The lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student targeted for deportation by the United States government over his pro-Palestine advocacy, have called on an immigration appeals court to reopen and terminate his case.The latest legal appeal points to new evidence, some of which was documented in media reports, that Khalil’s lawyers said it “suggests that the Trump Administration secretly engineered the outcome of his immigration case to make an example of him”.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listIt comes just over a month after the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a final order of removal for Khalil, who was first detained by immigration enforcement agents in March 2025, one of several students targeted for their participation in pro-Palestine campus protests that swept the US the previous year.Khalil, a US permanent resident who is married to a US citizen, has long maintained that he has been unjustly targeted for his political views.His legal team said on Friday that “apparent procedural abnormalities” support that view.“It’s clear that the revelations of DOJ misconduct corroborate what we have known since Mahmoud was arrested–that the administration has reverse-engineered its desired outcome by weaponising a farcical proceeding littered with abnormalities,” Johnny Sinodis, a lawyer representing Khalil, said in a statement.The new evidence includes a report by The New York Times that found that Khalil’s case had been flagged as high priority before it had arrived at the Board of Immigration Appeals, in what his lawyers say indicated the case w …
