The legal road for Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and anti-Israel protest organizer facing deportation, just got narrower. The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday rejected a bid to overturn the Trump administration's effort to remove the 31-year-old from the country, and his lawyer now says the U.S. Supreme Court is the last stop.
Baher Azmy, Khalil's attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, pledged to take the case to the nation's highest court, framing the appeals court ruling as a threat to judicial review itself. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, made clear it intends to follow through.
A DHS spokesperson told Reuters the department "will work to enforce Khalil's lawful removal order", and added a pointed suggestion that Khalil save everyone the trouble.
"We would encourage him to use the CBP Home app and self-deport now before he is arrested, deported, and never given a chance to return."
That statement captures the administration's posture: the legal process has run its course, and the government considers the matter settled. Khalil's legal team disagrees.
Khalil, an Algerian citizen born in Syria of Palestinian heritage, was first arrested in March 2025 at his apartment in New York City. The arrest followed his involvement in organizing disruptive protests at Columbia University, a campus that became a flashpoint for anti-Israel demonstrations.
But the formal deportation case does not rest on protest activity. The government's stated grounds center on what Khalil allegedly left off his application for permanent U.S. residency. Among the omissions, according to the proceedings: his work with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from June to November 2023, and his time at the British embassy in Syria.
UNRWA has drawn sustained scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and the Trump administration over alleged ties to terrorism. Omitting that employment from a green-card application is not a minor paperwork oversight, it goes to the core of the vetting process that permanent residency is supposed to require.
Khalil spent 104 days in custody before U.S. District Court Judge Michael Farbiarz in New Jersey ordered his release, finding what the judge described as fatal flaws in the government's reasoning for holding him. That order, however, did not survive long.
A federal appeals panel overturned Farbiarz's release order and directed the case back through immigration court, ruling that the district judge lacked jurisdiction. The panel's logic was straightforward: Khalil's challenge belonged in the immigration system first, not in a federal courtroom.
Friday's decision by the 3rd Circuit reinforced that conclusion. The court left the earlier jurisdictional ruling in place, effectively closing the door on Khalil's attempt to bypass immigration proceedings through the federal courts.
For Khalil's legal team, the ruling is an affront. Azmy, speaking to Reuters, cast the decision in sweeping terms:
"That ruling green-lights holding someone in prolonged, brutal detention conditions without access to meaningful judicial review in order to punish them and deter others from dissenting from US foreign policy."
That framing, detention as political punishment, is the argument Khalil's side will carry to the Supreme Court. Whether the justices agree to hear it is another question entirely.
Even as Khalil's attorneys fought in federal court, the immigration system moved forward. The Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals ruled in April that Khalil is subject to deportation, paving the way for his removal from the United States.
That administrative ruling is significant. It means the government's case has cleared not just one but two distinct legal tracks. The immigration courts found grounds for removal. The federal appeals courts found that federal judges had no business intervening at the stage Khalil's lawyers wanted them to.
Khalil's team argues a separate federal court case still prevents his removal. The details of that claim remain unclear, and the current status of any such proceeding is not specified in available reporting. What is clear is that every federal court that has weighed in so far has sided with the government's position on jurisdiction.
Taking a case to the Supreme Court sounds dramatic. In practice, the Court accepts a small fraction of the petitions it receives each term. Khalil's attorneys will need to convince at least four justices that the case raises a question worth answering, likely a question about the scope of habeas review for immigration detainees, or the limits of executive authority in deportation cases.
The facts of Khalil's situation, however, may not make for a sympathetic vehicle. A permanent resident who allegedly omitted employment with a controversial UN agency from his residency application, and who came to federal attention through protest organizing, does not present the clean constitutional question that typically attracts Supreme Court review.
The administration, for its part, has no reason to slow down. DHS has a lawful removal order. The Board of Immigration Appeals has ruled. The 3rd Circuit has declined to intervene. Every institutional checkpoint has pointed in the same direction.
Khalil's lawyers want this case to be about free speech and political dissent. The government says it is about a residency applicant who did not tell the truth on his paperwork. Those are two very different stories, and the courts so far have treated it as the second one.
That distinction matters. If Khalil had disclosed his UNRWA work and his time at the British embassy, and the government still moved to deport him over protest activity, the constitutional argument would carry more weight. Instead, the record shows omissions on a federal application, omissions the government considers material enough to revoke his right to stay.
Khalil's supporters will continue to frame this as a chilling effect on campus activism. But the legal system has consistently treated it as an immigration case, governed by immigration law, properly routed through immigration courts. Three levels of review have now agreed on that point.
Khalil's current custody status remains unclear. Whether he is detained or free pending the Supreme Court petition is not specified. What is specified, by DHS, by the Board of Immigration Appeals, and now by the 3rd Circuit, is that the government considers his removal lawful and intends to carry it out.
The broader principle at stake is not complicated. The United States grants permanent residency on the condition that applicants provide truthful, complete information. When someone omits material facts, including employment with an agency under congressional scrutiny for terror ties, the system is supposed to respond. That is not political persecution. That is the law functioning as designed.
Khalil's legal team has every right to petition the Supreme Court. The process allows it. But the process has also, at every stage, produced the same answer: the government followed proper channels, and the courts lack authority to second-guess the immigration system at this juncture.
If you want the protections of permanent residency, you have to earn them honestly. That expectation is not a political statement. It is the baseline.
