Palestinian-American activist Mahmoud Khalil has filed a federal lawsuit in Manhattan accusing senior Trump administration officials and three private organisations of coordinating a conspiracy to silence pro-Palestinian voices in the United States by targeting, jailing, and seeking to deport him. The suit, filed Tuesday in federal district court in New York, names White House adviser Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security secretaries Kristi Noem and Markwayne Mullin, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, alongside the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, the far-right Zionist youth movement Betar, and Canary Mission, a group long known for anonymously surveilling pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.
At the heart of the lawsuit is a Heritage Foundation initiative called Project Esther, developed after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. According to Khalil's legal team, the project served as a blueprint to dismantle the pro-Palestine movement in the United States by conflating support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism and calling for the deportation of foreign students involved in protests. The suit alleges the plan moved from concept to policy once the Trump administration took office in January 2025, with Betar and Canary Mission supplying the intelligence to identify targets. Khalil's lawyers argue this public-private collaboration may violate the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 — a Reconstruction-era law originally designed to prevent government coordination with vigilante groups from denying individuals their constitutional rights.
Khalil, 31, a legal permanent resident and former graduate student at Columbia University in New York, became a prominent spokesperson for student activists protesting Israel's military campaign in Gaza. He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at his campus apartment on 8 March 2025 and spent 104 days in an immigration detention centre in Louisiana, missing the birth of his first child. A federal judge in New Jersey ordered his release in June 2025, but the Trump administration successfully appealed, challenging the court's jurisdiction. The case is now expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court, with a judicial stay currently barring his detention or deportation while proceedings continue.
The Trump administration has maintained that Khalil misrepresented himself during his immigration application by failing to disclose prior work with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. UNRWA has said Khalil was never on its payroll and was only briefly affiliated as an intern, and his legal team has rejected the claim entirely.