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In a significant legal maneuver, attorneys representing Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student facing deportation, have requested Judge Emil Bove’s recusal from an appellate panel poised to assess Khalil’s case. Their request stems from Bove’s previous involvement as a high-ranking official in the Justice Department, where he played a role in probing student protests.
Earlier this week, Khalil’s legal team petitioned for the full bench of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals—excluding Bove—to reconsider and overturn a January decision. That ruling had been made by a three-judge panel from the same court, moving the Trump administration closer to detaining and deporting Khalil, a known pro-Palestinian activist.
During his tenure as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, Bove was responsible for directing immigration enforcement investigations, particularly those targeting student protesters at universities, including Columbia, as outlined by Khalil’s lawyers.
The legal representatives argue that Bove’s involvement in immigration enforcement creates either a real or perceived conflict of interest, warranting his exclusion from deliberations on Khalil’s appeal.
Judge Bove joined the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia in September. Before his judicial appointment, he notably served as a defense attorney for former President Donald Trump, representing him in various criminal cases, including the high-profile hush-money case in New York, which culminated in Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges.
The decision on recusal is up to Bove himself. The Justice Department, whose lawyers are representing the government in Khalil’s appeal, “sees no basis for recusal but defers to Judge Bove,” according to court papers.
Through the 3rd Circuit court, Bove declined to comment.
During the judicial confirmation process, Bove acknowledged that his Justice Department position, overseeing criminal and civil matters across the country, “could give rise to actual or potential conflicts” and that he would recuse himself “in cases that I was personally involved in should any such matter come before the court.”
Khalil, a legal permanent resident, was the first person whose arrest became publicly known during the crackdown on noncitizens who publicly criticized Israel and its actions in Gaza.
He remains in the U.S. with his wife, an American citizen, and their young son while he fights the January ruling that found a New Jersey federal judge who had sided with him didn’t have jurisdiction to decide the matter. Federal law requires detention and deportation challenges to move through the separate immigration court system first, the ruling said.
The three-judge panel’s 2-1 decision didn’t resolve the key issue in Khalil’s case: whether the Trump administration’s effort to throw Khalil out of the U.S. over his campus activism and criticism of Israel is unconstitutional. He then spent three months detained in a Louisiana immigration jail, missing the birth of his son.
The Trump administration has accused Khalil of leading activities “aligned to Hamas,” though they have not presented evidence to support the claim and have not accused him of criminal conduct. They also accused him of failing to disclose information on his green card application.
Khalil, who was born in Syria to a Palestinian family and holds Algerian citizenship, has dismissed the allegations as “baseless and ridiculous,” framing his arrest and detention as a “direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
The government justified Khalil’s arrest under a seldom-used statute that allows for the expulsion of noncitizens whose beliefs are deemed to pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests.
In February 2025, a month before Khalil’s arrest, Bove co-authored a memorandum on the Justice Department’s formation of a task force geared toward “Investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, antisemitic civil rights violations, and other federal crimes committed by Hamas supporters in the United States, including on college campuses.”