US Given One Day To Show Evidence For Deporting Columbia Student

An immigration judge on Tuesday gave the U.S. government a day to show evidence that Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil should be deported and said she would rule on the case on Friday, a month after his arrest in New York and transfer to a rural Louisiana jail 1,200 miles (1,931.21 km) away. "If he's not removable, I'm going to be terminating this case on Friday," Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jamee Comans said during a hearing at the LaSalle Immigration Court in Jena, Louisiana, Reuters reports. If the government's deportation case is terminated at the hearing scheduled for Friday afternoon, Khalil, 30, is free under immigration law. The government cannot challenge the termination, but if the judge terminates the case without prejudice it can attempt to file the removal case again. Khalil sat at a table in the courtroom, wrapping prayer beads around his right hand as he listened to his attorney Marc Van Der Hout appear remotely from California on a nearby screen to tell the court he had not received a single document of the government's evidence.

"There's nothing more important to this court than Mr. Khalil's due process rights," Comans told Van Der Hout after he asked for more time to review the government's evidence. "I'm also not going to keep Mr. Khalil detained while attorneys go back and forth about documents." Department of Homeland Security lawyers told Comans they would provide the evidence by her 5 p.m. Wednesday deadline. In a statement later, Khalil's attorney Van Der Hout said he was concerned the judge would rule without giving the defense time to respond to the government's case, a concern he had raised earlier in court. "What this case is really about is whether lawful permanent residents — and other immigrants to this country — can speak out about what is happening in Gaza, or any other important matters of discussion in the national discourse without fear of deportation for expressing beliefs that are completely protected by the First Amendment," Van Der Hout said. "Are U.S. citizens going to be next?" The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to free speech and assembly. President Donald Trump's administration says it has revoked Khalil's status as a lawful permanent resident under a 1952 law allowing the deportation of any immigrant whose presence in the country the secretary of state deems harmful to U.S. foreign policy.