Computer Ban Gave the Government Unfair Advantage in Anti-War Activist’s Case, Lawyer SaysNEWS | 13 May 2025An attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who’s overseeing a high-profile deportation case in Louisiana says she was stripped of her electronics moments before a pivotal hearing, preventing her from accessing evidence and court records that remained available to the three US government attorneys in the room, each of whom were allowed use of a laptop by the court.
Louisiana immigration judge Jamee Comans ruled late last month that Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was eligible for deportation. During that hearing, however, Khalil’s attorney Nora Ahmed says she was barred from bringing her laptop into the courtroom, despite having filed the proper paperwork in advance and being a frequent visitor to the immigration facility.
“There should not be an advantage, no matter how small or how large, provided to a particular party over the other,” says Ahmed. “Because that starts to infect the proceedings themselves and the notion of fundamental fairness that we all uphold in courtroom proceedings.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. Attempts to reach Comans through the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) were unsuccessful.
The son of Palestinian refugees, Khalil,—a US green card holder—became a key figure last year in the Columbia University protests against the war in Gaza, joining a coalition of student organizations espousing outrage and calling for divestment over the Israeli military’s bombings of hospitals, schools, and homes in the wake of the surprise attacks by Hamas-led militants in October 2023. Khalil remains one of the most high-profile targets of the Trump administration’s ongoing push to expel foreign students protesting Israel’s actions.
The US government has not accused Khalil, whose wife and newborn son were born in the US, of committing any crime. The government acknowledged last month that Khalil had been detained without a warrant due to “exigent circumstances,” claiming the 30-year-old graduate student, whose wife was eight months pregnant at the time, was a “flight risk.”
Following his arrest at his university-owned apartment complex in New York on March 8, Khalil was transported to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a for-profit prison overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where he is now subject to a tribunal system that bears little resemblance to the US courts that hear citizens’ cases. A majority of people fighting deportation cannot afford—nor do they have any recognized right—to legal representation. (This includes, most glaringly, the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who enter the US each year.) Political influence weighs heavily on the system, which, nestled under the Justice Department, is invariably subject to the whims of the current occupant of the White House, with its judges serving by appointment of the US attorney general.
In an unusual move, on April 8, Comans booted nearly 600 people attempting to observe one of Khalil’s hearings over the court’s videoconferencing software, declaring that, going forward, only his attorneys or wife would be permitted to view the proceedings online. Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, appeared to argue against the enhanced secrecy on April 11.Author: David Gilbert. Dell Cameron. Caroline Haskins. Dhruv Mehrotra. Andrew Couts. Makena Kelly. Emanuel Maiberg. Noah Shachtman. Leah Feiger. Justin Ling. Source
