The Trump administration’s basis for seeking to strip pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil of his green card amounts to this: He didn’t do anything illegal, but he holds beliefs that go against “core American interests.” 

In a two-page memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio obtained by the Associated Press, the government alleged that keeping Khalil in the country would undermine “U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States.”

Otherwise, the memo states, Khalil’s actions were “lawful.” 

“Condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” Rubio wrote.

A federal judge, Jamee Comans, had ordered the government to provide evidence by 5 p.m. Wednesday for its justification to deport Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent and Columbia University graduate who was a spokesperson for student activists at the university during protests last year against Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. A hearing is scheduled Friday on whether his detention can continue.

Khalil’s attorneys, Marc Van Der Hout and Johnny Sinodis, said in a joint statement that  “immigration authorities have finally admitted that they have no case whatsoever against him.”

“There is not a single shred of proof that Mahmoud’s presence in America poses any threat,” the statement reads.

When asked if the government had any additional evidence against Khalil, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, provided an emailed statement to the AP stating that “DHS did file evidence, but immigration court dockets are not available to the public.”

Khalil, who is married to a U.S. citizen due to give birth this month, has been held in a detention center in Louisiana after being arrested and detained by immigration agents last month at his university-owned residence. Khalil wrote in a letter last month from Louisiana that his detention was a “direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”​​ 

Administration officials have alleged that Khalil’s actions support Hamas but failed to provide any evidence in any court filings. That may very well help Khalil, as Comens said Tuesday that if the government’s evidence doesn’t support his deportation, “then I am going to terminate the case on Friday.”

President Donald Trump falsely suggested Thursday that autism may be caused by a “shot,” parroting his anti-vax health secretary. 

During a Cabinet meeting, the president discussed an increase in the rate of autism diagnoses, but seemed to invent some statistics to do it. 

“It was one in 10,000 children had autism, and now it’s one in 31. Not 31,000, 31,” Trump said. 

In reality, about one in 36 children aged 8 years old have been identified with autism spectrum disorder, according to the CDC. That’s an increase from 2000, when only one in 150 children born in 1992 were diagnosed with autism.

Sitting only a few seats away from the president was Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine movement, who used the one-in-10,000 statistic during his Senate confirmation hearings. It’s entirely unclear where he got this number, but Trump has since repeated it multiple times. 

“That is horrible—that’s a horrible statistic, isn’t it? And there’s gotta be something artificial out there that’s doing it,” Trump continued, turning to Kennedy. 

“So you think you’re gonna have a pretty good idea, huh?” Trump asked. 

“We will know by September,” Kennedy replied. 

“There will be no bigger news conference than that, so that’s it. If you can come up with that answer: where you stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot. But something’s causing it,” Trump said. 

Kennedy has previously claimed that autism comes from vaccines, and it seems that the president has officially bought in—or is at least open to the possibility. Trump’s newest comment comes months after a leaked phone call with Kennedy in July, where the president could be heard tying vaccines to autism. 

Meanwhile, experts have attributed some of the rise in autism diagnoses to a widening definition of autism spectrum disorder, which encapsulates a broader range of symptoms, as well as people being more aware of and willing to get diagnostic testing, according to ABC News.  

While Kennedy claimed he has “never been anti-vaxx,” he has spent his first two months in office pushing alternative, unproven medicines amid a deadly national measles outbreak. Last month, Kennedy suggested that contracting measles had more long-term health benefits than getting the measles vaccine, which he falsely claimed could cause all the same illnesses associated with measles. 

House Republicans approved a budget Thursday, pushing Donald Trump’s dream bill closer to reality.

With the budget framework in the rearview, conservatives in both chambers are now squaring away how they can slice trillions of dollars from the details of........

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