Masked immigration agents seizing a graduate student on a suburban street. Officers marching into campus housing and arresting another, ignoring his distraught wife as she asks where he is being taken. They have been among the defining images of President Trump’s second term.
But with Mahmoud Khalil’s release on bail from federal detention on Friday, the early phase of the Trump administration’s high-profile crackdown on international students who have spoken out in favor of Palestinian rights appears to have ended for now.
As a detention campaign — an attempt to confine the students while their deportation cases play out — Mr. Trump’s efforts appear to have been unsuccessful. In addition to Mr. Khalil, many of the other administration’s most prominent targets have been freed, while immigration agents have been barred from even trying to detain others.
Judges in those cases have sent an unequivocal message: The administration cannot detain people solely because of their speech.
“The unanimity of federal court decisions on this issue should send a clear message to the executive branch that it cannot snatch people off the streets for peacefully protesting and put them in prison indefinitely,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “The federal courts have unequivocally protected the First Amendment rights of the noncitizen protesters in these cases, literally across the country.”
Mr. Trump’s second term has been rife with similar efforts to suppress disfavored speech, as the administration bars news outlets from the Oval Office and cancels federal grants on the basis of words that its officials dislike. And while many of those efforts have been legally unsuccessful, it is difficult to measure their broader political effect.
In the case of the high-profile student protesters, if one of the president’s goals was to stifle the pro-Palestinian movement on college campuses, his administration has succeeded in some ways. The abrupt detention of foreign students may have had a profoundly chilling effect on international students, who could see Mr. Khalil’s monthslong detention as a warning.
“I am now regularly advising noncitizens to consider whether they want to engage in political speech,” Ms. Mukherjee said. “Of course, they should have a right to do so under the First Amendment, but there are potentially life-altering, devastating consequences for doing so.”
Mr. Khalil experienced those consequences firsthand. A Columbia University graduate student, he became one of the most recognizable faces of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the school’s campus. He was arrested in March, detained and sent to Louisiana, where he was held for more than three months, missing his graduation and birth of his firstborn child.
A lawyer for Mr. Khalil, Marc Van Der Hout, said that the administration’s political campaign against his client and other university students had been a failure.
“There has been worldwide outrage and outcry about what they have been doing,” he said. “The public as a whole has condemned this approach and condemned this attempt to silence people for speaking out on Gaza in particular.”
Mr. Khalil and other students who have been released from confinement remain in dire legal circumstances. Most are still in deportation proceedings in immigration court, where Trump administration lawyers are pushing for their expulsion from the United States. The proceedings, typically complex and overseen by immigration judges, could take months and still result in their being forced out of the country.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security condemned the judge’s decision to release Mr. Khalil on bail. The agency argued that only an immigration judge had the authority to make that determination. In a statement, the department accused the judge of undermining the voters’ will and suggested the government would appeal the decision. The Justice Department appealed on Friday evening.
“This is yet another example of how out-of-control members of the judicial branch are undermining national security,” the department said. “Their conduct not only denies the result of the 2024 election, it also does great harm to our constitutional system by undermining public confidence in the courts.”
The release of a small group of students is a welcome reprieve for them and their supporters, but the reality is that the Trump administration has broadened its efforts, moving aggressively to curb the number of all foreign students in the country as it seeks to expel immigrants in general.
The administration has tried to strip hundreds of students of their visas, targeting some for their involvement in protests or because they had broken laws while targeting many others without a clear reason.
The State Department recently adopted rules to vet the social media accounts of student visa applicants who may have “hostile” views toward the United States. And the federal government has sought to revoke Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, although the effort was temporarily blocked by a judge on Friday.
Greg Chen, a senior director at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that Mr. Khalil’s detention under an obscure and rarely used provision of immigration law should be seen “through the lens of how they are targeting a very broad swath of individuals.”
“The administration has actually stepped into a deep cesspool by trying to target people who are students that are contributing to the country,” Mr. Chen said, adding that “the public is starting to see the lie behind the administration’s statement that it is going to target people that are going to pose public safety threats.”
The student detentions, which began just weeks after Mr. Trump took office, quickly signaled that his deportation campaign would be aggressive. But although it began with a several arrests made in the name of national security, it has expanded well beyond America’s college campuses.
The individual detentions have given way to to roundups at Florida construction sites, New York immigration courts and Los Angeles workplaces, resulting in more than 100,000 people being arrested since late January. Many of them have been deported.
The targets now are not students with well-connected academic communities behind them. Instead, they are millions of longtime residents and recent arrivals who are undocumented and often lack resources, and the attention that made cases like Mr. Khalil’s difficult to ignore.
Upon his release from detention on Friday, Mr. Khalil immediately began to speak on their behalf, saying that he hoped to return to Jena to find that the detention center had been turned into a museum testifying to America’s racist policies against immigrants.
“The hundreds of men I left behind me shouldn’t be there in the first place,” he said. “The Trump administration are doing their best to dehumanize everyone here.”
