activist

A federal appeals panel on Thursday reversed a lower-court decision that released former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil from an immigration jail, bringing the government one step closer to detaining and ultimately deporting the Palestinian activist.

The three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t decide the key issue in Khalil’s case: whether the Trump administration’s effort to throw Khalil out of the U.S. over his campus activism and criticism of Israel is unconstitutional.

But in its 2-1 decision, the panel ruled a federal judge in New Jersey didn’t have jurisdiction to decide the matter at this time. Federal law requires the case to fully move through the immigration courts first, before Khalil can challenge the decision, they wrote.

“That scheme ensures that petitioners get just one bite at the apple — not zero or two,” the panel wrote. “But it also means that some petitioners, like Khalil, will have to wait to seek relief for allegedly unlawful government conduct.”

The law bars Khalil “from attacking his detention and removal in a habeas petition,” the panel added.

It was not clear whether the government would seek to detain Khalil, a legal permanent resident, again while his legal challenges continue.

Thursday’s decision marked a major win for the Trump administration’s sweeping campaign to detain and deport noncitizens who joined protests against Israel.

In a statement distributed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Khalil said the appeals ruling was “deeply disappointing, but it does not break our resolve.”

He added: “The door may have been opened for potential re-detainment down the line, but it has not closed our commitment to Palestine and to justice and accountability. I will continue to fight, through every legal avenue and with every ounce of determination, until my rights, and the rights of others like me, are fully protected.”

Baher Azmy, one of Khalil’s lawyers, said the ruling was “contrary to rulings of other federal courts.” He noted the panel’s finding concerned a “hypertechnical jurisdictional matter,” rather than the legality of the Trump administration’s policy.

“Our legal options are by no means concluded, and we will fight with every available avenue,” he added, saying Khalil would remain free pending the full resolution of all appeals, which could take months or longer.

The ACLU said the Trump administration cannot lawfully re-detain Khalil until the order takes formal effect, which won’t happen while he can still immediately appeal.

Khalil has multiple options to appeal

Khalil’s lawyers can request the active judges on the 3rd Circuit hear an appeal, or they can go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

An outspoken leader of the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia, Khalil was arrested on March 8, 2025. He then spent three months detained in a Louisiana immigration jail, missing the birth of his firstborn.

Federal officials have accused Khalil of leading activities “aligned to Hamas,” though they have not presented evidence to support the claim and have not accused him of criminal conduct. They have also accused Khalil, 30, of failing to disclose information on his green card application.

The government has justified the arrest under a seldom-used statute that allows for the expulsion of noncitizens whose beliefs are deemed to pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests.

In June, a federal judge in New Jersey ruled that justification would likely be declared unconstitutional and ordered Khalil released.

President Trump’s administration appealed that ruling, arguing the deportation decision should fall to an immigration judge, rather than a federal court.

Khalil has dismissed the allegations as “baseless and ridiculous,” framing his arrest and detention as a “direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

Dissenting judge says Khalil has right to fight detention

Judge Arianna Freeman dissented Thursday, writing that her colleagues were holding Khalil to the wrong legal standard. Khalil, she wrote, is raising “now-or-never claims” that can be handled at the district court level. He does not have a final order of removal, which would permit a challenge in an appellate court, she wrote.

Both judges who ruled against Khalil, Thomas Hardiman and Stephanos Bibas, were Republican appointees. President George W. Bush appointed Hardiman to the 3rd Circuit, while Trump appointed Bibas. President Biden, a Democrat, appointed Freeman.

The majority opinion noted Freeman worried the ruling would leave Khalil with no remedy for unconstitutional immigration detention, even if he later can appeal.

“But our legal system routinely forces petitioners — even those with meritorious claims — to wait to raise their arguments,” the judges wrote. “To be sure, the immigration judge’s order of removal is not yet final; the Board has not affirmed her ruling and has held the parties’ briefing deadlines in abeyance pending this opinion. But if the Board ultimately affirms, Khalil can get meaningful review.”

The decision comes as an appeals board in the immigration court system weighs a previous order that found Khalil could be deported. His attorneys have argued that the federal order should take precedence.

