Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protest leader whom ICE arrested at his New York apartment in March 2025 and held for 100 days, causing him to miss the birth of his first child, filed a 131-page federal lawsuit on July 14, 2026, under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the Reconstruction-era law written to reach conspiracies to deprive people of their civil rights.
The suit names Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and his predecessor Kristi Noem, and State Department consular official John Armstrong, alongside private organizations: the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, and Betar. The complaint alleges the officials and groups coordinated a campaign of intimidation, arrests, and deportations against pro-Palestinian activists, and that between March and May 2025, Miller, Rubio, Noem, and Armstrong used ICE to arrest or attempt to arrest at least nine students or scholars who had been pre-selected by the private groups.
Khalil, 31, is a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, and he still faces deportation efforts. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents him, frames the case as a test of whether the government can outsource its target list to private ideological organizations and then execute it with immigration police. The KKK Act was written for precisely that pattern: state power and private groups conspiring against a disfavored class. These are allegations in a complaint, not findings; the defendants have not yet answered (see ICE Agents Tracked Down a Man Who Called Its Chief a Nazi in an Email, Staking Out His Hotel and Leaving a 'Warning Notice').