OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
11:54 AM – Thursday, June 12, 2025
A Joe Biden-appointed federal judge has granted Mahmoud Khalil’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus while prohibiting the Trump administration from pursuing longer detention efforts, according to a recent court order.
However, the Trump administration can appeal Judge Michael E. Farbiarz’s order.
Joe Biden-appointed Judge Michael E. Farbiarz of the U.S. District Court for New Jersey issued a temporary stay of the preliminary injunction until Friday at 9:30 a.m., affording the U.S. government an opportunity to seek appellate review, should it decide to do so.
“The lawful permanent resident filed a habeas corpus petition and has moved to preliminarily enjoin federal officials from removing him from the United States based on the Secretary’s determination. The motion is granted,” Farbiarz wrote.
Khalil, a Columbia University graduate at the center of a high-profile deportation battle with the U.S. government over his anti-Israel government views, responded for the first time to allegations that he poses a foreign policy threat in a sworn legal declaration unsealed last week.
He also claims that he, himself, never distributed any pro-Hamas propaganda — despite White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stating that his organized protests included the distribution of “pro‑Hamas propaganda fliers.”
However, a lawsuit by families of October 7th hostages have also alleged that Khalil and the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) acted as part of Hamas’s “propaganda arm in New York City,” citing public statements suggesting the coordination with Hamas narratives.
Khalil was one of the first in a wave of media-circulated arrests regarding anti-Israel students and alumni at U.S. colleges.
The Trump administration has intensified its crackdown on anti-Semitism across college campuses. Although the White House has since retreated from plans to cancel hundreds of student visas, Khalil remained in detention—missing both the birth of his first son and his graduation from Columbia.
Meanwhile, his wife, Noor Abdalla, has asserted that Khalil should be released immediately and allowed to return home to New York to be with his family.
“This is the news we’ve been waiting over three months for. Mahmoud must be released immediately and safely returned home to New York to be with me and our newborn baby, Deen,” Abdalla declared. “True justice would mean Mahmoud was never taken away from us in the first place, that no Palestinian father, from New York to Gaza, would have to endure the painful separation of prison walls like Mahmoud has.”
As a graduate student of Columbia University, Khalil—a Muslim Palestinian “refugee” and leading voice for anti-Israel college students who condemn the Jewish State’s retaliatory efforts to retrieve Hamas’ kidnappees from the October 7th terror attack—essentially served as an intermediary between student protesters and university administrators during the pro-Palestine protests on campus last year.
Nonetheless, the Trump administration has maintained that Khalil’s organizing actions at the university undermine its foreign policy objective of combating anti-Semitism. In April, it presented its case against him in a two-page memorandum authored by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
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