Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil’s attorneys were stunned when an immigration judge in Jena, Louisiana, announced this week that she would rule on whether he should be deported at a hearing Friday — three days after his initial court appearance.
“That is, in my opinion, contrary to every notion of due process,” Marc Van Der Hout, one of his attorneys, told reporters before the hearing.
He said the compressed schedule gave them little time to review the Trump administration’s evidence, submitted to the court two days before the expected ruling, alleging the legal US permanent resident is a national security threat for leading pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations at Columbia last year.
On Friday, immigration Judge Jamee Comans ruled that Khalil is eligible for deportation. It marked a major setback for his legal representatives and immigrant rights advocates who have accused the Trump administration of strategically isolating college students and professors at remote Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in Louisiana and Texas with the intention of creating additional complications for their legal cases.
The detention centers are within the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, widely considered the nation’s most conservative circuit, making it potentially more difficult for noncitizens to win favorable rulings and speeding up their deportations. Though immigration judges are separate from the federal court system, legal experts and immigrant rights advocates fear those in conservative parts of the country are likely to be more receptive to the Trump administration’s agenda.
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“They are forum-shopping as to where they want the case decided,” Van Der Hout said before the hearing. “That has been clear, certainly, in this case and others in which individuals have been shipped off to faraway locations.”
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Like Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, is being held at the central ICE processing facility in Jena. Kseniia Petrova, an associate researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is in Richwood, Louisiana. And Georgetown University researcher Badar Khan Suri, arrested near his home in Northern Virginia, has been detained in Alvarado, Texas. All are hundreds of miles from where they live and were arrested.
Justice Department lawyers said in recent court filings that the university scholars, all of whom were in the United States legally, were transferred because there is not enough room for detainees in ICE facilities closer to where they were arrested.
Operated largely by for-profit companies, the 31 federal detention centers in Louisiana and Texas hold close to 40 percent of the nearly 48,000 immigrants who were in federal detention last month, according to an analysis by TRAC Reports, a nonprofit data analysis center at Syracuse University.
“Many ICE detention facilities throughout the Northeastern United States are near or at capacity and engaged in efforts to relocate detained aliens to regions with available bedspace,” federal prosecutors wrote in a court memo responding to Khalil’s lawsuit in New York challenging his detention.
ICE’s New York field office obtained bedspace for Khalil from its New Orleans counterpart, the prosecutors wrote, and “made its decisions to detain him based solely on operational considerations.”
Though they remain detained in Louisiana as their immigration court proceedings move forward, Khalil and Ozturk successfully blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to establish federal court jurisdiction in that state. Their attorneys argued that the government secretly arrested the scholars and shuttled them between locations without public disclosure to make it more difficult for them to file habeas corpus petitions in courts closer to home.
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A federal judge in New York ruled last month that Khalil’s lawsuit alleging the government violated his constitutional rights to free speech should take place in New Jersey, where he was briefly held before being transferred. His attorneys said before Friday’s ruling that the federal court challenge could potentially stop his removal even if the immigration judge decides he can be deported.
Ozturk, a doctoral candidate studying at Tufts on a student visa, was detained two weeks ago on a sidewalk in Somerville, Massachusetts. The Department of Homeland Security has accused her of supporting the Hamas terrorist organization, but her attorneys contend the government is unlawfully targeting her over political views expressed in a student newspaper opinion piece.
During a federal court hearing in Boston last month, a Justice Department prosecutor cited Petrova’s transfer to Louisiana to suggest that Ozturk’s case was consistent with “recent practice” by the Trump administration.
US District Judge Denise Casper appeared skeptical, asking if the practice was a regular part of immigration enforcement before the Trump administration. She ruled that Ozturk’s legal challenge of her detention should take place in Vermont, where she was initially detained.
The administration’s strategy “is to isolate the individuals from their communities, their legal support, their families, in hopes that media attention and mobilization around their cases dies down,” said Ramzi Kassem, co-director at CLEAR, a legal nonprofit and clinic at City University of New York that is representing Khalil and Ozturk.
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Petrova, who has a visitor exchange visa, is accused of failing to declare frog embryos at Boston’s Logan Airport’s customs checkpoint after a personal trip to France in February, which her boss at Harvard has called a “paperwork mistake.”
According to her attorney, Gregory Romanovsky, Petrova told Customs and Border Protection officials that she is afraid to be deported to Russia because she was arrested there in 2022 for participating in protests against the invasion of Ukraine. Romanovsky filed a federal lawsuit in Vermont, where Petrova was initially held, seeking her release or transfer to detention facilities in Vermont or Massachusetts as her deportation case unfolds in immigration court.
The arrests of the scholars come amid a broader Trump administration crackdown in recent weeks against hundreds of US visa holders, most of them international college students and recent graduates. The State Department said several weeks ago that at least 300 people had been affected, but a recent survey by Inside Higher Ed put the number at more than 600.
In many instances, school officials said they had not received an explanation from federal immigration authorities. It is not clear how many of them have been arrested or otherwise informed they must leave the country.
The ICE facilities in Louisiana and Texas are clustered in what researchers at TRAC Reports dubbed “Detention Center Alley,” a network that includes 13 of the nation’s 20 largest detention centers, with another just across the Louisiana border, in Natchez, Mississippi.
ICE’s detainee population three weeks ago reached 12,203 in Texas and 7,027 in Louisiana, far more than any other state, according to federal data analyzed by TRAC. California, with 3,082 detainees, ranked third.
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John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director during Barack Obama’s administration, said the federal government receives a discount from the contractors for sending higher numbers of detainees, creating a financial incentive to transfer more of them to larger facilities.
The unusual aspect of the Trump administration’s approach, Sandweg said, is how quickly federal authorities relocated the university scholars. Detainee transfers can take up to two weeks, he said, but the Trump administration moved them within days.
Pointing to Khalil’s case, Sandweg said it raises “very complicated questions of the First Amendment. If you know this case is headed to the courts well in advance, the speed in which he was taken to Louisiana so quickly is unusual. That means they were thinking about those legal issues before the operation and had a plan to get him on the plane to Louisiana.”
Civil rights groups have highlighted what they say are inhumane conditions at the Louisiana facilities. In an 88-page report last fall titled “Inside the Black Hole,” a coalition of advocates led by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization described allegations of unsanitary food and water, medical neglect, and physical abuse inside the detention centers.
New Orleans immigration attorney David Rozas said the remote locations of the ICE facilities — far from population centers with large immigration law firms — have made it more difficult for detainees to gain reliable and experienced legal representation.
Rozas represents Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian-born doctoral student at the University of Alabama, whose student visa was revoked by the State Department in 2023. Despite that, he had been allowed to remain in the country as long as he was enrolled in school, Rozas said. Doroudi was arrested by federal immigration authorities two weeks ago at his off-campus apartment and sent to the ICE processing facility in Jena, rather than a federal facility in Stewart, Georgia, which is closer to the university.
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The administration’s approach drew a wry rebuke from a federal judge in New York who is overseeing the case of Columbia University student Yunseo Chung, a US permanent resident from South Korea. Chung sued after being arrested by ICE last month due to her participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations two years ago.
US District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald said the federal government failed to prove Chung poses a national security threat and issued a restraining order temporarily blocking her detention as deportation proceedings play out.
“No trips to Louisiana here,” the judge said.
