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MANHATTAN (CN) — A group of students from Columbia University, including detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, sued Thursday to prevent the school from disclosing their private disciplinary records pursuant to Trump administration “jawboning.”
Seven students, suing under pseudonyms, joined Khalil in the complaint, claiming that demands for student records from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce are “clearly intended” to chill the protected speech of the university’s students through two primary means: “by exposing the students to negative publicity and investigation, pervasive and persistent harassment, doxing, and threats to their safety and lives, and by compelling the university to discipline and punish students, including the four plaintiffs, as well as to turn over those students’ (as well as faculty and staff’s) private disciplinary records.”
Lawyers from the Council on American-Islamic Relations join lead attorney Amy E. Greer from Dratel & Lewis in representing the eight students in the case.
The students label the committee’s demands on Columbia an example of illegal “jawboning,” when a government official threatens to use their power — prosecutorial, regulatory, or legislative — to inappropriately compel private action.
They say the records requested by the committee’s “vague and overbroad demand letter” to the university exceeds the committee’s purported goal of confronting antisemitism.
“Rather, the committee has instrumentalized accusations of antisemitism to attack ideas it ideologically opposes. It traffics in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic dog whistles to justify unjustifiable intrusions on First Amendment rights,” the students say in their complaint.
The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York on the same day Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism notified local leaders in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston that it planned to meet soon to discuss their responses to incidents of antisemitism at schools and on college campuses in their cities over the last two years.
The task force, created pursuant to Trump’s “Executive Order on Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism,” announced it wants to engage with local leadership, including the mayors, district or city attorneys, and local law enforcement.
Pressure on Columbia to clamp down on anti-Israel demonstrations has raised alarm among students, faculty and free speech advocates, who accuse the school of bowing to Trump’s threats to slash funding to universities and deport campus “agitators" on the pretense of combating antisemitism.
Last week, federal agencies announced they would consider cutting $51 million in contracts to the school — along with billions more in additional grants — due to its “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.”
The task force has also announced intentions to conduct a comprehensive review of the more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments to Columbia University “to ensure the university is in compliance with federal regulations, including its civil rights responsibilities.”
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin confirmed Khalil was detained pursuant to “President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.” Trump doubled down with his own statement Monday, writing that Khalil’s arrest “is the first of many to come.”
Khalil was a graduate student at Columbia University until December 2024, when he finished his master’s degree in public administration. He was slated to graduate in May 2025. Last spring, Khalil was a lead negotiator on behalf of student protesters, who tried to get Columbia University to divest funds from Israel amid the country’s ongoing bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip by pitching a tent encampment on the university’s lawn.
A Manhattan federal judge on Monday ruled that the administration cannot deport Khalil pending a court order, and an immigration judge is the only one who can revoke a green card. But that hasn’t stopped the White House and top officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio from suggesting that Khalil and others who have protested Israel’s war in Gaza could lose their lawful resident status.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson also framed Khalil as a “mastermind” behind the Columbia demonstrations. The Student Workers of Columbia union called him a “lead negotiator” in their efforts to get the university to financially divest from Israel.
At a court hearing Wednesday, Khalil’s attorney Ramzi Kassem said his client was “taken at night” by federal authorities from his New York City apartment and detained at a New Jersey facility before being transported once more to Louisiana, where he sits now awaiting possible deportation.
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