The Trump administration said it found only five instances in the last 35 years when the United States government had applied the same legal provision that’s being used to attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk and others for their pro-Palestine speech.
Previously, the provision had only been used to try and deport individuals convicted of, or implicated in, terrorist activities, gross human rights abuses or large-scale political corruption, new court filings submitted Friday and reviewed by Documented reveal.
Of the five previous instances, the most recent was a case from 21 years ago.
The five individuals listed in the government’s submissions include a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden who was convicted of terrorist activities in Jordan, a co-founder of an “illegitimate paramilitary organization responsible for numerous human rights violations,” and a former law enforcement official in Mexico who had been charged criminally in that country.
The provision in concern, Section 237 (a)(4)(c)(i), is from the obscure Cold War-era Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, which empowers the Secretary of State to initiate deportation proceedings against non-citizens whose actions may have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” on the U.S.
The government’s submissions were made in a case pertaining to Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University who was arrested by federal immigration authorities on March 8. The submissions came after the New Jersey district court hearing the case had asked the government to furnish details of previous instances when the same provision had been used.
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In response to the filings, Amy Greer, Khalil’s lawyer, told Documented that the government had gone “from using the statute for people connected to money, power, weapons, and governments,” to instead using it for students who are speaking out against Israel’s war on Gaza. She added, “What does it say about the U.S. if calls for peace and for the freedom for all people, including Palestinians, are a threat to U.S. foreign policy?”
In its submissions, the Trump administration mentioned that the cases listed were the only ones it could find where the particular clause of the INA had been used, but that it would continue searching for any it may have missed so far.
The government’s filings cited only one instance of the clause being invoked prior to the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine advocates and four occasions that a predecessor statute containing a similar provision was used in deportation proceedings in the 1990s.
The earliest of these instances was in 1995 when the federal government sought to deport Mohammed J. A. Khalifa, a convicted terrorist with ties to bin Laden. Khalifa had been sentenced to death in Jordan, where he was found to have provided financial support for a string of bombings across the country’s movie theaters.
A couple of months later, the Clinton administration applied the same statute to Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, the co-founder and leader of an “illegitimate paramilitary organization responsible for numerous human rights violations in Haiti.” The far-right paramilitary squad headed by Constant, which may have received funding from the CIA, was accused of carrying out the political assassinations of at least 3,000 people between 1991 and 1994.
In October 1995, Mexico’s former deputy attorney general Mario Ruiz Massieu faced deportation proceedings in the United States due to “existing allegations of Ruiz Massieu’s engagement in political corruption in Mexico” and for having been charged criminally in that country. The U.S. district judge ruling on Ruiz Massieu’s case was Donald Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who declared the following year that the application of the statute in Massieu’s case had nonetheless been unconstitutional.
Then, in 1997, the statute was invoked against a Palestinian national, Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, who, according to the government’s May 9 submissions in court, was a “top leader of a designated foreign terrorist organization and had been declared a ‘Specially Designated Terrorist.’ ” In addition, the filing stated that two U.S. courts had found “probable cause” that Marzook was responsible for ten incidents of terrorism.
In its filings in the New Jersey court, the Trump administration did not name Constant and Marzook since their cases “did not result in public court decisions.” However, publicly available documents, corroborated with the identifying information and dates mentioned in the filings, make it clear that they were the “Haitian national” and “Palestinian national” named in the government’s submissions.
The only time that the submissions listed the current iteration of the statute as having been applied before 2025 was in 2004, when the U.S. government found evidence that an “African national” had contributed to violent political activity while in Somalia.
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Mary Holper, clinical professor and director of the Immigration Clinic at Boston College Law School, said that comparing the convictions, criminal charges and evidence against the individuals from earlier cases to the recent ones of Khalil, Mahdawi, Öztürk and others shows “how irresponsibly the government is using the provision.” She added that, “Instead of criminal behavior, it is a decision to write an op-ed, to lead a protest.”
Luna Droubi, one of Mahdawi’s lawyers, said she viewed the government’s submissions as, “clear evidence of how the Trump administration is manipulating the statute in an absurdly transparent attempt to silence lawful speech within the United States that it disagrees with.”
Greer remarked, “The fact that the United States government is using foreign policy grounds previously reserved for those alleged to be involved in planning or executing violent actions, against Mahmoud, who has become one of the great voices of conscience in our nation, goes to show how much this administration fears people like Mahmoud, who operate with such integrity and moral clarity when speaking out against the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing unfolding in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.”
With a chuckle, Greer said that the list of reasons and charges for which this provision had been applied earlier versus the one it is being used for now reminded her of a Sesame Street song. “One of these things is not like the others.”