That judge has suggested Khalil could be deported to Algeria, where he maintains citizenship through a distant relative, or Syria, where he was born in a refugee camp to a Palestinian family.

His attorneys have said he faces mortal danger if forced to return to either country.

Offenhartz and Sisak write for the Associated Press. AP writer Larry Neumeister contributed to this report.

In Springfield, Ill., in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the “ravages of mob law” throughout the land. Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant “mobocratic spirit” threatened to sever the “attachment of the People” to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln’s opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”

Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a years-long baleful trend.

On Wednesday, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom, Renee Nicole Good, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Her ex-husband said she and her partner encountered ICE agents after dropping off Good’s 6-year-old at school. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.

Suffice it to say Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to the deployment of 2,000 immigration agents in the area and the deadly encounter by telling ICE to “get the f— out” of Minnesota, while Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.” Frey, who was also mayor during the mayhem after George Floyd’s murder by city police in 2020, has lent succor to the anti-ICE provocateurs, seemingly encouraging them to make Good a Floyd-like martyr. As for Walz, he’s right that this tragedy was eminently “avoidable” — but not only for the reasons he thinks. If the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t allowed unvetted immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and if Walz’s administration hadn’t moved too slowly in its investigations of hundreds of Minnesotans — of mixed immigration status — defrauding taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, ICE never would have embarked on this particular operation.

National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This sort of irresponsible fear-mongering already may have prompted a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.

Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.” The fact is, ICE is not the Gestapo, Donald Trump is not Hitler, and Charlie Kirk was not a goose-stepping brownshirt. To pretend otherwise is to deprive words of meaning and to live in the theater of the absurd.

But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.

The implicit threat of all “sanctuary” jurisdictions, whose resistance to aiding federal law enforcement smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area — or else. The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.

The truth is that swaths of the activist left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course. In 2020, the left’s months-long rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the officer who infamously kneeled on Floyd’s neck, was found guilty of murder (which he was, twice). In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, abortion-rights activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, perhaps hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes. And now, ICE agents throughout the country face threats of violence — egged on by local Democratic leaders — simply for enforcing federal law.

In “The Godfather,” Luca Brasi referred to this sort of thuggery as making someone an offer that he can’t refuse. We might also think of it as Lincoln’s dreaded “ravages of mob law.”

Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this. The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank. The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear or favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background — no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.

The proper recourse for changing immigration law — or any federal law — is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court. The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road — only death, despair and mobocracy.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer

Cape Town, South Africa – Lucy Campbell, with her long grey dreadlocks, stands animated in front of the thick stone walls of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town’s city centre, her small frame accentuated by their towering height.

The 65-year-old activist-turned-historian has a message for the 10 American students who have come to hear her version of the city’s history. Dressed in a black hoodie and blue jeans, Campbell is well-spoken but shows her disdain for Cape Town’s colonial past, often erupting in harsh language for those she blames for its consequences.

“This castle speaks to the first economic explosion in Cape Town,” she says at the beginning of her five-stop tour of the city. “It’s an architectural crime scene.”

Campbell refuses to enter the 17th-century castle, which she sees as a symbol of the violence and dispossession that the colonial era brought to South Africa’s second biggest city.

“That is where they used to hang people,” she says, pointing to one of the castle’s five bastions. It was built by the settlers of the Dutch East India Company, commonly known by its Dutch acronym, VOC. The VOC built the fortress as part of its efforts to establish a refreshment post between the Netherlands and other trade destinations in the East. The castle is now run by the South African military.

Campbell, an accredited tour guide, has been giving privately run tours like this for 17 years, starting at the castle and offering a scathing critique of the city’s monuments and museums for dozens of people each year.

She says most official tributes, such as the Slave Memorial erected in 2008 in Church Square, fail to do justice to the enslaved people who contributed to the construction of Cape Town and often neglect to acknowledge the Indigenous population that lived here for hundreds of years before the Dutch arrived in 1652, displacing them and introducing slavery to the Cape.

