A federal judge has ordered the federal government to release an anti-Israel activist, Mahmoud Khalil, from an immigration detention center in Louisiana, allowing him to return home while his deportation case moves forward in federal court. 

During a phone call hearing on Friday, a New Jersey District Court judge, Michael Farbiarz, granted Mr. Khalil’s recent motion for release, saying the anti-Israel activist was not a flight risk or danger to the community and thus his continued detention was “highly unusual.” 

Judge Farbiarz also denied the government’s request to stay his decision, making the order effective immediately. An attorney for the Department of Justice said the government is likely to appeal.

Mr. Khalil, who was born in Syria but holds citizenship in Algeria, was arrested by immigration officers in March after the Department of State revoked his visa and green card. The 30-year-old graduated in December with a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and served as one of the ringleaders of the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student encampment movement that has roiled Columbia since October 7, 2023. 

The state department initially justified the administration’s deportation of Mr. Khalil by calling up a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the government to deport non-citizens who pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” 

The government also argued that Mr. Khalil committed immigration fraud by lying on his green card application about his employment history, namely his involvement in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a UN group accused of aiding Hamas and employing people who participated in the October 7 massacre. 

The administration further accused Mr. Khalil of withholding his previous employment at the Syria office of the British Embassy at Beirut, as well as his work with an anti-Israel student group at Columbia, Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

Judge Farbiarz’s order for Mr. Khalil’s release comes a week after he ruled that the government could not continue to hold Mr. Khalil on the basis of the foreign policy law. However, given the government’s secondary claim that Mr. Khalil failed to disclose key work history information in his green card application, Judge Farbiarz had declined to grant Mr. Khalil’s release.

Mr. Khalil’s lawyers followed up on Monday with a new release effort, arguing that the government’s rationale for detaining him on that secondary basis was “exceedingly rare and extremely unusual.” They also urged the judge to transfer Mr. Khalil to a detention facility in New Jersey — so that he could be closer to his wife and son — if the release request was not granted.

The government responded to the filing by arguing that Mr. Khalil “failed to challenge” the government’s charge that he withheld information on his green card application. It further chided Mr. Khalil’s legal team for seeking “to rehash the arguments in his motion that this Court already denied” without providing any “basis for this Court to reconsider its prior order.” 

The government’s challenge was rebuffed by Judge Farbiarz, who determined on Friday that the green card allegations against Mr. Khalil did not warrant his continued detainment.  

Despite Friday’s win, Mr. Khalil is hardly out of the woods yet. In April, an immigration judge overseeing Mr. Khalil’s case in Louisiana gave the government the green light to proceed with its deportation efforts against Mr. Khalil on the basis of the foreign policy law. Mr. Khalil is now seeking to convince that judge to grant him asylum on the basis that deporting him back to the Middle East would place him in reach of the Israeli government. That claim has been greeted with doubt by legal scholars and foreign policy experts.