WATCH: Marco Rubio Ends The Stupid Mahmoud Khalil Controversy
There’s an Obama-appointed judge named Jesse Furman in New York who has blocked the deportation of a pro-Hamas demonstrator who led violent protests against Israel on the Columbia University campus in one of the most bizarre cases we’ve ever seen.
The demonstrator’s name is Mahmoud Khalil, and he runs, or ran, an organization called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. That outfit staged protests on Columbia’s campus in which Hamas’ October 7 massacre of Israelis, which began the war which has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza as the Israelis justifiably resolved to annihilate Hamas as a viable military opponent. Jewish students were made afraid to even attend classes thanks to Khalil’s efforts.
He’s a Syrian who is in America on a student visa. But Khalil had graduated in December and it’s now March. He was still living in university housing on Columbia’s campus when ICE arrested him earlier this week.
Khalil is married, apparently to an American citizen. That doesn’t automatically confer citizenship rights to him.
You’d expect that he would have been deported by now. But Furman, whose brother Jason was one of Barack Obama’s key economic advisers and who is Jewish, interestingly enough, blocked Khalil’s removal from the country. It’s also an interesting question where Khalil will be deported to, given that Syria isn’t exactly open for business right now.
As such, Khalil now sits in a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana awaiting some resolution of his case.
Sounds like his camp has reason for optimism that he’ll get to stay, right? Don’t be so sure. Here’s what Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who at the end of the day is the man deciding what to do with problematic visas like the one Khalil is holding, had to say about him…
No lies detected.
We’ve seen a non-stop campaign in the courts to gum up the works of the Trump administration’s actions, and Judge Furman is just one more cog in that campaign. He probably should have a bill of impeachment filed against him for his conduct in this case – for one thing, he’s far over the line of his jurisdiction, as the proper venue for Khalil’s case to be litigated is the Western District of Louisiana since that’s where he’s currently located, and for another, if it’s not a question of whether you’ve been given asylum but rather whether your visa has been revoked, you don’t belong in a federal district court but in front of an administrative law judge, because the State Department is the arbiter of whether your stay in America is valid.
Rubio is correct. This case should end soon with Khalil going home or….somewhere, anywhere else. The administration has determined he’s undesirable and shouldn’t be here based on his actions, and that ought to be the end of the matter.
