President Donald Trump is defying a judge’s orders yet again as he refuses to release pro-Palestinian Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil from an ICE detention facility.
Despite being told that the government’s stated grounds for holding Khalil—who has a green card—are unconstitutional, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are instead switching their tactics and creating a new bullshit reason for why they need to keep him locked up.
Unfortunately, their newest rationale for why Khalil should remain detained is holding up in court for now. On Friday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz upheld the government’s argument that Khalil failed to provide all necessary information on his green card application and denied his request to be released.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it wasn’t too long ago that the “dangerous” Kilmar Abrego Garcia was painted as an MS-13 gang kingpin by the Trump administration and deported to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.
The government initially refused to return the Maryland father to his family, despite lower court rulings and even a Supreme Court order telling Trump’s minions to do so.
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And when the racist thugs couldn’t use their weak and disproven MS-13 theory to hold him anymore, they suddenly charged Garcia with human smuggling.
Garcia denies the charges and says he was carpooling to a construction site that day.
Khalil’s case now carries the same stench. The Trump administration is grasping at straws to keep these once-accused “terrorists” in abuse-ridden detention facilities so they won’t have to admit any sort of error.
And while Khalil continues to fight for his freedom, ICE denied his request to be present for the birth of his son in April. He also asked to be relocated to a facility closer to his family, as he awaits his fate in a Louisiana detention center thousands of miles away from his family in New York City. That request was also denied.
“The most immediate and visceral harms I have experienced directly relate to the birth of my son, Deen,” Khalil said in a legal filing obtained by NBC News. “Instead of holding my wife’s hand in the delivery room, I was crouched on a detention center floor, whispering through a crackling phone line as she labored alone.”
Khalil met his son for the first time in May during an immigration hearing.
He and Garcia aren’t alone. Family members of other men who were deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison are still fighting for the right to prove their innocence too.
And despite multiple reports of innocent migrants being wrongfully imprisoned in El Salvador, it’s far from certain that these men will see the light of day anytime soon.