The Trump administration scored a major win Thursday in its fight to deport anti-Israel activist and former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil when a federal appeals court overturned a decision freeing him from custody – a ruling that could lead to a showdown at the US Supreme Court.
A split three-judge panel on the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit Court of Appeals found Newark federal Judge Michael Farbiarz didn’t have the authority to order Khalil’s release from a Louisiana detention facility this past June.
Instead, the case should have been allowed to work its way through the immigration court system.
Only after that process was complete, the panel ruled, could Khalil mount a legal challenge to his detention and prospective deportation.
“The scheme Congress enacted governing immigration proceedings provides Khalil a meaningful forum in which to raise his claims later on — in a petition for review of a final order of removal,” read the opinion by Judges Thomas Hardiman and Stephanos Bibas, appointed by former President George W. Bush and President Trump, respectively.
The judges didn’t rule on the validity of Khalil’s arguments in his habeas corpus petition, alleging the Trump administration violated his right to free speech by trying to throw him out of the country over his campus activism protesting Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
Khalil can request the Third Circuit review Thursday’s ruling en banc or he could seek to take the case up to the US Supreme Court. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Office of Representative Jim McGovern/Wikimedia Commons |
In a major win for the Trump administration, a federal appeals court ended a Biden-appointed district judge’s blockade on the deportation of a pro-Hamas foreign activist on Thursday.
In a 2-1 ruling, a panel for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals vacated orders from New Jersey-based District Judge Michael Farbiarz regarding the detainment and attempted deportation of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil. As law professor Mark Goldfeder previously wrote in these pages, Khalil — a Syrian-born green card holder — was detained by federal authorities last year “on the charge that he ‘led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,’ and posed a threat to national security and foreign policy.”
Farbiarz’s orders “prevented the government from removing [Khalil] from the country,” mandated “his release from custody,” and “intervened in his immigration-court proceedings,” according to the circuit court.
In its Thursday decision, the Third Circuit panel found that while Farbiarz did have jurisdiction over Khalil’s habeas petition (i.e. a legal challenge to one’s detention) since he was held by authorities in New Jersey (despite being initially detained in New York), the Biden appointee ultimately lacked “subject matter jurisdiction” over the case under existing federal law.
More specifically, the court found that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) “channels ‘[j]udicial review of all questions of law … arising from any action taken or proceeding brought to remove an alien from the United States’ into a single petition for review filed with a federal court of appeals,” and therefore, “strip[s]” Farbiarz of jurisdiction over the matter.
In other words, the ruling essentially holds “that federal district courts lack power over immigration cases,” as The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland put it.
“Our holdings vindicate essential principles of habeas and immigration law,” the ruling continued. “The scheme Congress enacted governing immigration proceedings provides Khalil a meaningful forum in which to raise his claims later on—in a petition for review of a final order of removal.” --->READ MORE HERE
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