Confused about Mahmoud Khalil's legal case
I was reading the New Yorker's profile on Khalil and they largely framed the entire prosecution as a targeted attack on Khalil by the Trump administration for free speech.
However, when I see the Trump administration's case, it's centered around how Khalil lied on his greencard application, when they asked him about past employment. From what I can tell, he did. Specifically he lied about working at UNWRA and the British Embassy in Beirut.
Khalil interned at UNWRA from June to November in 2023, a time period that overlapped with the Oct 7th attacks. Israel has continuously accused UNRWA of harboring ongoing terrorist connections to Hamas. We have good evidence that 9 UNRWA employees were involved in the Oct 7th attacks. And we know for a fact that Sinwar died with a UNRWA teacher's passport on his person.
This means Khalil's co-workers were involved in Oct 7th attacks, while he was working there.
It makes sense that he'd lie about this, because greencard applications also ask about past involvement in terrorist groups.
Greencard applications don't just ask about the past, but about planned future involvement with terrorist organizations.
And we have circumstantial evidence that Khalil distributed terrorist propaganda at his rallies at Columbia. However, there's some plausible deniability here, unless someone has video of him handing them out. The Trump administration is probably going to focus on how he lied about UNRWA (and working at the British Embassy in Beirut).
TO me, this seems clear cut. Not just the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law.
Khalil is someone who was clearly involved or sympathised with terrorism, with 9 of his co-workers attacking civilians on October 7th and he lied about it. We know that the Hamas propaganda office produced the flyers at his events.
We also have his own words where Khalil justified Oct 7th attacks, "I was interning at UNWRA and part of my internship was focused on Palestine...."
"Israel was trying to make that deal with Saudi [Arabia]...and they circumvented the palestinian question." (Literally Yahya Sinwar's language about why he orchestrated Oct 7th).
"Palestinians HAD to do that[Oct 7th]" (did it?)
On how Columbia's narrative was too Pro-Israeli on Oct 10, 2023 "By October 8th, there were hundreds of Palestinians killed by israel" (let the record show these deaths were the terrorists who invaded Israel to kill and kidnap civilians).
From his interview with Ezra Klein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2BLU3Gy3YE&t=6s
But whenever I see this covered, the angle is always focused on how the Trump Administration is unfairly targeting him. I don't think so.
It's easy to contrast this case with Ozturk who had no involvement with Hamas, even tangentially, didn't lie on her visa application and literally just wrote an Op Ed. She was unfairly targeted for expressing free speech and our courts managed to rule in her favor fairly quickly.
Khalil is NOT being unfairly targeted. He is exactly the type of person we should deport.
Unless I'm missing something here? Everytime I listen to popular press on the subject I have these burning questions that don't seem to be addressed. I'm opening this up to this subreddit to test my understanding of this case.