Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana

NYC Protest shows a crowd with signs that read, "Release Mahmoud Khalil" "Hands off our students" "free palestine"

SWinxy, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to our news segment: TL;DR of Immigration News, for when the news is Too Long and you Didn’t Read it.

This is a weekly collection of immigration-related news stories. These bite-size summaries will keep you up to date without overwhelming your inbox.
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'Nazis got better treatment,' judge says of Trump administration's Alien Enemies Act deportations

Proof that even judges are not immune from Godwin’s Law (putting aside whether Godwin’s Law technically applies to offline communications), last week federal appeals judge Patricia Millet told a Justice Department lawyer during a court hearing about Venezuelan immigrants that “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.”

The people in question, scooped up and shipped to a torture and slave labor prison in El Salvador, were detained and deported without even the pretense of due process. It appears the main criteria employed by the Trump administration in selection was…whether someone had a tattoo. That’s it. A tattoo is now enough to get you clapped in chains and sent on a plane to a torture prison, regardless of whether, say, you have legal refugee status. The cruelty is the point. The fear is the point. This administration wants everyone to think that at any time, the hammer can and will fall on them.
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Law Prof. Katherine Franke accuses Columbia of empowering Trump by agreeing to $400M “ransom note”

Last week Columbia University continued to grovel in response to the Trump administration’s demands, which included banning face masks on campus, punishing student protestors with expulsion or multi-year suspensions, degrading remnants of faculty and student governance, imposing censorship and administrative control over the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies, and increasing police presence on campus.

Columbia not only agreed to every wildly undemocratic demand spelled out in what Professor Katherine Franke has called a $400 million “ransom note;” but also added a few of its own. However, as we may have predicted, this display of compliance and prostration has not restored any of Columbia’s federal funding. Rather it serves only to further embolden the current administration’s full-fledged attack on education, democracy, freedom of speech, and Palestine solidarity.

Franke was forced to leave her established and decorated career as a Columbia Law Professor several months ago over trumped up charges of antisemitism. Make no mistake: Columbia is not merely making the best of a bad situation; rather, it is sacrificing the safety, wellbeing, and constitutional freedoms of its students, staff, and faculty, while abandoning its entire educational and research mandate. Most terrifyingly, Columbia’s fawning is serving to teach the current fascist regime what further horrors it can get away with implementing on a mass scale.
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Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana

“My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.”

Read the rest of Mahmoud Khalil’s letter from an ICE prison in Louisiana here.

A New York court has ruled that Khalil’s case challenging his unlawful detention will be transferred to New Jersey, a small win after the Trump Administration attempted to transfer the case to Louisiana, far away from Khalil’s residence and community. They also reaffirmed a previous ruling that blocked his immediate deportation.

Samah Sisay, a member of Khalil’s legal team, said, “The government transferred Mr. Khalil to a remote private prison in Louisiana hours after his arrest and the filing of his original habeas petition – an intentional and retaliatory attempt to silence his speech in support of Palestinian rights and interfere with the jurisdiction of the New York and New Jersey Courts. Mr. Khalil should be free and home with his wife awaiting the birth of their first child, and we will continue to do everything possible to make that happen.”

Read more quotes from Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team and the progression of his court case at the Center for Constitutional Rights website here.

Demand Mohamad Khalil’s release by signing this petition.
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Trump Orders DOJ and DHS to Punish Law Firms That Challenge His Agenda
On a now-typical shabbat rampage, the mad king/sitting president threatened to punish lawyers initiating “frivolous” lawsuits against federal actions. This clear menace to immigration lawyers invokes the right-wing nonsense that immigration advocates somehow “coach” clients to lie about their experiences. It has historical precedent in the McCarthy era, which also saw repression and jailing of advocates.

Austin Kocher breaks down the targeted punishment directed against immigration lawyers.

Support the National Immigration Law Center at this link.
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Trump revoking protections for 530,000 immigrants

The federal government is trying to revoke protections for 530,000 migrants, who would have to leave the country by April 24. Immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela were brought into the US under a Biden-era sponsorship process called CHNV.

The program was created to provide a legal pathway to asylum-seekers who would otherwise be stuck in overcrowded shelters and barred from working for at least six months after an asylum case was opened. CHNV granted a two year parole status to migrants, which required them to have a US-based sponsor who would take financial responsibility for settling them and helping them secure a work permit if authorized. Employers experiencing labor shortages welcomed the program, and it seemed to be successful, as run-ins by CHNV migrants with Border Patrol have been reduced since the program was introduced in January 2023.

The Justice Action Center in California is preparing to challenge the move in court. The organization’s founder, Karen Tumlin, said in an interview with the BBC that this decision hurts both immigrants and their American sponsors, "who did everything right that the US Government asked of them." She added, “To say 'oh, we're so sorry, even if you had 18 months left on your grant of permission to be here we're going to pull the rug out from under you in the next 30 days,' it's really quite surprising.”
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5 Actions you can take Right Now:

  1. Jeanette Vizguerra, community leader and mother, was arrested by ICE in Colorado. Jeanette has been fighting her deportation case since 2009 and is a pillar to her community and family. She has organized and supported immigrant and human rights for years, she needs our support now.

  1. College Students/Faculty/Staff: Sign the ICE Noncompliance Pledge. When Trump abuses “Jewish safety” to justify deportations, we must spread the word to not comply.

  2. Respond to reports of suspected raids in your area in real time by reading and sharing the information in this 1-page guide. For those of us who are allies especially, learn how to watch for ICE and protect your neighbors.

  3. Updated for 2025: Never Again Action is equipping members to organize themselves into neighborhood groups (or “pods”) to be trained and respond to deportation threats on a hyperlocal level. Learn more and build or join a pod: bit.ly/BuildAPod2025

  4. Support Never Again Action’s organizing by making a donation today. You can make a tax deductible donation via our fiscal sponsor at this link, or you can donate directly to our 501(c)(4) organization at this link.

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