visiting to serve a summons for code violations to a Geo Group representative. The charges against Baraka were dropped weeks later.

“I have serious concerns about the reports of abusive circumstances at the facility,” McIver wrote in a statement late Thursday regarding the breakout. “Even now, as we are hearing reports from news organizations and advocates on the ground about a lack of food and basic rights for those inside, the administration appears to be stonewalling efforts to learn the truth.”

Dozens of anti-ICE protests have spread from coast to coast, with gatherings in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, San Diego, Denver, Seattle, Las Vegas, Raleigh, Columbus, Oklahoma City, Washington, D.C., and others. But Donald Trump is still having a difficult time believing that his nativist agenda is facing such widespread opposition: On Wednesday, the president torched a Fox News reporter when she informed him that the protests had spread outside of Los Angeles, spouting from the Kennedy Center’s red carpet that he simply didn’t believe her while patting his administration on the back for its military intervention in the City of Angels.

Immigrant workers are keeping Trump’s multiple estates running even as the president indiscriminately targets them for raids and deportation.

Forbes reports that Trump has used at least 1,880 seasonal immigrant workers at Mar-a-Lago and other golf clubs since 2008. His winery has hired 31 since the year started, even as his administration is working to deport thousands every single day.

These workers are on short-term temporary H-2A agricultural and H-2B hospitality visas—status that would very well put them at high risk of deportation if they weren’t cleaning Trump’s clubs. These workers make between $14.17 and $23.01 an hour working as servers, cooks, groundskeepers, and more.

Wouldn’t someone who claims to love American workers as much as Trump does, who waxes poetic about reinvigorating domestic markets, make it a point to staff his lavish estates with the U.S. laborers he’s fighting for? It’s clear that the president, like most avaricious businessmen, is cool with immigrant work—as long as it’s cheap, noncommittal, and for him.

The Department of Homeland Security admitted to scrounging around for dirt on Kilmar Abrego Garcia only after he was wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Freshly returned from a Salvadoran prison, Abrego Garcia attended an arraignment hearing in Nashville Friday, where he pleaded not guilty to two charges related to illegally transporting undocumented immigrants for cash. The charges stemmed from an investigation into a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, where Abrego Garcia was discovered in a car with several Hispanic men who did not possess identification.  

During the hearing Friday, one DHS agent revealed that he was only asked to look into Abrego Garcia’s case on April 28 of this year, according to Tennessee Lookout’s Anita Wadhwani. 

That’s more than a month after Abrego Garcia was sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison, and a week after Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to recover his kidnapped constituent, boosting the story’s profile to the national level. That was also a full week after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed, seemingly out of nowhere and without providing any evidence, that Abrego Garcia had “engaged in human trafficking.”

Last week, after months of claiming that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States despite being deported over an “administrative error,” Attorney General Pam Bondi announced his return and made several other allegations against Abrego Garcia that were not included in the indictment. 

Since accidentally sending Abrego Garcia abroad, the Trump administration has been intent on smearing him any way it can, repeatedly alleging an affiliation to the transnational MS-13 gang based on thin evidence and even falsely claiming he was a convicted criminal. 

Bondi said that if Abrego Garcia is convicted, the government plans to return him to El Salvador after he completes his sentence, once again violating a judge’s order preventing his removal.

Donald Trump has praised Israel’s sweeping military operation targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leaders, and Republicans have already started taking up positions as faithful cheerleaders.

Shortly after the strikes in Iran were first reported Thursday evening, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham had his own sickening message of support for Israel. “Game on. Pray for Israel,” he wrote in a post on X Thursday, summoning a wave of critics condemning his rhetoric about the deadly strikes.

Republican Senator Jim Risch, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also shared his support for Israel’s strike in a post on X.

“We stand with Israel tonight and pray for the safety of its people and the success of this unilateral, defensive action. I am also praying for the brave U.S. service members in the Middle East who keep America safe—Iran would be foolish to attack the United States,” the post read.

Risch did not extend wishes of safety to Iranian civilians, after several were killed in Israel’s attacks on residential buildings. Risch was one of several lawmakers behind the recent Stand with Israel Act, which would bar the U.S. from funding any U.N. agency that suspends, downgrades, or expels Israel over its catastrophic military campaign in Gaza.

On Friday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson jumped to Israel’s defense over its unprecedented strike, and blamed Iran for bringing the action on itself by refusing nuclear disarmament. “Israel decided it needed to take action to defend itself. They were clearly within their right to do so,” he wrote in a post on X. “Iran will face grave consequences if it responds by unjustifiably targeting U.S. interests.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz was also on defense, and compared people who criticized Israel’s strike to terrorists. In a post on X, former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes wrote, “This is all so unnecessary. All of it. Everywhere.” Cruz reposted, adding, “You forgot to add ‘death to Israel’ and ‘death to America.’”

Between 2019 and 2024, Cruz received a whopping $562,593 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its members, and has received more than $1.8 million from pro-Israel PACs between 1990 and 2024, according to OpenSecrets.

Representative Don Bacon, who received $697,837 from AIPAC in 2024, did his paid gig as Israel’s spokesperson by simply reposting from Israel’s official X account. “When someone threatens to annihilate you - you better believe them. When they build weapons of mass death - stop them,” the post read.