Newly-Released State Department Documents Pour Water on Kidnappings of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk
The revelations come as DHS insists it will deport Khalil, and as one Columbia student still remains in detention.
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 The recklessness was immediately evident: arresting agents told him his student visa was revoked.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 Agents then pivoted, saying that was revoked, too.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.