There is evidence to “strongly suggest” that federal officials acted on tips and lobbying from right-wing and pro-Israel advocacy groups to detain Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil in March, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed Thursday.
“For years, these anti-Palestinian doxxing groups have served as agents of repression, weaponizing inflammatory rhetoric and conflating criticism of Israel with hate speech in order to chill activism for Palestinian rights,” Ayla Kadah, an attorney the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Khalil as he appeals his case, said in a statement.
“Now, evidence seems to point to the Trump administration colluding with them,” she added.
The FOIA request seeks information from federal offices involved in immigration enforcement and investigation, like the FBI and the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security.
It accuses federal lawyers of relying on posts from online monitoring groups that claim to be tracking antisemitism, though some critics say the groups engage in unsafe doxxing campaigns.
The Independent has contacted these agencies for comment.
The FOIA request pays particular attention to the Zionist group Betar USA, and whether its calls to deport students influenced the effort to detain and deport Khalil.
The advocacy group is known for publicly naming pro-Palestinian activists on social media and urging their deportation, and has claimed to have shared “thousands” of targets with the Trump administration. (The administration has not publicly confirmed any contacts with the group.)
Betar has also handed out mock pagers to pro-Palestine activists, a seeming reference to the likely Israeli exploding pager operation that killed both Hezbollah fighters and civilians.
The FOIA request points to alleged ties between Betar and federal officials.
Ross Glick, then the head of the group, has claimed he spoke with Senator Ted Cruz in the days before Khalil’s March 8 arrest, as well as briefed Senator John Fetterman and aides for Senator James Lankford.
“I absolutely deny any involvement with this group whatsoever,” Senator Fetterman said in a statement to The Independent. “I do not support private organizations coming up with deportation lists, and in any event, I would never participate or assist in that.”
Betar shared a video of Glick briefly speaking with Fetterman at the Capitol in late 2024.
The Independent has contacted the offices of Cruz and Lankford for comment.
“The correlation is clear, and not a coincidence: to date, not a single reported visa revocation and detention of an individual based on pro-Palestine activism occurred absent prior doxxing,” the FOIA request reads.
The federal government does not accuse Khalil of breaking any laws; rather, Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked a rarely used, controversial provision of federal law to declare Khalil’s activities could harm U.S. foreign policy interests and then stripped his green card.
The FOIA request, in part, seeks to probe what kind of information the State Department used from federal officials in reaching this decision. The Independent filed a similar FOIA request shortly after Khalil’s arrest, with no response thus far from federal officials.
Khalil, who is married to a U.S. citizen and held legal permanent resident status at the time of his arrest, is currently being kept at a detention facility in Louisiana. He is challenging his imprisonment in immigration and federal court.
This week, a federal judge in New Jersey held that the administration’s decision to revoke Khalil’s green card was likely unconstitutional, though the court stopped short of ordering Khalil’s release.
“The Secretary’s determination deserves, and gets the highest respect,” Judge Michael Farbiarz wrote. “But arbitrary enforcement can also be a danger, when one person is given the job, if his determination veers too far away from the standard set down by Congress. Here, the Secretary’s did.”
