Today, Explained - Deporting Mahmoud Khalil

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

The Trump administration has fallen short of its promise to deport millions. The White House now seems focused on attention-grabbing arrests, including that of a Palestinian activist and leader of the Columbia student protests. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Mahmoud Khalil, who was a student negotiator in the pro-Palestinian protest encampments on the Columbia University campus last year. AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil faced a judge in a federal courtroom in Manhattan today while outside protesters demanded his release. Release Mahmoud Khalil now! Release Mahmoud Khalil now! Khalil is a green card holder who was detained by ICE over the weekend. The Trump administration has lobbed some serious accusations at him. Mahmoud Khalil was an individual who was given the privilege of coming to this country to study at one

of our nation's finest universities and colleges. And he took advantage of that opportunity, of that privilege by siding with terrorists, Hamas terrorists who have killed innocent men, women, and children. But hasn't backed them up with any evidence. The attempt to deportation has created some unlikely allies here, including conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who tweeted, There's almost no one I don't want to deport. But unless they've committed a crime,

isn't this a violation of the First Amendment? On Today Explained, can the Trump administration kick out of the country a man who is charged with no crime and who is here legally? Coming up. no crime and who is here legally. Coming up. Listen, we all love a good hustle.

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Indeed's sponsored jobs can help you stand out and hire the right people fast. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash vox business. Just go to indeed.com slash vox business right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash vox business. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Indeed is all you need. This is Today Explained. My name is Gabby Del Valle. I'm a policy reporter at The Verge,

where I cover immigration, privacy, and the tech right. Gabby, what happened to Mahmoud Khalil last weekend? So on Saturday night, he was arrested by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations Division in his apartment. When the officers asked him to identify himself, they initially said that his student visa had been revoked. I believe at that point, he and his wife had called his attorney,

and his wife and his attorney were both saying he's not here on a student visa, he has a green card. His wife who is eight months pregnant got the green card and showed it to the HSI officers, that's the division of ICE that handles Homeland Security. And the officer said, well, the green card has been revoked too. Which to be clear, ICE doesn't have the authority to revoke a green card, but they arrested him. They took him first, I believe, to a detention center in New York, then transferred him to a different detention center in New Jersey when his wife went to visit him there on Sunday. So he was told that he wasn't there. And for a while, his wife and his attorney

didn't know where he was until it was revealed that he had been transferred to a different ICE detention facility in rural Louisiana. And so while he was still detained in New York City, 440 a.m. on Sunday, his attorney filed a habeas petition with the Southern District of New York. So this was before any of the transfers happened. And a federal judge on Monday ordered that he not be deported for now and set a court hearing for today. Who is this guy? Mahmoud Kaleil is a recent graduate of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a very prominent pro-Palestine

activist on campus. Free, free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine! So, starting in late 2023, Columbia University had a series of protests on campus where student activists were trying to get the university to divest from military contractors and from certain companies that were based in or do business with the Israeli government. We demand divestment! We will not be moved unless by force. And those protests kind of culminated in the spring of 2024 with an encampment on Columbia University's lawn

that the university ended up calling in the NYPD or allowing the NYPD to arrest students. The protests didn't end at the end of the academic year and have been ongoing. In the spring of 2024, when the encampments had sprung up and had been there for a while, he actually wasn't prominently involved in the encampments and he spoke at a press conference where he said that he hadn't attended a ton of protests and he hadn't been doing a ton of interviews, he wasn't really in the public eye because he at that point was in the US on a student visa. here, they feel very uncomfortable, very, very uncomfortable participating and protesting with their people. That's why we are very grateful for everyone on campus for protesting on our behalf.

But that wasn't to say he wasn't involved with this movement. He was one of the students involved with negotiating with the administration and trying to push the administration to divest. While other students were doing the encampment, the more on the ground stuff, he was in these meetings with the university administration. What will happen in court? Has he been charged with anything? This is kind of a tricky thing. The judge that sat that hearing is a federal judge in the Southern District of New York. And This is a hearing basically just requesting his release from immigration custody. That isn't going to affect the outcome of his immigration case because ultimately an immigration judge is the one who decides whether to order him deported or not.

These are two different courts, different jurisdictions. His hearing today was about whether he should remain in ICE custody or be let out, but it's not about whether he's going to be deported. When asked to explain this, what has the Trump administration said? So a White House official told the free press that he has not been charged with a crime. There's no allegation that he's broken the law, but that he poses the threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Secretary of State has the right to revoke

a green card or a visa for individuals who serve or are adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America. The official White House, Instagram, and Twitter accounts posted this picture of him saying, Shalom Mahmood, and Trump himself has said, there will be more. In a post on Truth Social, Trump called him a radical foreign pro-Hamas student and said, this is the first arrest of many to come. What rights does Mahmoud Khalil have as a green card holder in the US? So in most cases, people in deportation proceedings have the right to a hearing before an immigration

