Palestinian American activist Mahmoud Khalil has launched a landmark civil lawsuit against a coalition of high-ranking Trump administration officials and right-wing advocacy organizations, accusing them of an unlawful conspiracy to intimidate and silence pro-Palestinian speech. He made the announcement official during a public press conference held Tuesday.
The legal action is being spearheaded by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) alongside legal representation from the firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman. The suit alleges that the named parties deliberately targeted Khalil and other non-citizen Palestinian rights activists to send a punitive message, with the explicit goal of weakening the rapidly expanding global movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
In a rare legal maneuver targeting coordinated public-private repression, the lawsuit is filed under the Enforcement Act of 1871, more widely known as the Ku Klux Klan Act— a Reconstruction-era law designed to combat conspiracies by private groups and state actors that violate civil rights.
Court documents argue that the campaign against Khalil was rooted in explicit anti-Palestinian prejudice, with private anti-Palestinian groups coordinating directly with senior executive branch officials to target and persecute Khalil and other advocates for Palestinian rights.
“The goal was never to win an argument. The goal was always to manufacture fear, to convince people that the cost of speaking out would be too high. When those campaigns were not enough, they brought in the power of the state,” Khalil told reporters during the press conference.
Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, first became a target of the Trump administration starting in 2024 for his role in organizing anti-Gaza war protest encampments on the Columbia University campus. In 2025, he was taken into immigration detention, where he remained locked up for 104 days. The detention forced him to miss the birth of his first child, a devastating personal consequence he says the defendants are responsible for.
Despite the years of retaliation for his advocacy, Khalil said the campaign to silence him has failed. He declared, “We cannot let fear become the price of consciousness. To those who built this machinery to silence us, hear me clearly: it did not work. You detained me, and I’m standing here. You tried to make me a warning, and instead, you made me a plaintiff.”
The lawsuit names a slate of top Trump administration officials: senior presidential advisor Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, acting attorney general Todd Blanche, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and John Armstrong, an official with the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.
Alongside government officials, the suit names three private organizations: Canary Mission, Betar US, and the Heritage Foundation. Canary Mission is a controversial website that maintains a public blacklist of students, activists, and academics who express pro-Palestinian views or criticize Israeli government policy. The outlet routinely conflates pro-Palestinian advocacy and anti-Zionism with antisemitism and support for terrorism, framing its work as documenting anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Jewish activity on North American college campuses. Israeli authorities also use Canary Mission’s blacklist to bar pro-Palestinian advocates, including both Palestinian and Jewish critics of Israel, from entering the country.
Betar US, the U.S. affiliate of the international far-right Zionist movement Betar, is also named as a defendant. The group describes its mission as empowering Jewish people to embrace their identity and defend their heritage, calling itself one of the most impactful Zionist movements in history. It has previously publicly admitted to collecting personal information on participants in pro-Palestinian events and sharing that data directly with the Trump administration. An investigation from New York Attorney General Letitia James found that Betar US repeatedly targeted individuals based on their faith and ethnic background, specifically targeting Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and Jewish residents of New York. The group was ordered to cease all operations in New York state as a result of the findings.
The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, the third private defendant named in the suit, is best known for developing Project 2025, a 900-page comprehensive policy blueprint that has guided the Trump administration’s second-term policy agenda. Project 2025 includes explicit commitments to maintain unwavering U.S. support for Israel regardless of Palestinian civilian harm.
Khalil currently has two outstanding legal cases pending in the U.S. court system. One is an immigration removal proceeding, where an immigration judge ruled he could be deported; Khalil has appealed that ruling to the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals. The second is a federal constitutional challenge, where his legal team argues that his detention and attempted deportation violated his First Amendment right to free speech and Fifth Amendment right to due process.
Khalil closed his press conference by vowing to see the legal fight through to the end. “I will not stop fighting until everyone who willingly contributed to my missing the birth of my son, and to taking 104 days of my life from me, answers for what they’ve done,” he said.