World
Anti-Israel US activist Mahmoud Khalil files lawsuit alleging ‘conspiracy’ against him
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University pro-Palestinian protest leader, filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging that US President Donald Trump’s administration had colluded with several pro-Israel groups to prosecute him for his advocacy.
The lawsuit is “about exposing the network of organizations, political actors and institutions that work together to criminalize solidarity with Palestine,” Khalil, who became the face of Trump’s crackdown on anti-Israel and allegedly antisemitic pro-Palestinian activism when he was arrested by immigration officers in March 2025, said at a press conference at New York City Hall.
“For decades, the state of Israel and the Zionist organizations in this country that operate on behalf of Israel have understood that their conduct cannot survive honest scrutiny,” he said. “So rather than defend or change their conduct, they resorted to making scrutiny itself impossible. They brand criticism of a government as hatred of a people. They rebrand documented atrocities as debates.”
Khalil was arrested by federal immigration authorities in June 2025, with the Trump administration saying he was a threat to US interests and had committed fraud on his green card application. He was held in detention for several months until his court-ordered release, and has been battling deportation in court since.
The lawsuit, which was filed in Manhattan federal court, alleges that the government’s actions violate the Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 anti-conspiracy law intended to restrict government coordination with vigilante groups. The act was also used to prosecute the 2017 Charlottesville march’s organizers for planning to incite racist violence.
The complaint alleges there had been a “conspiracy” among private pro-Israel entities, including the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission and Betar USA, and senior Trump administration officials to target and prosecute pro-Palestinian activists. The lawsuit names US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, former DHS secretary Kristi Noem and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
“After the October 7 [2023] attacks and the beginning of the Israeli genocide, these entities were appalled and scared about the burgeoning Palestine rights movement occurring on campus and the cratering support for [the] Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza,” Baher Azmy, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the complaint on behalf of Khalil, claimed during the press conference.
He continued: “Because they could not defend their support for the Israeli government’s actions… they sought to do what cowards and bullies do, which is to repress, to punish speech that they disliked.”
Inquiries from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission and Betar USA were not immediately returned.
The lawsuit comes after Betar USA, a militant pro-Israel group, agreed to halt its operations in New York after reaching a settlement with state Attorney General Letitia James, whose office found that the group had committed a “campaign of violence, harassment and intimidation against Arab, Muslim and Jewish New Yorkers.”
Azmy claimed that Project Esther, a 2024 plan for combatting antisemitism written by the conservative Heritage Foundation that outlined many policies undertaken by the Trump administration last year, had created a “blueprint for the conspiracy.”
He alleged that Betar and Canary Mission then worked to identify and “nominate” campus pro-Palestinian activists for the Trump administration to target.
“It’s not like the State Department was using any reasoned judgment or deliberation,” Azmy charged. “They were taking these nominations and, within a day or two, sending DHS and ICE officials to arrest Mahmoud and others and send them to faraway prisons, and so today we’re here demanding accountability.”
Khalil was an organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an alliance of campus groups that led the disruptive protests on the Ivy League campus after the start of the Gaza war. The group is no longer recognized by the university.
CUAD has praised violent “resistance” by Palestinians, including, explicitly, the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught, in which terrorists killed some 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages. The group hosted pro-Hamas figures on campus, called for the “total eradication of Western civilization,” and distributed Hamas propaganda at a campus library.
Khalil served as a spokesperson for the group in its negotiations with the Columbia administration.
Since his release from detention, Khalil has justified the Hamas attack on Israel and dismissed concerns about antisemitism at Columbia.
In September, he called for the “collapse” of the “Zionist genocidal project and the ideology of supremacy that it’s built on.”