Campbell can still see clear echoes in the city of the “genocide” and dispossession of the Khoi people, the Indigenous herders who lived on this land for thousands of years. She remembers her mother’s stories about how this history personally affected her family, who are descendants of the famously wealthy Hessequa, a subset of the Khoi. The Hessequa lost their land and livestock to the Dutch.

Known as “the people of the trees”, the Hessequa lived for centuries in the farming area now known as Swellendam, about 220km (137 miles) east of Cape Town. The arrival of European settlers transformed them from land and cattle owners to peasant workers employed by white people, conditions that in many places persist to this day.

Land ownership in Cape Town and South Africa as a whole remains overwhelmingly in the hands of the white minority. Rights groups have also accused white farmers of sometimes abusing predominantly mixed-race agricultural workers and evicting them on a whim, a practice that has carried on since the colonial era.

“Many of them have worked there for generations, and they are just being evicted,” Campbell says. “There’s no pension. There’s nothing. So the ailments of the past [continue].”

The coloniality of the museum

With a resume that includes posts ranging from trade union administrator and mechanic’s assistant to historian, Campbell started her tours after working at the Groot Constantia estate of the VOC colonial Governor Simon van der Stel, now a museum. This is where she got her first taste for history.

When she started working on the estate as an information officer in 1998, she found that the history of enslaved and Indigenous people was largely erased on the property, including the “tot” system, the use of wine as payments to workers that dates back centuries and was still in use on some Cape Town farms years after the fall of apartheid in 1994.

Alarmed by this erasure of her ancestors at the estate, Campbell resigned and pursued a degree in history. Armed with a postgraduate degree specialising in the history of slavery in the Cape, Campbell established Transcending History Tours in 2008.

Her academic research uncovered the inherently colonial nature of museums globally. She discovered that human remains were held in museums, universities and in private ownership, especially in Europe. The South African Museum, founded in 1825, housed human remains that were used in studies that sought to reinforce racist ideologies, such as seeking to prove that non-Europeans were racially inferior. Even though these studies have been halted, the remains continued to be housed by these institutions.

Campbell would prefer that the museums she tours be decentralised and relocated to the Cape Flats, a mainly nonwhite working-class area where Campbell and most descendants of the Khoi and enslaved people live. She argues this would make the museums more accessible to these communities, bringing them closer to their personal histories and demonstrating that their current difficult living conditions and marginalisation are not natural or inevitable, but rather the result of a cruel past.

“At night, this place is filled with homeless people,” she says on a sunny morning in September as the tour leaves the castle.

A few steps away, past two lions perched on pillars at the castle’s entrance and a moat filled with fish and pondweed, a barefoot man is asleep on the sidewalk while a woman in a bra and camouflage pants scrounges for food in the shrubs. Like most of the unhoused on the wealthy city’s streets, they are people of colour.

The tour passes the Grand Parade, the city’s public square and oldest urban open space, where the mud and wood predecessor to the existing castle stood. For many years, it served as a training ground for the colonial garrison before becoming a marketplace, surrounded by striking buildings, such as the Edwardian City Hall.

The parade’s most famous moment in modern South African history was as the setting of Nelson Mandela’s first public speech after his release from prison in 1990. Today, traders still gather here to sell everything from brightly coloured dashikis (colourful, traditional garments) to kitchen electronics.

A ‘trailblazer’

A few blocks away, the group stops to look at a plaque in St George’s Mall dedicated to one of Campbell’s heroes, Krotoa, a Khoi woman known as the progenitor of Cape Town’s mixed-race population after her marriage to a Danish surgeon.

The plaque dedicated to her in this busy modern commercial area feels misplaced and superficial to Campbell, who says it fails to celebrate the woman’s historical significance. Campbell also dislikes the commonly used image of Krotoa on the plaque, which she says is fabricated.

“The Krotoa that I know, she’s a trailblazer. She’s an interpreter. She’s a negotiator,” Campbell says.

