a federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to immediately release Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student activist who has been held in a Louisiana detention center since his arrest in early March.

The judge had previously ruled that Khalil could not be held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement based on a vague federal statute focused on potential “adverse foreign policy consequences” of his presence in the country. The latest ruling rejected the government’s arguments that Khalil, who missed the birth of his son while in detention, posed a flight risk, much less a danger to the community.

“No one should fear being jailed for speaking out in this country,” said Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law, who represented Khalil in court, in an emailed statement. “We are overjoyed that Mr. Khalil will finally be reunited with his family while we continue to fight his case in court.”

Khalil’s case is just the latest instance in which federal courts have ruled against the Trump administration’s dogged efforts to detain and deport noncitizens who protested Israel’s war in Gaza, many of them students who are in the U.S. on visas or green cards.

One under-scrutinized federal agency has been crucial to this effort: Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which markets itself as an elite force that targets human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals. But under the second Trump administration, HSI has turned its surveillance apparatus on a different kind of target: noncitizens on college campuses with critical views of Israel.

As it built dossiers on Khalil and others, HSI deployed its full suite of investigative tools and techniques to “identify individuals within the parameters” of President Donald Trump’s executive orders about rooting out purported antisemitism, as one HSI agent explained in an affidavit.

For each target, HSI agents used surveillance tools to build a dossier, which was then passed to the State Department to confirm that the target was, in the eyes of the U.S. government, sufficiently antisemitic to be deported.

“The government hasn’t made a plausible argument that these students actually pose a threat to the national security of the United States.”

To track down protesters for arrest, HSI agents conducted “pattern of life” surveillance, The Intercept found, which meant monitoring targets’ movements and associates. HSI agents executed search warrants on college dorms based on flimsy affidavits, issued subpoenas for financial records and other data, and even put a trace on one target’s WhatsApp account.

“It’s notable that these components, which purportedly focus on threats to national security and public safety, are spending their time hunting down student protesters for their protected speech,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which is suing the Trump administration for targeting pro-Palestinian campus activists. “From what I’ve seen, the government hasn’t made a plausible argument that these students actually pose a threat to the national security of the United States.”

For years, watchdogs have warned that Congress needs to rein in HSI. During the first Trump administration, HSI monitored protest plans, called in aerial surveillance of the George Floyd demonstrations, and helped compile a database of journalists and immigration advocates to target at the border.

When Trump returned to the White House in January, HSI wasted little time in using its broad, fuzzy authority to target and track down critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.

“HSI has a really broad, often unchecked authority that in moments like these can allow them to turn it into a weapon,” said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, who previously worked as senior intelligence counsel in the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department does little to promote oversight and accountability of its operations,” Reynolds said of HSI, pointing to the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate or defang DHS’s civil liberties office as........

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