Biden Judge Defies Law, Orders Release Of Hamas-Affiliated Columbia Activist

A federal judge has now ordered the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University and public spokesperson for Hamas-affiliated CUAD (Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition), from immigration custody. The decision, rendered by Judge Michael Farbiarz, a Biden appointee and political opponent of President Trump, not only misreads the law but willfully disregards national security imperatives and the statutory authority of the executive branch. Judge Farbiarz’s ruling is not the exercise of judicial independence, it is a flagrant act of judicial resistance, aimed at undermining the Trump administration’s lawful effort to remove from US soil a man who has publicly aligned with terrorist ideology.

Khalil has been in ICE custody since March 8, 2025. According to government filings, the Trump administration moved to revoke his green card and initiate removal proceedings under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), specifically 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)(B) and (F). The first provision bars entry and permits removal of any alien who endorses, supports, or associates with a designated foreign terrorist organization. The second is even more explicit, granting the Secretary of State unilateral authority to determine, in his own judgment, whether an alien’s presence would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences. This is not a matter for courts to second-guess. It is a personal statutory power, not subject to judicial override. Secretary Marco Rubio exercised this authority in accordance with the law, citing Khalil’s activities as sufficient grounds for expulsion.

Those activities are not speculative. Khalil served as a public negotiator and spokesman for CUAD, an organization that not only led the pro-Hamas encampments at Columbia, but also openly published material endorsing Hamas and Hezbollah leadership. Its Substack posts did not merely criticize Israeli policy, they applauded and parroted the strategic rationale of Hamas itself. Independent of the administration’s own evidence, a civil lawsuit filed by the families of six Israeli hostages held by Hamas charges that Khalil and CUAD operated as a de facto propaganda arm for the terror group.

In plain terms, Khalil did not merely sympathize with a cause. He represented it. On elite American soil, under the protection of an Ivy League shield, he acted as a mouthpiece for enemies of the United States and its allies.

Now, Judge Farbiarz, with not even the pretense of judicial humility, has inserted himself into the national security decision-making of the executive branch. His ruling, delivered via remote hearing, declared that Khalil is not a flight risk and poses no threat to public safety. To whom, one might ask, does he refer? To the suburban family whose son attends Columbia? To the grieving parents of Israeli hostages? To American taxpayers who fund the educational institutions that now harbor enemy sympathizers?

Worse, Farbiarz refused the government’s request for a seven-day stay, showing not even the courtesy of delay to allow for legal remedy. He seemed far more concerned with the comfort of the petitioner than the constitutional structure he was elected to safeguard. His reasoning, that the courts, not the executive, ought to decide immigration removal in such a case, flatly contradicts decades of legal precedent.

The INA is unambiguous: the Secretary of State, not the judiciary, is granted personal discretion to determine when a non-citizen’s presence undermines US foreign policy. That grant is not advisory, it is statutory. It exists precisely because Congress recognized that courts are ill-equipped to weigh complex national security threats. Khalil’s case is a test of whether that delegation of authority still means anything in the post-Biden legal order.

The judicial sleight of hand here is a familiar one. It begins with a heartfelt invocation of due process and ends with the dismantling of executive authority. Khalil, we are told, has a wife who was eight months pregnant at the time of his arrest and gave birth in April. He is not accused of planting bombs or firing rockets. But the law does not require that. The law only requires a determination, made by the appropriate executive officer, that his presence has adverse foreign policy consequences. That determination was made by Secretary Rubio, consistent with the law. It has now been ignored, not rebutted, by a single district judge with a political axe to grind.

Some have tried to frame this as a First Amendment matter. But the First Amendment does not grant resident aliens a right to materially support terrorism. And the line between speech and material support has already been drawn by the Supreme Court. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), the Court upheld the constitutionality of banning “expert advice or assistance” to foreign terrorist organizations, even if that advice involved pure speech. The Constitution does not protect Khalil’s right to act as a PR agent for Hamas.

More fundamentally, non-citizens do not have a right to remain in the country against the will of its government. In Turner v. Williams (1904), the Supreme Court upheld the deportation of an anarchist, declaring that Congress has “plenary power” to expel aliens whose presence it deems undesirable. That remains the law. In Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), the Court again affirmed that so long as the executive provides a “facially legitimate and bona fide” reason for exclusion or removal, the courts have no role to play. National security is not a courtroom drama. It is an executive responsibility.

Judge Farbiarz’s order does more than misapply the law. It signals a broader pattern of judicial sabotage against the constitutional powers of the Trump administration. The judiciary, increasingly populated with activist judges from the Obama and Biden eras, has taken to operating as a shadow veto over national immigration policy. They do not merely interpret the law, they rewrite it. And in doing so, they jeopardize the very security they pretend to uphold.

President Trump was elected with a mandate to restore American sovereignty. That includes the sovereign right to decide who may enter and remain within our borders. It includes the right to exclude those who act as ideological foot soldiers for organizations that seek the destruction of our allies and the destabilization of our society. Mahmoud Khalil is one such person. His Ivy League credentials should not blind us to his affiliations.

The Trump administration must appeal Farbiarz’s decision immediately and vigorously. More than Khalil’s fate is at stake. The question is whether, in the United States, a duly elected President and his lawfully confirmed Cabinet retain the power to protect the republic from internal threats, or whether that power has been quietly seized by judges who mistake robes for thrones.

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