The niece of the Khoi chief Autshumato, Krotoa joined the household of the first Dutch governor in the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck, at about the age of 12. As one of the first Indigenous interpreters, she became a mediator between the Dutch and the Khoi, playing a key role in the cattle trade, which was vital to the settlers’ survival at the Cape. She also negotiated in the conflict that arose between locals and the settlers.

Krotoa’s influence in van Riebeeck’s government eventually led to her becoming the first Indigenous person to be baptised as a Christian in 1662 and adopting the name Eva. She married a Danish soldier, who was later appointed as the VOC surgeon, Pieter van Meerhof, in 1664, and the couple became the Cape’s first recorded interracial marriage.

In the end, though, Krotoa was a controversial figure: Khoi leaders criticised her for adopting colonial ways, and both they and Dutch officials accused her of being a spy for the other side.

“She went right into the kitchens of the Dutch,” Campbell says. “She used to tell them, ‘I know you. I know who you are. You can’t do anything for yourself. Slaves have to do everything for you.’”

Campbell says Krotoa was instrumental as a mediator in the first Khoi-Dutch war, which lasted from 1659 to 1660 and was sparked by a campaign led by local Khoi leader Nommoa, or Doman, to reclaim the Cape Peninsula. The Dutch were victorious against the two Khoi groups, the Gorinhaiqua and the Gorachouqua, and expelled them from the peninsula to mountain outposts about 70km (44 miles) away.

Asked what she would consider a fitting memorial for Krotoa, Campbell says: “Monuments are Eurocentric and hierarchic. Where her memorial should be, I am not sure. What I know is that her story and her memory should be a popular memory and part of our learning in schools and in other tertiary learning. She and her Danish husband van Meerhof were sent to Robben Island. She also spent lots of time at the first castle, which is today’s Golden Acre [shopping mall], and her so-called plaque in Castle Street is a humiliation of the contributions she made in resisting the colony in favour of her people.”

Profits over people

Around the corner from Krotoa’s memorial in Castle Street, Campbell stops at another VOC landmark – the cobbled walkway featuring the VOC’s bronze emblem framed by an outline of the castle’s five ramparts.

“I want you to see how the VOC is embedded right in the fabric of the city,” she says, pointing to the insignia emblazoned in the street.

Then she directs her tour’s attention to nearby skyscrapers, which she views as symbols of wealth rooted in VOC exploitation.

As she speaks, workers on their lunch breaks walk by while others sell beaded jewellery, paintings, leather handbags and other wares in stalls dotted along the mall. Most of these workers live in overcrowded townships far outside the city, which is famed for its French Riviera-like lifestyle and has often been voted one of the world’s top tourist destinations.

“For me, it’s important to speak of that company, the first company that came here,” Campbell says, explaining the origin of capitalism in the region.

“It comes from there – profits before people. It comes from history. … The VOC is alive and kicking in the city.”

Restoring memory

The most haunting stop on the tour comes next: the Slave Lodge. It stands on the doorstep of the parliament precinct and the gardens that the VOC established to provide fresh produce to ships journeying between the East and the Netherlands.

Thousands of enslaved people from as far away as Angola, Benin, Indonesia, India and Madagascar were housed here from 1679 to 1811. Converted into a museum, it contains artefacts, including shackles and the reconstructed hull of a slave ship as well as a plinth recording the names of the enslaved people – names assigned to them by slave owners when they arrived at the Cape.

Campbell objects to the pristine exhibits, saying they are in stark contrast to the building’s dark history as a place of suffering and violence. One of the most horrific aspects of life there was the sexual violence inflicted by soldiers on women, including rape and coercion into sex work, often with payments made to the VOC.

This violent culture has had lasting effects, contributing to today’s high levels of sexual crimes and domestic violence on the Cape Flats, according to Campbell.

“The Slave Lodge does not get the reflection that it should get,” Campbell tells her tour. “It is very much veneered and made palatable to the visitors. It doesn’t bring the voices of the women in.”

The tour ends in the street behind the Slave Lodge, where Campbell shows the tourists a macabre landmark they might otherwise miss. On a traffic island in the middle of Spin Street is the spot where the city’s slave auctions were once held. A tree that marked the spot was chopped down in 1916. In its place, a slab of stone was installed in 1953, inscribed with a fading and barely legible message about its historical significance.

