Mahmoud Khalil, shown above after his release from prison, was asked in an appearance on CNN if he would explicitly condemn Hamas for the heinous terrorist attack on Oct.7, 2023.
"It's disingenuous to ask about condemning Hamas while Palestinians are the ones being starved now by Israel. It's not going to be Oct. 6, where 260 Palestinians were killed by Israel, before Oct. 7."
The order by a left-wing judge that blocked the Trump administration from deporting Khalil has been appealed to the Third Circuit.
A Columbia University graduate student, he was arrested in March over his anti-Israel activism on campus, and an immigration judge ruled he could be removed from the country -- until a federal district court judge blocked that order.
The immigration judge had ruled largely on a memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio which said Khalil’s campus protests were not aligned with U.S. foreign policy interests.
The Department of Homeland Security has also said that Khalil purposely did not reveal that he was employed by the Syrian office in the British Embassy in Beirut when he applied for permanent U.S. residency, Fox News reported.
Each time Khalil was asked about Hamas, he turned the conversation back to the Palestinians.
Art Arthur is a legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
"He is unrepentant about the position that he's taken. The First Amendment does, to a degree, protect even aliens in the United States. I think that this is going to be a test case. It's one that's going to tell us a lot about how the courts view the political activities of aliens in the United States."
So Arthur says we have to wait for deportation.
"In the interim Mr. Khalil will remain free, at least until he commits some other act that would subject him to ICE detention."