judge. So despite what the government is saying, despite what the White House is saying, he cannot just be deported today or tomorrow or this week. He has to go before an immigration judge and only an immigration judge can decide whether Mahmoud will be deported. And what case would the Trump administration have to make in order to get him deported? Like how does this generally work? It works differently depending on what the grounds for deportability are. I'm going to give you a kind of unrelated example. Like if you were a green card holder and he had been charged with certain crimes, crimes

including what is called crimes of moral turpitude or aggravated felonies, which are not all felonies, it's kind of a misnomer, that could then trigger deportation proceedings. Or if he were an undocumented immigrant who was in the United States without legal authorization, that could trigger deportation proceedings. This is a really unusual case. So because deportability is being argued on this foreign policy ground, I believe the administration is going to have to prove that his activities in the United States are in some way a threat to national security or to the US's foreign policy interests. The question is what they're going to point to to prove that.

Is it going to be his involvement in campus protests? And if so, is there then a First Amendment counterargument? Like, will his attorney be able to say he was not doing anything dangerous or anything threatening to national security, he was exercising his First Amendment rights? So will the administration then argue that he was doing something beyond speech is what we should be looking out for. As far as I know, he is not accused of any acts of violence, of like the occupations, any of that. In fact, I know, he is not accused of any acts of violence, of the occupations, any of that. In fact, I emailed the NYPD asking if he had any kind of charges or if he had

been arrested in connection with any of those events, and I didn't receive a response. But when I was covering these protests last spring, there was no mention of him as one of the people who had been arrested. There were many students involved in these protests on college campuses and many students all across the country. Do we know why this one student was singled out? I think there are a few different reasons why he was singled out. One of them is that he's an easier target than a lot of other students. His name is out there, his information is out there, the government knows that he's not a US citizen. There was a report in the foreword that some pro-Israel activists had

met with members of Congress, including Ted Cruz and John Federman, and had personally named Mahmood as someone that the government should be looking at. And there are also a number of organizations that both before and since Trump's ree-election have kind of dedicated themselves to naming and shaming what they say are students on campus who are either promoting anti-Semitism or in some cases promoting terrorism. One of these organizations, Canary Mission, makes these kind of dossiers of pro-Palestine activists on college campuses across America. Canary Mission's simple interface allows you to easily explore profiles of radical individuals and organizations. It is your duty to ensure that today's radicals are not tomorrow's employees.

Another more recent one is the Heritage Foundation's Project Ester, which has kind of tried to weaponize the Canary mission model to encourage retaliation against these students. Students that are engaged in pro-terrorist activities should be deported. The United States federal government itself should embark on a mission to deport such visiting students that are expressing support for Hamas and other terrorist entities. And then there's another group, Bataar, which claims it made lists of students who are in the U.S. on visas or are otherwise non-citizens, and also claims that it showed that list

to immigration authorities and has encouraged that these students be arrested and removed from the country. President Trump said on Truth Social the following, we know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.

It sounds like a threat, there will be more of this. Should we expect more of this? We should absolutely expect more of this. Just days before Mahmoud was arrested, Axios reported that the State Department under MacroRubia was using AI to identify students who were in the US on visas who had either been arrested at pro-Palestine Axis on campus or off campus or who had posted anti-Israel content on social media. It claimed that there were no visas that were revoked

under the Biden administration, which was proof that they were not taking this seriously, and that this new administration would be taking this seriously. Reuters and the AP have also reported that ICE has been looking for at least one other student on campus. Let me ask you lastly,

what does this tell us about how President Trump and his administration are thinking about deportations, about how to do them, about how to utilize them, about who to target for deportation? So, when Trump was on the campaign trail, he promised mass deportations. And since then, you know, we have seen an increase in immigration enforcement. But despite what Trump says, despite what other White House officials say, you can't just instantly deport most non-citizens. Because that process is often slow and bureaucratic, the Trump administration is kind of relying

on these shop-and-awe tactics, you know, sending people to Guantanamo, high-profile arrest of activists, sending migrants to Panama. These videos of Cristina wearing bulletproof vests to arrest migrants in New York City. They're kind of relying on the public not realizing that an immigration arrest, while it may be the first step in a deportation, there's still a process that they have to adhere to. That was The Verge's Gabby Delvalle. Coming up, President Trump promised mass deportations, not just high profile ones.

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My full name is Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, and I'm an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. It's been just under two months, Colleen, since President Trump took office. On the campaign trail, he promised mass deportations. We heard this again and again and again. We will use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. Got to do it.

How's he doing with that campaign promise? Right now, we don't have the current numbers of deportations from the government, but we do know that the Trump administration is quite frustrated with where deportations are at. We have some inferences that show that the deportations have not kept pace with what the Trump administration had hoped. According to three sources familiar with discussions at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, and at the White House, President Trump has said to be angry that more people aren't being deported. It's too low and he's angry over the ICE numbers. His borders are Tom Homan.

