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Immigration agents arrested Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil in New York on March 8. They quickly moved him to New Jersey and then to Louisiana, where he remains detained. His lawyers are fighting the Trump administration's attempt to deport him over his pro-Palestinian activism. Yesterday, a federal judge made an important ruling about where his case will be heard. NPR's Adrian Florido reports.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: The night ICE agents followed Khalil and his wife into the lobby of their New York apartment building, Khalil got his lawyer, Amy Greer, on the phone. She told one of the agents, you can't arrest him. He's got a green card.
AMY GREER: And he said, oh, he'll go in front of an immigration judge. And then I started demanding for a warrant. I was like, you cannot take him until you show us a warrant. And the agent hung up on me.
FLORIDO: What was the first thing you did?
GREER: Cried - truly, that's what I did. I just burst into tears.
FLORIDO: Minutes later, Khalil's wife called Greer back. An agent had told her they were taking Khalil to a Manhattan detention facility. Greer called a colleague for help.
GREER: We're criminal defense attorneys. I'm not an immigration attorney. And so we were like, wait a second, I think you have to file a habeas.
FLORIDO: A habeas corpus petition challenges someone's detention over violations of their constitutional rights. Greer had to work fast because she knew ICE would probably move Khalil out of New York, and she wanted the case to be heard there. She and several other lawyers stayed up all night.
GREER: Basically, a whole bunch of legal brains got together, and we basically wrote, over the course of eight hours, a habeas petition that we submitted at, like - I think it was, like, 4:14 in the morning.
FLORIDO: The case was officially filed at 4:41 that morning. But in court filings, the government said that by that time, Khalil had already been moved across the river to New Jersey. Hours later, ICE put him on a plane to Louisiana. That sequence of events teed up the huge legal fight over a crucial question - where would Khalil's case be heard? In the New York area where his lawyers want it, or down in Louisiana, where the government does?
BRETT MAX KAUFMAN: The government believes that it has an advantage if it brings people down there.
FLORIDO: Brett Max Kaufman with the ACLU is one of Khalil's lawyers. He says there's a real disadvantage to sending Khalil and his case to Louisiana.
KAUFMAN: When you do that, you take someone away from their community, from their family, from their lawyers. It really is a huge, debilitating thing to not be able to walk into a facility and spend time with your client face to face.
FLORIDO: Several of the other students and scholars the Trump administration has arrested, alleging their pro-Palestinian activism supports terrorism, have also been quickly shipped to Louisiana. ICE has nine detention facilities in this state. The federal court system in Louisiana is one of the nation's most conservative.
KAUFMAN: What the government has been attempting to do is use its ability to move detainees around at will to avoid the jurisdiction of the courts where their lawyers filed cases.
FLORIDO: The Department of Justice declined NPR's request for comment. In federal court, government lawyers argued that Khalil's case should be heard in Louisiana because when his lawyer filed her habeas petition, he was already in New Jersey on his way to Louisiana. But yesterday, New Jersey federal judge Michael Farbiarz rejected that argument. He wrote, there was no way for Khalil's lawyer to know where he was when she filed her petition in New York. He ordered the case to be heard in New Jersey. The government says it plans to appeal. The ACLU's Brett Kaufman says Amy Greer's decision to stay up all night to file her habeas claim before Khalil was put on a plane was crucial.
KAUFMAN: If she had waited even, you know, five hours later, the government would be on much stronger ground to argue that there was no other place to hear the case other than Louisiana.
FLORIDO: His lawyers call it a big win. They're now asking the judge to return Khalil to New Jersey and release him before his first child is born later this month. Adrian Florido, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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