Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian rights advocate, filed a lawsuit He was accused in federal court Tuesday of a coordinated conspiracy between senior administration officials and three private organizations to target and deport him because of his advocacy. Khalil is a former Columbia University graduate student who became the public face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists.
The 131-page complaintThe petition, filed under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, names among many defendants senior presidential adviser Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and State Department official John Armstrong, as well as the Heritage Foundation and two online monitoring groups, Canary Mission and Betar, as well as individual leaders of each organization, among others.
According to the ComplaintThe Heritage Foundation launched Project Esther in October 2024. This project sought to identify and target non-citizen students and scholars who advocate for the rights of Palestinians against arrest and deportation through a “public-private partnership” with a “willing government” in the White House. Canary Mission and Betar would select the targets. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official later testified in a separate federal trial that about 75 percent of the names his agency investigated came from Canary Mission.
Khalil, a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, was arrested by ICE agents on March 8, 2025. He spent 104 days in immigration detention in Louisiana and missed the birth of his first child. His lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages as well as an injunction barring the defendants from further pursuing his removal.
“This case is about much more than what was done to me,” Khalil said in one Press release on Tuesday. “This is about a coordinated, ongoing campaign to punish, silence and intimidate anyone who dares to advocate for the liberation of Palestinians.”
