NEW YORK — An international student at Cornell University involved in pro-Palestinian protests has been asked to surrender to immigration authorities as he seeks to block deportation actions by the Trump administration.
The government action against Momodou Taal comes as President Donald Trump ratchets up efforts to arrest and deport noncitizens who participate in such protests or who demonstrate against Israel’s military actions in Gaza. In one of the most high-profile cases, the Justice Department recently lodged new accusations against a Columbia University graduate student who has been detained and targeted for deportation because of his participation in protests.
Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana studies at Cornell, filed a federal lawsuit March 15 seeking to block enforcement of executive orders by Trump that he feared could lead to his deportation. Taal is a citizen of the United Kingdom and Gambia.
On Friday, just six days later, the 31-year-old international student was asked to surrender to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, according to his attorneys.
In its court filing, the DOJ said Taal’s student visa was revoked before he filed his lawsuit but ICE agents had trouble locating him. The revocation is based on Taal’s alleged involvement in “disruptive protests,” disregarding university policies and creating a hostile environment for Jewish students, the government said.
An attorney for Taal, Eric Lee, said Monday that his client is not being required to surrender before Tuesday’s scheduled hearing on the lawsuit in Syracuse.
Taal was temporarily suspended from Cornell for a second time last fall after a group of pro-Palestinian activists disrupted a campus career fair. He has limited access to the upstate New York campus as he continues his studies remotely.
In his lawsuit, Taal and his co-plaintiffs argue that Trump’s executive orders violate the free speech rights of international students and scholars. Taal claims he was at the career fair protest for five minutes and had faced no criminal charges.
“If the First Amendment does not protect the right to attend a demonstration, what’s left?” Lee said. “Not much.”
In the case involving Columbia University, federal prosecutors on Thursday lodged new allegations against graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, saying he had not disclosed his work with the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees and his continued employment with the British embassy for Syria, based in Beirut. Prosecutors also said he did not disclose his involvement with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition group of anti-Israel student organizations.
Ramzi Kassem, an attorney for Khalil, called the allegations “plainly thin,” noting the government would have to prove any omission was both willful and materially important.
“It’s very obviously a rearguard action to shore up their immigration case,” he said. “This doesn’t change the fact that this is still a case about Mr. Khalil’s pro-Palestinian speech and the fact that the government doesn’t like it.”
The Trump administration had previously also argued that Khalil’s prominent role in the Columbia University protests amounted to antisemitic support for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Khalil, who received his master’s degree from Columbia’s school of international affairs last semester, served as a negotiator for students as they bargained with university officials over an end to the tent encampment erected on campus last spring.
The administration’s argument rests on a seldom-invoked legal statute that authorizes the secretary of state to revoke the visa of any noncitizen whose presence in the United States could be considered a threat to the country’s foreign-policy interests.
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Hill reported from Albany, New York.