Mahmoud Khalil at his July 14 press conference in New York announcing his Ku Klux Klan Act suit.Sophie Hurwitz
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist who spent months in ICE detention, has filed a federal lawsuit against what he alleges is a “public-private conspiracy” to deport him, taking aim at both the Trump administration—one of the suit’s targets—and a constellation of right-wing figures and organizations that relentlessly targeted him over his involvement in anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. Khalil contends that the White House collaborated with these groups in violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era law that sought to restrict government coordination with racist vigilantes.
Khalil’s suit, filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that federal officials entered into a conspiracy with ideologically driven groups including the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, and Betar, to “single out Mr. Khalil and other non-citizen Palestinians and their supporters for arrest, detention, and deportation, as punishment for their support of Palestinian rights.”
Aspects of that alleged relationship have been publicly documented. Shortly after federal immigration officials detained Khalil in March 2025, his lawyers told Mother Jones they had reason to believe the White House was involved. Months earlier, Ross Glick, who then led the radical right-wing Zionist group Betar USA, claimed he had “started commencing lists of Jew-hating foreign nationals on visas who support Hamas” and sending those lists to Trump administration officials. In addition to Khalil, at least eight other noncitizen Palestinians or supporters of Palestinian rights were targeted for deportation based on their advocacy, according to the lawsuit.
Months after Khalil’s arrest, unsealed court records proved that the federal government was targeting students for arrest and deportation based on pro-Palestinian speech—and relying partly on information from groups like Canary Mission, a website cataloging and encouraging harassment of people who express pro-Palestinian views, in order to do so. In July 2025, a senior ICE official testified in court that the Department of Homeland Security created a team to investigate student protesters “based on a list of 5,000 people identified on the Canary Mission website,” according to the Knight First Amendment Institute.
“I think the evidence has, in a way, been there all along,” Khalil’s lawyer Astha Sharma Pakharel said at the press conference. “The Heritage Foundation admitted as early as October of 2024 that it intended to recruit a public-private partnership once a willing administration entered into the administration.” The lawsuit alleges that the Heritage Foundation, perhaps the single most influential outside organization with respect to the second Trump administration, created a blueprint, known as Project Esther, for linking individual student protesters to a supposed “Hamas Support Network” and targeting them for deportation, and relied on groups like Canary Mission and Betar to identify targets.
If his case moves forward, court proceedings may compel the Heritage Foundation and the Trump administration to make public more details of how specific students were pursued for deportation.
To prove a conspiracy, though, Khalil’s lawyers will need to offer evidence beyond anti-Palestinian ideological alignment. “The government’s behavior in Khalil’s case stinks to high heaven,” Stephen I. Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor, told the New York Times. “Whether that opens the door to this kind of broad theory of civil liability is another question altogether. Courts will be worried about what kind of precedent it would set unless there are clear reasons Khalil’s case is not just factually unique but legally unique.”
Khalil’s own deportation case is ongoing, and is expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court. But while that separate litigation proceeds, he is seeking damages from the groups he says contributed to his 104-day detention.
“This case is about far more than what was done to me, Khalil said at Tuesday’s press conference. “It’s about a coordinated, ongoing campaign to punish, silence, and intimidate anyone who dares to speak out for Palestinian liberation, and it’s about exposing the network of organizations, political actors, and institutions that work together to criminalize solidarity with Palestine.”