EXCLUSIVE: Mahmoud Khalil Sues Trump Admin for Communications With Anti-Palestinian Groups
Khalil is seeking all communications between the Trump administration and outside pro-Israel doxxing groups like Canary Mission.
Mahmoud Khalil is suing Donald Trump’s administration over its refusal to release its communications with shadowy anti-Palestinian organizations and individuals in the lead-up to when it arrested the student protest leader last March.
Khalil was the first of many foreign students targeted by the Trump administration, which revoked their visas – in Khalil’s case, his green card – purely based on their speech criticizing Israel and supporting Palestine. Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, spent over three months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, as Trump sought to deport him.
In July, it was revealed in court that ICE had used information from Canary Mission and Betar – two of the pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian, anti-speech doxxing groups – to generate leads on students to target, including Khalil.
“For months, shady organizations and individuals carried out a smear and harassment campaign designed to intimidate and silence me,” Khalil tells Zeteo. “The public deserves full accountability for every bad actor who helped make that possible, including those at Columbia who fabricated and amplified these smears and opened the door for state retaliation against Palestinian speech.”
Khalil’s lawsuit seeks to compel the administration to reveal all communications between the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, the Department of Justice, and the State Department, and groups like Canary Mission, Betar, and Columbia Alumni for Israel.
Per the suit, Trump’s administration “unjustifiably failed” to respond to an open records request Khalil sent nearly six months ago requesting information on government communications with these outside groups.
The records request, filed in May, argued that patterns of the administration’s arrests “strongly suggest” it was acting at the encouragement of organizations that appear to coordinate with each other to target those advocating for Palestinian rights, and that take credit whenever those people were pursued. “The correlation is clear, and not a coincidence: to date, not a single reported revocation and detention of an individual based on pro-Palestine activism occurred absent prior doxxing by one of these groups,” the request read.
According to Khalil’s new lawsuit, though, the agencies dismissed Khalil’s detailed request for information as “too broad.” They then ignored his subsequent records requests.
It was during this interim period that ICE was shown to have relied on groups like Canary Mission to fuel its speech crackdown.
Some 5,000 names mostly derived from Canary Mission were analyzed, leading to hundreds of reports being prepared on students, including Khalil, and sent to the State Department.
According to court records, combing through these lists required so much work that staff had to be taken away from the Trump administration’s “Counterintelligence Unit, the Counterterrorism Intelligence Unit, from the Cyber Intelligence Unit, from the Global Trade Intelligence Unit, from all different parts of HSI intelligence.”
The judge in that case – William Young, a Reagan appointee – excoriated the Trump administration for its anti-speech crackdown and its collaboration with the groups Khalil is seeking more information on.
Young wrote that once someone was “on the lists, one was potentially subject to adverse action so long as, it seems, there was any online mention of one’s pro-Palestine activities.” He noted the justification for targeting students was often as thin as “any form of online suggestion that one was ‘pro-Hamas,’ including Canary Mission’s own anonymous articles.”
“Watching the process at work, and not wishing to credit the Public Officials with incompetence, it would require a remarkable naivete not to conclude that this process worked as intended.”
Khalil’s lawsuit cites at least eight other students and academics who have been targeted by the government and the anti-Palestinian groups in similar fashion to Khalil: Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk, Momodou Taal, Badar Khan Suri, Efe Ercelik, Ranjani Srinivasan, Leqaa Kordia, and Yunseo Chung. It cites how courts have pushed back against both their targeting, and the broader solicitation of their names through groups like Canary Mission.
In Khalil’s case, Canary Mission (a doxxing website reportedly tied to the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs) created a profile for Khalil on their website in January 2025. Shortly thereafter, Betar USA identified Khalil as one of its targets, posting on Twitter that ICE is “aware of his home address and whereabouts” and that they “have provided all his information to multiple contacts.” On March 6 and 7, Canary Mission, and other groups of pro-Israel campus affiliates and individuals like Columbia professor Shai Davidai piled on. (Davidai was later suspended from campus for alleged harassment.)
The following day, ICE arrested Khalil without a warrant, first wrongly saying his visa was revoked, then adjusting their claim to say his green card was revoked.
Over 100 days later, a federal judge ordered Khalil be released, following a string of rulings against the administration’s crackdown on speech.
Khalil’s lawsuit cites Judge Young’s condemnation of Trump’s broader crackdown on foreign students as a “truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech.”
The lawsuit says that a release of the records will reveal how extensive the coordination between federal agencies and these outside organizations was, and clarify, then, what the basis was for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to determine that Khalil and other students were a “threat” to US foreign policy, and thus targetable.
Adina Marx-Arpadi, an attorney and Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, tells Zeteo, “Mr. Khalil and the public at large have the right to know about the depth of the collusion between the federal government and the shadowy groups targeting people who speak out against a genocide.”
If you are a student or academic affected by the administration’s crackdown, or someone who works in or around the US government with relevant information about these developments, please contact me via email or Signal (premthakker.35).
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Excellent! Expose the Zio-Nazis!