Newly-released State Department documents unsealed by a federal judge prove once and for all that the Trump administration abducted Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed critical of Israel, Mohsen Mahdawi for explicitly false allegations, and Mahmoud Khalil for reasons that courts would find bogus.
On Friday, US District Court Judge William Young unsealed a ream of documents revealing how the State Department justified its detention and attempted deportation of several pro-Palestine and anti-war college students.
The Trump-Vance-Rubio administration began its spree of targeting college students last year, attempting to use a narrow, little-used authority given to the secretary of state to target individuals who may have “adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
The campaign started with Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student protest leader whom the administration clumsily detained in March. The recklessness was immediately evident: arresting agents told him his student visa was revoked. But Khalil had a green card. Agents then pivoted, saying that was revoked, too.
In the newly-released documents, the State Department conceded that, beyond Khalil being a leader for student protests, and being involved in a library occupation demonstration “where protestors distributed” what the department calls “Hamas-authored flyers,” (not even specifying that Khalil handed out said flyers), Khalil had no culpability for anything else.