New Video of Mahmoud Khalil’s Arrest Shows Trump Admin is Lying in Court
The new footage of ICE’s warrantless arrest shows the Palestinian student fully cooperated with federal agents and was not a flight risk, as the government continues to falsely claim.
New video footage undermines the Trump administration’s attempt to legally justify its March 8 warrant-less arrest of green card holder Mahmoud Khalil.
According to Khalil's legal team, immigration authorities wrote in their arrest report that agents told Khalil they had a warrant for his arrest. But the Trump-Vance administration admitted last month that there was no warrant, claiming it didn’t need one to arrest the Columbia pro-Palestine and anti-war protest leader because “it was likely he would escape before they could obtain a warrant.” The government claimed Khalil was not cooperating and he was going to flee. The “exigent circumstances,” it claimed, amounted to Khalil being a “flight risk.”
But the new footage of Khalil’s abduction – along with a previously published video showing the moment plainclothes agents handcuffed him – reveals the government’s claims were a lie.
Video courtesy of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team
The new footage, released after Khalil’s legal team subpoenaed Columbia University, clearly shows Khalil speaking on the phone before handing the phone to the agents seeking to detain him. Khalil was talking to his attorney, according to his legal team, which also said Khalil asked to see a warrant. At some points in the video, which doesn’t include audio, Khalil appears to be casually chatting with the agents, who seem to express no fear of him fleeing. Khalil has no handcuffs on for at least five minutes.
In both videos showing his arrest, Khalil is clearly cooperating with the immigration agents and at no point appeared to try to evade arrest.
“The Columbia footage that we subpoenaed conclusively proves that Mahmoud never attempted to run from the ICE agents, that the government lied once again, and that there was no valid reason for the arrest of a US permanent resident and human rights defender,” Ramzi Kassem, professor of Law at the City University of New York and co-director of CLEAR, a legal non-profit and clinic that represents Khalil, told Zeteo.
Other Students Targeted
An immigration judge in Louisana also called Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk a “flight risk” to justify denying her bond, despite footage of Öztürk’s arrest that shows that she fully cooperated with masked, plainclothes agents when they detained her as she walked down a street in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Öztürk, however, was released on bail by a federal court in Vermont earlier this month. Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi and Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri have also been released. The Trump administration has continued to provide little justification to the courts for the sweeping crackdown on pro-Palestine and anti-war speech on the grounds that it threatens US foreign policy.
Khalil remains in a Louisana ICE detention facility. After he challenged his arrest in court, a federal judge asked the Trump administration to simply back up its grounds for arresting the permanent resident, and the administration responded with an objection, saying the order was "misguided.”
Khalil is expected to appear in immigration court on May 22.
If you are a student affected by this 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).
Read more from Zeteo on Mahmoud Khalil and others detained by ICE:
great work Prem
Excellent work, Prem, thank you.