HAMILTON, Canada

Lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and graduate of New York's Columbia University, blasted his deportation case as a "sham" Tuesday, vowing to fight the Trump administration's efforts to remove him from the US through federal appeals.

Khalil, a spokesperson for pro-Gaza protests at the university and a legal US resident, was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2025 and held for 104 days.

A federal judge later ruled his detention unconstitutional. However, the Trump administration won an appeal earlier this month, allowing the case to proceed in immigration court.

Lead attorney Marc Van Der Hout, a nearly 50-year veteran of immigration law, said during a virtual briefing that the proceedings were fundamentally unfair.

"This was not a real trial. This was not a real hearing," he said, adding that he has "never seen such a sham proceeding" in his career.

Van Der Hout said the judge "denied every single motion we filed at the beginning of the case" and scheduled a merits hearing just three days after arraignment.

He also said the judge had written her decision before testimony concluded.

“From the time she walked in at the quote-unquote trial, the hearing, She never left the bench. About an hour into the hearing, she said, ‘I've heard enough,’ and then she read her prepared statement…that she'd written before the hearing even started.

"Any judge looking at this, any real judge, would have thrown out this case from day one," he added.

For his part, attorney Johnny Sinodis argued that the US government's case rests on a charge that was never proven.

"The government charged a specific allegation. They failed to prove it, and the case should have been dismissed," he said.

He also said that the charge that Khalil failed to disclose membership in UNRWA and a Columbia student group on his green card application was undercut because "the immigration judge never found he was a member of either group."

Calling the case "meritless," "pretextual" and "retaliatory," he argued that it is ultimately about whether "the government can erode the protections of the First Amendment to enforce its anti-immigrant policy."

At the briefing, Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, placed the case in a broader context.

"Detaining and deporting and punishing people for their dissenting viewpoints is the hallmark of autocratic regimes like, for example, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran, countries we claim to have the authority to, you know, depose because they engage in these practices," he said, adding that Khalil's fight is "for the Heartland constitutional values in this country, which is one cannot be punished because one disagrees with the policies of the United States."

Khalil's legal team has now filed an appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, asking it to reverse an immigration judge's ruling, with a federal court order prohibiting his deportation remaining in effect while proceedings continue.