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Will foreigner who praises 'armed resistance' get to remain on U.S. soil?

Will foreigner who praises 'armed resistance' get to remain on U.S. soil?

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After a court ruling in New York City, Mahmoud Khalil is pictured celebrating his release from an immigration detention center. 

Will foreigner who praises 'armed resistance' get to remain on U.S. soil?

Even though radical Islamist Mahmoud Kalil is celebrating a legal victory over the Trump administration, an immigration expert says he might not be cheering for long.

Kalil, 30, was released from an immigrant detention center June 21 after a federal judge ruled he does not pose a flight risk nor pose a threat to the community.

Judge Michael Farbiarz called it "highly, highly unusual" for the federal government to detain a legal U.S. resident who was unlikely to flee and hasn't been accused of violence.

The Trump administration, which plans to appeal Judge Farbiarz’s ruling, has watched Khalil become a hero to the radical Left for fighting his deportation on free speech grounds and vowing to defeat a State Department plan to deport foreigners for blatant antisemitism.  

Khalil, who was born in Syria to Palestinian parents, came to the U.S. on a student visa from Algeria, where he is a citizen. He was attending graduate school at Columbia University when he became a prominent pro-Hamas protest leader at Columbia.

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, tells AFN there are several reasons Khalil can be deported, namely that he lied on his visa application.

“There's a box that you check on those forms that says you're not affiliated with any sort of foreign terrorist organization,” Mehlman points out.

Obviously, Mehlman adds, no foreigner applying for the visa would check that box and admit it. But it gives the State Department evidence you lied if it later discovers you are associated with such groups.

AFN reported in a previous story Khalil is on camera, at a Columbia event in March 2024, defending Hamas and its “armed resistance” against Israel.

“We’ve tried armed resistance, which is legitimate under international law, but Israel calls it terrorism,” Khalil, speaking from a stage, tells the crowd at the event called “Palestine 101.”

Khalil is also a member of CUAD, or Columbia Apartheid Divest, which has also defended “armed resistance” in its writings. “We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group stated last year on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack.

AFN also reported in the story, from April, that Khalil would likely become a test case over the State Department’s legal ability to remove legal foreign visitors from U.S. soil.

Mehlman, Ira (Federation for American Immigration Reform) Mehlman

Even though the issue of free speech is being pushed by Khalil, his attorneys, and his supporters, Mehlman calls him an “agent” of a foreign terrorist group whose campus protests violated the safety of Jewish students at Columbia.

“It's not a question of him being able to express his political opinions,” Mehlman argues. “It's the actions that he's taken that clearly violate other people's rights."

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