“It looks like a drain,” Campbell says, noting the sharp contrast between this neglected memorial and the bronze statue of Afrikaner leader Jan Smuts, oddly situated in front of the Slave Lodge, where the plaque bearing his name has been restored to a brilliant gleam.

In 2008, the city tried to rectify this oversight at the auction site, unveiling a commemorative art installation designed by prominent artists Gavin Younge and Wilma Cruise across the street. It consists of 11 granite blocks, roughly at knee height, inscribed with the assigned names of enslaved people and words that recall their tortured reality: “Suicide, infanticide, abscond, escape, flee.”

Activists have criticised the installation for being too cold and failing to convey the deep wounds left by nearly 200 years of slavery.

“Birds s*** on it, people sit on it, but they don’t know what it is,” Campbell says. “They have the names of the slaves that were held at the Slave Lodge, but there’s no story. … It’s a monument that only serves the master, at the end of the day, because it doesn’t bring out the pain of the people.

“I would have loved to see a high rise to bring out the memory of the people, … something more visible.”

Egyptian-British writer Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who faced years of imprisonment in Egypt, ‘unequivocally’ apologises for the tweets.

Alaa Abd El-Fattah, an Egyptian-British human rights campaigner, has “unequivocally” apologised after right-wing leaders in the United Kingdom dug up decade-old tweets to demand he be stripped of British citizenship.

In a lengthy apology posted online, the writer and blogger – who returned to Britain this week after 12 years of imprisonment in Egypt – said the tweets were “shocking and hurtful”, but added that some had been “completely twisted”.

Conservative Party and far-right Reform UK leaders, along with right-wing commentators, took to sympathetic outlets and social media to demand that Abd El-Fattah be stripped of citizenship for the posts dating back to 2010, which included alleged references to killing Zionists and police officers.

The tweets were “expressions of a young man’s anger and frustrations in a time of regional crises”, including the wars on Iraq and Gaza, and a pervasive culture of “online insult battles”, Abd El-Fattah wrote.

Still, “I should have known better”, he said.

“I am shaken that, just as I am being reunited with my family for the first time in 12 years, several historic tweets of mine have been republished and used to question and attack my integrity and values, escalating to calls for the revocation of my citizenship,” he added.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch wrote in a Daily Mail op-ed that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood should consider how Abd El-Fattah “can be removed from Britain” and added that she does “not want people who hate Britain coming to our country”.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, posted a letter he wrote to Mahmood on X and took a swipe at Badenoch for being part of the 2021 administration, then under Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, that granted Abd El-Fattah citizenship.

Human rights activists and supporters of Abd El-Fattah dismissed the efforts as a smear campaign and directed followers to his apology.

Jewish academic and writer Naomi Klein wrote on social media that right-wingers were “playing politics with his hard-won freedom”, while Mai El-Sadany, executive director of the Washington, DC-based Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, said the citizenship revocation campaign was “coordinated” to “impugn his reputation and harm him”.

British law allows the home secretary to revoke citizenship if doing so is considered “conducive to the public good”, a policy that critics say is disproportionately wielded against British Muslims.

In a 2022 report, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion estimated that at least 175 people had been stripped of British citizenship since 2006, including more than 100 in 2017 – prompting the group to deem the UK “a global leader in the race to the bottom” for revocations.

Part of British conservatives’ ire appeared to stem from the reaction of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to Abd El-Fattah’s release. Earlier this week, he said the case had been a “top priority” and added that he was “delighted” by Abd El-Fattah’s return, a sentiment echoed by Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper.

Abd El-Fattah had been jailed during Egypt’s mass protests in 2011 that ousted then-leader Hosni Mubarak. He went on to become a top critic of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who took power in a military coup two years later.

The writer received a 15-year prison sentence in 2014 on charges of spreading fake news. He was briefly released in 2019 before receiving another five-year sentence.

He received a pardon in September, along with five other prisoners, after repeated international calls to release him.