We've heard that he is unhappy and has made his unhappiness known to the men and women of ICE, that they want to get arrests and deportations of migrants higher. It's a type of infrastructure that can't be built overnight and so right now the deportations are just not keeping pace with what the Trump administration had hoped to reach that goal of one million per year. All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. Now, in the meantime, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is more transparent, perhaps, than I think a lot of people realize. They do have a color-coded spreadsheet online. It shows us all of

the detention data from this year. What does that spreadsheet tell us about detentions, if not deportations, since Donald Trump took office? These spreadsheets from ICE offer us really concrete information about ICE detention and then they also allow us to make some really great inferences into what might be happening with deportations, especially when we don't have that data. And so since Trump took office, we can see that the average number of people in detention has gone up. So in December, that last full month of the Biden administration, there

are about 39,000 people in detention. And then in February, the first full month of the Trump administration, there were about 42,500. So a small increase, but an increase nonetheless. And then we can also see that more of the people who are in ICE detention right now are coming from ICE arrests, rather than arrests conducted by Customs and Border Protection, which would typically be those arrested on the border. So under this administration, we are seeing an increase in arrests.

And so the interior arrests that are happening by ICE are higher than under the Biden administration. What's much different about this administration versus the Biden administration and when Biden came into office is that the border looked a lot different. President Biden taking executive action this afternoon that will restrict asylum processing along the US Mexico border. President Biden announcing new steps to tackle the crisis at the border,

expanding rules on who will be turned back. And under the Biden administration, the majority of the shares of people who are being deported were actually coming from through the border. So it wasn't that ICE stopped interior arrests altogether, but it was that those arrests were happening at a far slower rate than they are currently. But also the Trump administration came into a border that was much slower and much less busy than the Biden administration inherited. slower and much less busy than the Biden administration inherited. And so those two differences have somewhat skewed the numbers in that now the Trump administration

is focusing more on the interior, but those deportations are a lot harder to carry out than when people have just recently crossed the border. So I wonder what we should make of this dynamic. The numbers of deportations are falling short of what Trump promised. But his administration is making a lot of news with these very high profile cases. A student connected to pro-Palestinian protests last year has been detained by ICE. Striking scenes from the windows of this Panama hotel. Confined inside, migrant men, women, and children deported from the

US by the Trump administration. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad, we don't even trust the countries to hold them. What do you think we should take from that? So having this large kind of public relations campaign around the arrests that are happening, the deportations that are being carried out, the previous use of military planes, for example. We shot this video from a dirt ridge outside Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. We could

see about 80 men, women, and children, recent arrivals in the US, stepping off buses and stepping on to military transport jets. Sending military to the border. Thousands of troops have been deployed to the border with Mexico. These are all part of a larger campaign to basically meet two critical needs of the Trump administration. To one, show the base of people that are supportive of this, that they are doing what they promised. They're intending to increase arrests and

increase deportations. Whether or not the numbers are adding up, the intent is there. One of the very first actions by the Trump administration was to risk in something called the sensitive locations memo, which did not allow ICE to go into schools. The Department of Homeland Security tossed out a policy that limited where immigration authorities can make arrests. Now, federal agents can detain migrants at sensitive locations, including schools and churches. And so it certainly created a bit of a chilling effect.

Today, federal agents detained and arrested people in Denver and the neighboring city of Aurora, Colorado, breaking down doors and questioning people. Multiple communities across Chicago are feeling the impacts of what ICE is calling targeted operations. That can mean that people just aren't going to go to work, or they might not go to a doctor's appointment,

or they might not send their kids to school that day. I have calls from school teachers and parents who are afraid to send their children to school. It's already scaring people. My guess would be that the Trump administration, at some point, will start to take flak because the number of deportations that it promised is not matching the reality.

Are you seeing new strategies by this administration to kind of get deportation numbers up? Part of the deportation system is also the detention system. The Trump administration has made a lot of efforts to essentially bend the US government towards trying to increase the resources across detentions and deportation. And so that means that they're deputizing all different areas of the government, including ones that had never been working on immigration before. But also calling agents from Department of State, from DEA, from ATF, from US Marshals, and asking people to be reallocated to work on immigration enforcement. And we're also seeing that they are targeting

certain areas that work with immigrants. So for example, the Trump administration has launched several investigations into so-called sanctuary cities, which has resulted in a litany of different lawsuits. Sanctuary city mayors from Boston, New York City, Denver, and Chicago were taken to task by House Republicans for their dangerous policies during this contentious hearing. False narrative is that immigrants in general are criminals or immigrants in general cause all sorts of danger and harm. That is actually what is undermining safety in our communities.

We're also seeing that the Trump administration is trying to compel states and localities to use their own law enforcement agencies to also carry out immigration enforcement. So the Texas National Guard has signed a memorandum of understanding with DHS so that Texas National Guard can now kind of carry out the functions of an immigration enforcement officer, where they previously couldn't. So there's a lot of different areas in which they're trying to sort of bend various aspects of both the US government, but also state resources, all towards the singular goal of carrying out mass deportations. Colleen Putzelkavanaugh of the Migration Policy Institute. Today's show was produced by Noelle King, it's Today Explained. It's been reported that 1 in 4 people experience sensory sensitivities, making everyday experiences

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