The Trump administration indicated that it has picked a country to send one of the most well-known foreign student agitators accused of sympathizing with Hamas.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to deport Mahmoud Kahlil to Algeria, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said during a Wednesday interview with NewsNation. Khalil, who established himself as the face of the pro-Palestinian student protests that rocked Columbia University in 2024, is closer to being re-detained by federal immigration authorities following an appeals court ruling earlier in January.
“It looks like he’ll go to Algeria,” McLaughlin said during the interview, confirming that the administration is preparing to take Khalil back into custody. “That’s what the thought is right now.”
“It’s a reminder for those who are in this country on a visa or on a green card. You are a guest in this country — act like it,” McLaughlin said. “It is a privilege, not a right, to be in this country to live or to study, and if you are pushing propaganda that relishes the killing of Americans or promotes terrorists — door’s that way.”
Tricia McLauglin. NewsNation interview. YouTube screengrab.
Major American college campuses in 2024 became engulfed with leftist student protesters sympathetic to the Palestinian cause during the Israel-Hamas war. Largely at the center of these student demonstrations was Columbia University in New York City, which at one point was rocked with protests so violent that university employees were forced to call police to make arrests.
Khalil, a graduate student living in the U.S. on a non-immigrant student visa at the time of these events, positioned himself early on as the protest movement’s leader, speaking to media outlets and serving as an intermediary between Columbia and the demands of campus activists. Born in Syria and holding Algerian citizenship, the activist also claims to be Palestinian by ancestry.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Khalil at his university home on Mar. 8, making him the first of many alleged pro-Hamas actors at American universities to be detained. The foreign activist was swiftly flown to an immigration detention center in Louisiana, where he remained until a federal judge in New Jersey ruled he could be released.
However, Khalil faced a major legal setback in January when a federal appeals panel determined that the New Jersey judge didn’t have jurisdiction to decide the matter, paving the way for the Trump administration to take him back into custody.
The Trump administration on Thursday confirmed its intention to deport Khalil out of the country.
“Mahmoud Khalil is a foreign terrorist sympathizer who has repeatedly refused to condemn Hamas and has previously advocated for violence, glorified terrorists, terrorized Jewish students, and damaged property,” McLaughlin told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “DHS is working to enforce his lawful removal order.”
Since his release from immigration custody, Kahlil became a leading figure in the opposition against President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, hitting the media circuit to discuss his case and waging a lawsuit against the administration. During a July interview on CNN, Khalil repeatedly refused to condemn Hamas when asked by host Pamela Brown.
“So I hate this selective outrage of condemnation because this is not, this wouldn’t lead to a constructive conversation,” he said during the interview, speaking about Hamas and the group’s massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. “And this is also, like what we want to deal with is the root causes of why that happened. And it’s no way anyone can justify the killing of civilians.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated to include additional commentary from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
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