Mike Johnson Can't Say What Crimes Mahmoud Khalil Committed

Khalil helped organize protests against Israel's war in Gaza but hasn't been charged with violating federal law.

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was unable to say what crimes had been committed by a student protester arrested and set for deportation by the Donald Trump administration.

Federal immigration agents on Sunday arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the U.S. and recent graduate student at Columbia University, and sent him to a detention facility in Louisiana because he helped organize protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

Asked at a press conference what crime he believed Khalil committed, Johnson said Khalil had been the “mastermind” of dangerous protests that the speaker personally witnessed when he visited Columbia’s campus last April. He said Jewish students feared for their physical safety and that school administrators failed to control the situation.

“This guy apparently was a mastermind of those very things when the gnashing of teeth and the ripping of clothes and the people screaming at me, wanting to rip me limb from limb because I was there talking about moral clarity and how there’s a right and a wrong,” Johnson said. “They were threatening physical violence of their fellow students.” (Johnson and several other Republicans were heckled from a distance, according to a HuffPost reporter on the scene that day.)

Khalil hasn’t been charged with a crime, but experts say the U.S. has leeway to deport green card holders if officials have reasonable grounds to suspect they could engage in terroristic activities.