U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) testifies during his Senate Foreign Relations confirmation hearing at Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 15, 2025 in Washington, DC. Rubio, a three-term Senator and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, has broad bipartisan support from his Senate colleagues. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

(JTA) — In advance of a pivotal court hearing this week in the deportation case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University, a judge demanded that the State Department lay out its case against him.

Now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has done so, in a two-page memo that says “beliefs, statements, or associations” that he deems at odds with U.S. foreign policy interests are sufficient to justify deportation. It does not allege any criminal behavior and instead implies that Khalil’s behavior and statements were “otherwise lawful.”

Instead, Rubio wrote, “The public action and continued presence of ____ and Khalil undermine U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States.” (The memo includes the redacted name of another permanent resident facing deportation.)

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The memo, first obtained by the Associated Press, cites the same Cold War-era law that Trump officials have pointed to to justify deportations of non-citizen activists who they believe pose a threat to the country’s national security interests.

The memo was filed Wednesday ahead of a hearing set for Friday to determine whether the government can continue detaining Khalil.

Khalil, who is a green card holder, was detained by ICE a month ago, the first in a wave of student activists whom the government has arrested and targeted for deportation. (Most of the people who have been told to leave the country were on student visas, which the State Department has broad latitude to revoke.) His case has sparked widespread protest and has split Jewish groups that, broadly, want to aggressively combat antisemitism but in many cases fear the erosion of civil liberties.

“After a month of hiding the ball since Mahmoud’s late-night unjust arrest in New York and taking him away to a remote detention center in Louisiana, immigration authorities have finally admitted that they have no case whatsoever against him,” two of Khalil’s attorneys, Marc Van Der Hout and Johnny Sinodis, said in a joint statement to the Associated Press. “There is not a single shred of proof that Mahmoud’s presence in America poses any threat.”

Rubio has repeatedly defended the deportation of people he deems Hamas supporters, including in a Senate confirmation hearing prior to his appointment as secretary of state. He has expressed the same sentiments after Khalil’s arrest.

“Now that you got the visa and [are] inside the U.S. and we realize you’re a supporter, we should remove your visa. If you could not come in because you’re a supporter of Hamas, you should not be able to stay. That’s how I view it,” said Rubio at the hearing.

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