Court Battles

Mahmoud Khalil asks for Emil Bove’s recusal in immigration case

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by Ryan Mancini - 04/02/26 6:53 PM ET

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by Ryan Mancini - 04/02/26 6:53 PM ET

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Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil on Wednesday called on U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Emil Bove to recuse himself from the pro-Palestinian activist’s immigration case, where he risks deportation.

Khalil’s lawyers filed a petition requesting Bove’s recusal over his prior roles as the acting deputy attorney general and then the principal associate deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice (DOJ), during which he was involved in investigating student activists. President Trump later nominated Bove, one of his former defense lawyers, to be a federal judge.

Bove, while at the DOJ, “wrote memoranda about and directed immigration enforcement investigations and decisions against student protesters on college campuses –– particularly at Columbia University, where Mr. Khalil was enrolled and, soon after, was the first to be arrested pursuant to a retaliatory policy that is at the core of Mr. Khalil’s habeas challenge.”

Khalil’s lawyers cited Bove’s own Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, in which he said he would recuse himself if a conflict of interest arose.

“Regardless of the veracity of each of these allegations, the public reporting on Judge Bove’s involvement in investigating Columbia student protestors makes it difficult to imaging that a member of the public would not perceive that Judge Bove was involved in decision-making around Mr. Khalil’s case, the first and very high-profile government action against a Columbia student protestor,” Khalil’s lawyers wrote in their motion.

A panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where Bove serves as a federal judge, previously said the federal judge who freed Khalil did not have the authority to do so.

Immigration authorities arrested Khalil in March 2025. He remained in jail in New Jersey until he was released in June.

If Bove does not recuse himself, Khalil’s lawyers could appeal the panel’s decision to the Supreme Court, The New York Times reported.

Khalil, an Algerian Palestinian activist, wrote an op-ed with Fox News last month warning that what happened to him could affect others who challenge the U.S. government.

“Throughout my 104 days in federal detention, during which I missed the birth of my first child, I considered myself a political prisoner,” Khalil wrote. “The government had deprived me of my liberty, not because I had broken any laws, but because it didn’t like what I had to say.”

After Khalil’s arrest, several more activists and students were detained by federal immigration officials after they spoke out in favor of the Palestinians in Gaza.

This included Turkish national and Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who wrote an op-ed that called for Tufts to withdraw its support for Israel and praised the Palestinians. In February, an immigration court terminated her deportation proceedings requested by the Trump administration.

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