By Sharon Zhang
This article was originally published by Truthout
The memos were released by a judge who, last week, slammed Rubio, Noem, and Trump for “unconstitutional” actions.
Newly unsealed memos by the State Department on the Trump management’s push to deport pro-Palestine student advocates have confirmed that officials knew the cases against the students were shaky and likely to run up against their First Amendment rights.
The documents were unsealed by a federal judge on Thursday. The case, brought by academic groups, has been full of bombshell revelations on the role of top officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the campaign dubbed as “unconstitutional” by the judge last week.
The documents concerned five students who have been targeted by the Trump administration: Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri. The memos were released in response to a request by news outlets to unseal them for the public interest.
In every case, the memos showed that the administration was seeking to remove students over some form of advocacy for Palestinian rights amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On Chung and Khalil, the State Department claimed that the two Columbia University activists posed a “potentially serious adverse” foreign policy risk — an argument which legal experts have argued is shaky at best. However, it says that officials coudl not identify prior cases where people were deported under thes grounds, and that “courts may scrutinize the basis for these determinations” consequently.
State officials further said that the Department of Homeland Security “has not identified any choice grounds of removability that would be applicable to Chung and Khalil.”
Despite this, the Trump administration is still trying to deport Khalil.Last week, a federal panel reversed a federal court decision to free Khalil from immigration d
