Photo: AFP
Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student who is accused of being one of the driving forces behind the anti-Semitic protests that plagued the Ivy League campus last year, is currently sitting in a Louisiana prison awaiting deportation. Khalil’s arrest is being hailed by the Trump Administration as the first of many removals of student visa and green card holders who are actually considered to be national security threats, although a federal judge has temporarily halted Khalil’s deportation. Defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman, who hosts the iHeart podcast “Beyond the Legal Limit,” is among the many who agree with the move to expel Khalil from the United States. Appearing on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program, Lichtman says no one should shed any tears for Khalil.
Lichtman explained to host Larry Mendte why the process to rescind Khalil’s paperwork is relatively simple. “He is a green card holder, as opposed to someone who has a student visa. He’s actually not even a student anymore, He came over here from Syria a couple of years ago. His sole purpose, when he was activated, was jihad at Columbia. He graduated and he was in student housing when they came to snatch him up. He has some rights. I believe that he will be removed from the country because there was the determination that he is a national security threat… Now, when you remove somebody with a student visa, you just yank their visa and they have no legal right to be in the country anymore.”
Lichtman says any protestors who sympathize with Khalil have their sympathies in the wrong place: “They’re acting as if this is Martin Luther King, as opposed to Yahyah Sinwar. The fact is that there’s a determination that he is a troublemaker here, that he is pro-jihad, that he is doing things against our country’s interest. He doesn’t have all the rights that a citizen has because he’s not a citizen, so there doesn’t have to be a crime. They will find some way to remove him and send him back to Syria.”
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