“In a previously unreported interview, Khalil also told Reason about his life story. “I was born in a refugee camp in southern Damascus. My grandparents were ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948,” he said. “They stayed in the closest camp to Palestine, and they lived and died in that refugee camp.”
As Syria fell into civil war, Khalil moved to neighboring Lebanon. He worked as a local manager for two British government programs, the Chevening Scholarship and the Conflict, Stability, and Security Fund, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2023, he enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs.
Khalil told Reason that he was not worried about the political repercussions of being such a high-profile activist, because he wasn’t planning to go back to Lebanon and Syria. Nor was he worried about how it would affect his career prospects in America, because “I wouldn’t work for an institution that doesn’t value Palestinian lives. So if they don’t want to employ someone who is standing for Palestine, that’s my gain,” he said.
The prospect that he might be arrested by the U.S. government seemed so remote that it didn’t come up.
It’s not clear exactly which legal authorities the Trump administration used to revoke Khalil’s green card, nor how that will hold up in court. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.”
…
“”The Trump administration’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder studying in this country legally—is targeted, retaliatory, and an extreme attack on his First Amendment rights,” the New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman declared in a statement. “Ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campus. Political speech should never be a basis of punishment, or lead to deportation.””
https://reason.com/2025/03/10/who-is-the-palestinian-columbia-student-detained-for-his-protest-activity/
Revoking a green card because he protested?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ice-arrests-palestinian-activist-helped-162258497.html
“Only 3 percent of the people who have applied for green cards will receive one in FY 2024, as the backlog continues to grow and migrants continue to choose illegal migration pathways in large numbers. Today’s green card processing “reveals a legal immigration system that is utterly failing to direct aspiring immigrants to pursue the American dream in lawful and orderly ways,” wrote David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, in a report released last week.
About 1.1 million green cards may be issued in FY 2024, but there are currently 34.7 million pending applications. The backlog has its roots in the Immigration Act of 1924 and subsequent eligibility restrictions. While 98.1 percent of immigrant applicants were allowed to enter the country with permanent status from 1888 to 1921, just 16 percent of applicants were admitted in an average year once caps were imposed, per Bier. The rate fell to 3.8 percent in 2023.
Adding to the problem is the fact that the government has let 6.3 million green cards go to waste since 1921, failing to meet caps in large part due to processing delays.
Certain nationalities and green card categories experience more severe backlogs and selective processing. “Indians—who make up half the applicants in the employer-sponsored categories—must wait more than a century for a green card,” wrote Bier. People who try their luck at the green card lottery, which currently has about 22.2 million applicants, only have a 1 in 400 chance of getting a green card in a given year. Some who apply for family-based green cards “will face lifetime waits for many country-category combinations,” according to Bier.
By granting green cards to such a low percentage of applicants each year, the U.S. is leaving a lot of potential growth on the table. “Backlogged immigrants are likely to enter the United States and start working at higher rates than the general population, and they also appear to be more educated on average,” wrote Bier. And beyond being an important addition to the labor force, immigrants are helping to reduce the massive federal budget deficit and stave off population decline.
The Cato report suggests that Congress do away with “the unnecessarily onerous rules and arbitrary caps to approve current green card applicants.” After tackling the existing backlog, policy changes could be more modest, since “annual legal immigration would only need to increase more gradually to meet future demand.”
This report echoes the findings of June 2023 Cato Institute research, which found that “fewer than 1 percent of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally.” A variety of factors keep people from qualifying for the existing green card categories, including low annual visa caps, a lack of U.S.-based sponsors (either employers or qualifying family members), narrow definitions of eligible nationalities, and cost.”
https://reason.com/2024/02/21/green-card-process-utterly-failing-to-help-immigrants-pursue-the-american-dream-in-lawful-and-orderly-ways/
“Current law caps the number of employment-based green cards that can be granted each year at 40,000. That is far fewer than the demand for green cards in that category. Making matters worse, nationals from any one country can be granted only 7 percent of the total.
As a result of that rule, a very small share of high-skilled professionals from India and China are able to land green cards even when their petitions have been approved. These two countries send America the bulk of our imported high-skilled talent, typically on H-1B visas. Meanwhile, the green card quotas for countries that don’t send much high-skilled talent to the U.S. go unfilled.
The upshot is that an estimated 800,000 immigrants who are working legally in the United States are waiting for green cards, an unprecedented backlog in employment-based immigration. The vast majority are Indians; Chinese are the next biggest category.
An Indian national who applies for a green card now might wait 50 years (or more) to get one. Under current policy, the Cato Institute’s David Bier estimates, 200,000 Indians will die of old age while waiting for green cards. The children of such workers qualify for dependent visas until they turn 21, at which point they become “legal Dreamers”—people who have grown up in this country but can’t qualify for permanent residence.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/27/21039138/liberia-green-card-path-citizenship-ndaa