a federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to immediately release Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student activist who has been held in a Louisiana detention center since his arrest in early March.
The judge had previously ruled that Khalil could not be held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement based on a vague federal statute focused on potential “adverse foreign policy consequences” of his presence in the country. The latest ruling rejected the government’s arguments that Khalil, who missed the birth of his son while in detention, posed a flight risk, much less a danger to the community.
“No one should fear being jailed for speaking out in this country,” said Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law, who represented Khalil in court, in an emailed statement. “We are overjoyed that Mr. Khalil will finally be reunited with his family while we continue to fight his case in court.”
Khalil’s case is just the latest instance in which federal courts have ruled against the Trump administration’s dogged efforts to detain and deport noncitizens who protested Israel’s war in Gaza, many of them students who are in the U.S. on visas or green cards.
One under-scrutinized federal agency has been crucial to this effort: Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which markets itself as an elite force that targets human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals. But under the second Trump administration, HSI has turned its surveillance apparatus on a different kind of target: noncitizens on college campuses with critical views of Israel.
As it built dossiers on Khalil and others, HSI deployed its full suite of investigative tools and techniques to “identify individuals within the parameters” of President Donald Trump’s executive orders about rooting out purported antisemitism, as one HSI agent explained in an affidavit.
For each target, HSI agents used surveillance tools to build a dossier, which was then passed to the State Department to confirm that the target was, in the eyes of the U.S. government, sufficiently antisemitic to be deported.
To track down protesters for arrest, HSI agents conducted “pattern of life” surveillance, The Intercept found, which meant monitoring targets’ movements and associates. HSI agents executed search warrants on college dorms based on flimsy affidavits, issued subpoenas for financial records and other data, and even put a trace on one target’s WhatsApp account.
“It’s notable that these components, which purportedly focus on threats to national security and public safety, are spending their time hunting down student protesters for their protected speech,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which is suing the Trump administration for targeting pro-Palestinian campus activists. “From what I’ve seen, the government hasn’t made a plausible argument that these students actually pose a threat to the national security of the United States.”
For years, watchdogs have warned that Congress needs to rein in HSI. During the first Trump administration, HSI monitored protest plans, called in aerial surveillance of the George Floyd demonstrations, and helped compile a database of journalists and immigration advocates to target at the border.
When Trump returned to the White House in January, HSI wasted little time in using its broad, fuzzy authority to target and track down critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.
“HSI has a really broad, often unchecked authority that in moments like these can allow them to turn it into a weapon,” said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, who previously worked as senior intelligence counsel in the Department of Homeland Security.
“The Department does little to promote oversight and accountability of its operations,” Reynolds said of HSI, pointing to the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate or defang DHS’s civil liberties office as amplifying the risks of abuse.
“We’ve seen this happen in the past,” Reynolds said, “and it can result in abusive targeting.”
ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s questions for this story.
HSI sprang into action in late January, after Trump issued an executive order purportedly aimed at antisemitism, according to an affidavit filed by a high-ranking HSI official in the case of Momodou Taal, a Cornell University grad student.
HSI investigators launched a “proactive” review of “open-source information to identify individuals subject to the Executive Order,” wrote Roy M. Stanley III, who leads the counterterrorism unit within HSI’s Office of Intelligence. As part of this review, HSI conducted “targeted analysis to substantiate aliens’ alleged engagement of antisemitic activities.”
In the Knight Institute’s lawsuit, another official, Andre Watson, who leads HSI’s national security division, explained that “HSI Office of Intelligence proactively reviews open-source information to identify individuals within the parameters of” Trump’s executive order.
“The HSI Office of Intelligence is typically focused on identifying actual security threats,” said DeCell of the Knight Institute.
And just because the underlying information is open source, meaning available on the public internet, DeCell explained, “doesn’t mean the government isn’t using more advanced tech as part of its “boil the ocean” approach to surveillance.”
In fact, ICE officials’ references to “open-source” searches potentially refer to HSI’s massive database, called RAVEn, said Reynolds, of the Brennan Center. RAVEn uses large-language models to collate material from across ICE’s systems and the public internet, including social media posts and news stories.
For Taal, HSI’s open-source trawl turned up online articles about his participation in Gaza protests and run-ins with the Cornell administration. In mid-March, HSI referred its findings to the State Department, which revoked Taal’s visa the same day, according to other court filings.
After initially filing suit to challenge the revocation of his visa, Taal decided to leave the U.S. in late March rather than risk being detained like Khalil.
Court records across multiple cases reflect this general workflow: HSI agents use surveillance tools to build a dossier — an “HSI Subject Profile,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to them in memos.
“There seems to be a two-way street here” between HSI and the State Department, DeCell noted, by which HSI agents provide reports that “support the State Department’s decision to revoke a visa.”
HSI drafted “subject profiles” on Khalil and at least two other Columbia students targeted for their ties to Gaza protests, court records show: Yunseo Chung and Mohsen Mahdawi.
In many cases, Rubio quickly ratified HSI’s findings and ordered the targets should be deported under a rarely used provision for “adverse policy interests.” As in Taal’s case, Rubio signed off on the deportations of Khalil, Chung, and Mahdawi within 24 hours. He even did so in a single letter that gave ICE the green light to detain both Khalil and Chung.
But in some cases, HSI’s intel was a stretch even for Rubio’s staff.
