Mahmoud Khalil Sues Trump Administration Officials and Anti-Palestinian Groups for Conspiracy to Persecute

Citing anti-KKK law, suit details a plot stretching from White House to Heritage Foundation and other anti-Palestinian groups

July 14, 2026, New York – Mahmoud Khalil today sued senior Trump administration officials and three anti-Palestinian private organizations for conspiring to deprive him of his constitutional rights. Brought under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the lawsuit says the co-conspirators sought to terrorize and make an example of Mr. Khalil and other non-citizen Palestinian rights advocates in an effort to intimidate and weaken the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity. The case is filed against the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, Betar, Senior Presidential Advisor Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and John Armstrong, an official at the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. 

“This is another step toward holding accountable everyone who targeted me and terrorized Americans. This case will expose the scheme that sought to criminalize the Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S.,” said Mahmoud Khalil.

“Today, I sued the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Miller, a Columbia affiliate, and others under the KKK Act. I will not stop fighting until everyone who willingly contributed to my missing the birth of my son—and 104 days of my life—answers for it. But this lawsuit is about far more than what was done to me. It is about a coordinated, ongoing plot to punish, silence, and intimidate everyone who dares to dissent and speak out for Palestinian liberation. We will hold them accountable.”

The suit, filed on Mr. Khalil’s behalf by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Beldock Levine & Hoffman, emerges a year after federal agents abducted him and amid the government’s continuing effort to deport him in retaliation for his role in protests at Columbia University against Israel’s U.S.-enabled genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. 

The conspiracy traces back to the days after Israel attacked Gaza in October 2023, when Miller, while working with the Heritage Foundation to prepare for a prospective Trump administration, vowed to punish Palestinians and their supporters through arrest and deportation. A year later, in October 2024, just weeks before the 2024 election, and after widespread anti-genocide protests on college campuses, the Heritage Foundation published Project Esther, its blueprint to dismantle the burgeoning U.S. Palestine solidarity movement by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and support for terrorism. The private entities recognized they would need the full power of the federal government to maximize the terrorizing effects of their retribution, so the blueprint outlines that their plan would leverage a “willing administration” – the prospective Trump administration – when it occupied the White House. The goal of the plan was to single out prominent non-citizens who were Palestinian or supported Palestinian rights, and arrest, detain, and deport them so as to create a chilling effect across campuses and more broadly signal that support for Palestinian rights would be met with maximal state repression. 

To operationalize the blueprint after Trump entered office, the Heritage Foundation said the plan would require a “public-private partnership,” with private, anti-Palestinian groups identifying targets of the conspiracy. Enter Canary Mission and Betar. Canary Mission is an Israel-based and anonymously-run surveillance, blacklisting, cyberstalking, and doxxing outfit, while Betar, a chapter of the Jewish supremacist Betar movement and a self-described vigilante group, also has a history of surveilling and harassing Palestinians and their supporters. 

Driven by anti-Palestinian animus, Betar, Canary Mission, and the Heritage Foundation coordinated with administration officials to persecute Mr. Khalil and other Palestinian rights advocates. Between March and May 2025, Miller, Rubio, Noem, and Armstrong used ICE to arrest or to try to arrest at least nine students or scholars pre-selected by the private groups. The federal defendants continue to seek Mr. Khalil’s deportation and pursue the conspiracy through sham, corrupted immigration proceedings under their control. Working together, the government and private co-conspirators sought to deny Palestinians and their supporters their constitutional rights: to equal protection, to freedom of speech and travel, to freedom from punitive detention, and, ultimately, to exist in this country. This is just the kind of anti-civil rights campaign that the KKK Act was intended to proscribe. 

The complaint lays out in depth the extensive record proving the conspiracy, including drawing on other federal court cases and admissions by the conspirators.

“The brazenness of this conspiratorial plan is matched only by the exquisitely detailed and shamelessly public record the conspirators produced of a collaborative plan to silence the growing student movement protesting U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal campaign,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The conspirators acted through forms of state repression and arbitrary detention that numerous courts have found are blatantly unconstitutional. They targeted Mr. Khalil, smeared him, and subjected him to the torment of detention for nothing other than being Palestinian and supporting Palestinian rights in order to send a message of terror across the student movement for Palestine—but the KKK Act was designed to prevent conspiracies to stifle advocacy for political freedom, and together we are demanding accountability for this outrageous injustice.”

As a result of the conspiracy, Mr. Khalil has suffered a range of harms, including three months in detention that forced him to miss the birth of his child,and an ongoing threat to his lawful immigration status in the United States. He seeks compensatory and punitive damages and injunctive relief enjoining the defendants from continuing to carry out the conspiracy. 

“The Defendants in this case were blinded by their anti-Palestinian animus: they publicly boasted about their involvement in a conspiracy to arrest, detain, and deport students who advocated for Palestinians during a genocide,” said Luna Droubi of Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP. “Groups such as Canary Mission have openly harassed students for many years. No longer can these actors hide behind anonymity or power. Mahmoud Khalil was detained for his advocacy. For him, and for all others whose speech has been chilled by the Defendants’ unlawful conspiracy, we file suit.”

In addition to the administration officials, the named defendants include: Robert Greenway, former Director of the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation and co-author of Project Esther; Victoria Coates, Vice President of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation and co-author of Project Esther; Ronn Torrossian, founder and chair of Betar USA; Jonathan Bash, founder and director of Megamot Shalom and presumed director of Canary Mission; Victor Muslin, a Columbia alumnus who works with Canary Mission; and John Doe A, a U.S.-based individual who works with Canary Mission.

Mr. Khalil is represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP.

For more information, please see the case page.