Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, whose arrest in 2025 garnered national headlines, asked the Supreme Court to prevent the Trump administration from re-arresting and deporting him under an existing removal order.
The case asks whether federal district courts can immediately hear claims that a noncitizen was detained in retaliation for protected speech, or whether such claims must wait until the end of the immigration court process, which can take months or years. The outcome could determine how quickly noncitizens can challenge alleged First Amendment violations in immigration detention.
Khalil’s attorneys filed the petition with the nation’s highest court on Oct. 19.
Khalil led pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.
Immigration agents arrested Khalil, a lawful U.S. permanent resident, in March 2025. His wife, along with their young son, are both U.S. citizens.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked a rarely used part of the Immigration and Nationality Act to find Khalil removable, citing his involvement in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities” at Columbia in 2024 that the government alleged contributed to a hostile environment for Jewish students.
In June 2025, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz ordered Khalil’s release from an immigration detention center in Louisiana. The judge held that Khalil was likely to succeed on his claim that his detention was retaliatory punishment for protected speech and was intended to chill similar speech by others. The judge also held that his continued detention caused irreparable harm to his family, career, and ability to speak freely. The order was not a final ruling on whether Khalil was removable.
Meanwhile, an immigration judge ordered removal in September 2025, designating Algeria or Syria as the country of removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act’s rules for choosing a destination. Khalil is a citizen of Algeria and was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed in April 2026, which made the removal order final. Khalil is separately challenging that removal order in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in January of this year that Farbiarz lacked jurisdiction, or legal authority, when he ordered that Khalil could be released from immigration detention.
The panel held that Khalil’s claims could not be adjudicated by a district court and instead should have been raised in an appeal of an immigration judge-issued removal order. The nation’s system of immigration courts is not part of the regular federal judiciary and is administered by the U.S. Department of Justice.
His lawyers said in May that they would ask the Supreme Court to review the high-profile immigration case.
In the petition, Khalil’s attorneys argue that waiting until the end of the immigration court appeals process leaves someone locked away for months or years as punishment for protected speech with no way to get out sooner. They also say that other federal courts of appeals have reached different conclusions on the same question.
“If the decision stands, the government would be handed a powerful and unprecedented weapon to silence its critics, and to chill the speech of countless others, including citizens, who wish to avoid the government’s wrath against themselves and their loved ones,” the lawyers said in the petition.
“Our laws and our Constitution do not permit this kind of malevolent abuse of executive power,” they added.
If the Third Circuit’s ruling remains intact, the government can re-arrest Khalil and deport him under the current removal order. For the moment, he remains free because the appeals court stayed its decision while he asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
The Trump administration is expected to argue, as it did in the Third Circuit, that federal law requires these challenges to be brought up only in an appeal of a final removal order, not in a separate district court case, so that there is one streamlined review process rather than separate parallel proceedings.
It is unclear when the Supreme Court will formally consider the petition.
Jacki Thrapp and Reuters contributed to this report.
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