HSI’s dossier on Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student, quoted from an op-ed she co-wrote calling on Tufts to “disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel,” the Washington Post reported. The State Department pushed back somewhat, determining the op-ed wasn’t sufficient evidence of antisemitic activity or support for a terrorism organization.
The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about whether Rubio’s staff had disagreed with HSI’s determinations as to any other targets beside Öztürk.
All the same, based on HSI’s threadbare findings, Öztürk’s visa could still be revoked at Rubio’s discretion, the State Department wrote in a reply memo later filed in court. “Due to ongoing ICE operational security, this revocation will be silent,” wrote John Armstrong of the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs to Watson on March 21. “The Department of State will not notify the subject of the revocation.”
Four days later, as Öztürk walked to a Ramadan dinner, six plain-clothed ICE agents surrounded her, placed her under arrest, and whisked her out of Massachusetts and ultimately to a detention center in Louisiana, where she was held for several weeks before a federal judge ordered her release in early May.
Mahdawi also won his release in May, which the federal government has appealed in tandem with Öztürk’s case. Despite HSI agents’ best efforts, Chung has never been detained, and earlier this month a federal judge issued an injunction that prohibits ICE from taking her into custody.
HSI has not just taken lead on flagging people who criticized Israel on university campuses, but also in tracking down and arresting them through various surveillance tactics.
In Khalil’s case, even before Rubio signed off on their findings, HSI placed Khalil under “pattern of life” surveillance, according to an immigration court filing. As an ICE attorney explained, this meant gathering information about Khalil’s “frequent locations, people he associates with, and various other information essential to law enforcement activities.”
When Rubio gave the go-ahead, HSI agents were already parked outside Khalil’s campus apartment in New York City. Despite not having an arrest warrant, they took him into custody and quickly hustled him to a facility in Louisiana.
HSI special agents also staked out and arrested Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University, after Rubio determined he should be deported in mid-March. In May, a federal judge ordered his release.
When HSI struggled to locate targets, they used legal processes like subpoenas and search warrants to try to track them down.
In Chung’s case, ICE surveilled her campus apartment for five days and visited her parents’ home in Virginia but still couldn’t find her. So HSI agents sent administrative subpoenas to Columbia — seeking video footage from her dorm building and data showing when Chung swiped in and out of the building over an eight-day period, court records show.
Citing student privacy laws, a Columbia spokesperson would not answer whether the university complied with ICE’s administrative subpoenas, which would not be legally enforceable without a separate court order. “The University seeks legal advice for any type of warrant or subpoena, judicial or administrative,” the spokesperson wrote by email to The Intercept, adding that decisions about compliance “are made by the University after legal review to ensure there is a lawful requirement and, if so, the University must then comply.”
HSI agents also obtained and executed judicial search warrants for the dorm rooms of Chung and another Columbia student on the theory that Columbia was “harboring” them in violation of federal law.
The search warrant application materials, which were unsealed in mid-May, showed an assistant special agent in charge of HSI’s New York office filed a wildly inaccurate affidavit.
The affidavit misstated basic facts and federal law, attorneys told The Intercept, including that Chung, a lawful permanent resident with a green card, was in the country unlawfully.
When Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who grew up in the West Bank, was arrested by New York City cops last spring at a Gaza demonstration at Columbia University, she was not a prominent activist or a recognizable leader in the student pro-Palestine movement like Khalil or Mahdawi.
She wasn’t even a Columbia student or otherwise affiliated with the school. Kordia had gone into the city for the day from her home in Paterson, New Jersey, she says in a lawsuit challenging her detention at an ICE facility in Texas.
Kordia was one of dozens of people arrested the same day in April 2024 that NYPD stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. Kordia was not part of the contingent of students who occupied the hall, but was arrested outside the closed campus gates after police told the crowd to disperse.
All charges against Kordia were later dropped without any court appearances. Her case was sealed, and her name did not make it into news coverage of the protest or onto lists by pro-Israel groups like Betar.
But her low profile didn’t stop Kordia, whose student visa had expired while her green card application was in process, from being targeted by HSI.
Early in March, HSI began investigating Kordia for “national security violations,” according to court records. And agents in HSI’s Newark office threw considerable investigative resources into profiling Kordia.
HSI agents subpoenaed her financial records, put a trace on her WhatsApp account, and asked NYPD for records about her arrest. They interviewed Kordia’s mother, who is an American citizen; several of her acquaintances; and even the tenants of an apartment Kordia once rented.
In mid-March, the week after HSI agents arrested Khalil at his apartment on Columbia’s campus, they detained Kordia in New Jersey and flew her to the Texas detention center.
After the Department of Homeland Security put out a gleeful statement, Kordia quickly became known as the “second Columbia student” arrested by ICE over Gaza protests — even as Columbia made clear she was never enrolled. It’s a basic error that ICE still can’t keep straight, claiming in a recent press release that Kordia is “another Columbia Student who actively participated in anti-American, pro-terrorist activities on campus.”
Kordia remains in ICE detention thousands of miles from her family. Together with others targeted by HSI because of their ties to protests over Gaza, her case underscores the Trump administration’s commitment to targeting dissent with advanced surveillance tools and federal manpower.
“The government is deploying resources that are purportedly focused on identifying threats” but instead “rounding up students protesting on their own college campuses,” summarized the Knight Institute’s DeCell. “That raises significant First Amendment concerns, and it raises a chilling effect for anyone here in the U.S. on a visa.”
