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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a joint press conference with Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the East Room at the White House Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025, in Washington (Carl Court/Pool Photo via AP).
The Trump administration is pushing for the deportation of a Cornell University graduate and activist who had his student visa revoked “hours” before he filed a lawsuit against the president and Department of Homeland Security over the arrests of people “participating in demonstration[s] in support of Palestine.”
Trump’s Justice Department claims it’s simply due to a “lack of lawful immigration status,” while the student’s legal team calls the push a “naked attempt at intimidation.”
Momodou Taal, the activist being sought for deportation, is one of three students at the New York Ivy League college, along with a Cornell professor, who are suing Trump for what they say is a “campaign against free speech — particularly as it targets international students and scholars who protest or express support for Palestinian rights,” according to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
The ADC, along with co-counsel, is representing Taal and claims Trump has “unconstitutionally silenced” him and other people living in the United States from “speaking, hearing, or engaging with viewpoints critical of the U.S. government” through deportation and EOs, the group’s lawsuit says. The ADC points to the recent detainment and attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, described in the lawsuit as “a former Columbia University graduate student and prominent participant in pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations.”
According to Taal and his legal team, Trump’s DOJ allegedly contacted them on Friday and told them that he needed to turn himself into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for having an “unlawful” immigration status. They said his student visa had been revoked on March 14, just one day before the ADC filed its lawsuit on his behalf.
Hours before alerting Taal, he and ADC lawyers filed an emergency motion late Thursday, March 20, for a temporary restraining order (TRO) to preemptively block Taal’s detainment — leading him and ADC to believe it was all calculated, which the DOJ insisted was untrue in a Saturday opposition filing. Taal’s motion alleged that federal agents were seen and spoken to outside his residence last Wednesday, March 19, by two eyewitnesses and that he was at risk of being immediately detained and deported.
“On the morning of March 19, current and former Cornell community members residing with Mr. Taal at a communal residence near the Cornell campus (the Telluride House) contacted the undersigned counsel,” the motion said. “They reported that undercover law enforcement officers, from an unidentified agency, had identified themselves in the parking lot of Plaintiff Taal’s residence.”
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According to his lawyers, Taal has “long feared adverse immigration enforcement actions” and the recent development of plainclothes agents being stationed outside his home has “intensified his fear and anxiety, escalating the risk of immediate harm,” his motion said. It’s unclear whether the alleged officers were with ICE or another agency.
“Mr. Taal is now in imminent danger of detention or deportation, causing irreparable harm that cannot be undone,” his motion said. “The emotional distress, combined with the threat of enforcement action, constitutes an irreparable injury to his rights, and therefore, Plaintiff respectfully requests the issuance of a TRO to prevent further harm and preserve his due process rights until a full hearing can be held.”
On Saturday, Trump’s DOJ responded by insisting that Taal’s immigration status and student visa was probed before his filing of the protest lawsuit and that he was being targeted due to “disruptive actions” he took recently, which Taal says were peaceful protests that he helped organize and lead six months ago.
“On or around March 14, 2025, ICE transmitted written communication to the Department of State seeking the State Department’s determination as to whether Taal, by participating in disruptive actions that created a hostile environment for Jewish students, had taken actions calling into question his continued eligibility for a U.S. visa,” DOJ lawyers said in their TRO opposition filing. “Later that day the U.S. Department of State revoked Taal’s F-1 student … State relied upon the underlying information and assessment provided by ICE that Taal had been involved with disruptive protests and had engaged in an escalating pattern of behavior, disregarding university policies and creating a hostile environment for Jewish students. This pattern of activity called into question Taal’s ability to establish his continued entitlement to nonimmigrant F-1 status, implicating State’s discretionary authority to determine whether to revoke the visa.”
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Furthermore, the DOJ claimed that after learning of the visa revocation and Taal’s “lack of lawful immigration status” on March 14, ICE began to look for Taal to serve him with “notice of these developments” to place him into “removal proceedings.” It was Taal’s actions before ADC attorneys went after the Trump administration, according to DOJ lawyers, that allegedly led DHS to target him; not his lawsuit.
“Taal contends that ICE is trying to take him into custody in response to this lawsuit,” the DOJ said Saturday. “But that gets things backwards: Taal’s immigration status became unlawful before this lawsuit began. ICE’s efforts to place Taal into removal proceedings are a result of his changed immigration status, not this lawsuit. Yet it appears that this lawsuit is now essentially an effort to prevent ICE from placing Taal into removal proceedings, which is the process Congress designed for assessing the issues raised in this case.”
The DOJ insisted that Trump’s directive targeting protesters is “undoubtedly lawful” and being used to combat “antisemitic harassment and violence.” Taal and ADC’s legal team replied Sunday by saying they felt Trump admin officials were refusing to explain why they’re going after Taal months after his protest.
“Defendants claim they initiated a rapid and highly coordinated inter-agency process to revoke Mr. Taal’s visa,” Taal’s lawyers said. “Though Defendants’ declarations do not provide a reason for the sudden urgency to address the protest that had taken place six months prior, Defendants assert that they initiated and finalized a multi-agency review of the evidence of Mr. Taal’s protest activity, weighed the potential statutory grounds upon which he could be deemed removable, underwent the time-consuming review mandated by the State Department for non-immigrant visa revocation by the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) and determined that it was necessary to revoke Mr. Taal’s visa all on the same day.”
Taal’s lawsuit comes as Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old living in the United States legally with a green card, was detained earlier this month and is now facing deportation for what Homeland Security claims is a violation of Trump’s orders, which call for the removal of anyone deemed a “national security and public safety threat.” A government memo obtained by NBC News said Khalil was told this by the Trump administration: “The Secretary of State has determined that your presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
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The ADC and Cornell plaintiffs suing Trump have previously pointed to statements from Trump after Khalil’s detainment, in which he said others would be subjected to similar treatment for their critical viewpoints. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump said on TruthSocial. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antiSemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
ADC officials have said in statements that they believe Taal’s lawsuit is a “necessary step to preserve our most fundamental constitutional protections” regardless of what side a person supports in the Israel-Hamas war, and that Trump’s administration is trying to strong-arm its way out of it.
“This is a naked attempt at intimidation,” Chris Godshall-Bennett, ADC’s legal director and co-counsel, told The Cornell Daily Sun.
Closing out their reply on Sunday to DOJ’s opposition filing, Godshall-Bennett and ADC lawyers said: “Plaintiffs challenge the orders to the extent they violate the First and Fifth Amendments, and no further.”
