Mamdani says he’s asked Trump to drop immigration cases against these pro-Palestinian activists

(CNN) — During an unannounced meeting with President Donald Trump last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani brought up four pro-Palestinian protesters pursued by federal immigration authorities: Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Leqaa Kordia.

“I asked that these cases be dropped,” Mamdani said at a ribbon cutting ceremony at the Weeksville Heritage Center Friday. “And the president said that he would look into it.”

The mayor said he also spoke about Ellie Aghayeva, a Columbia undergraduate taken into custody by federal agents, during his meeting with the president Thursday. He said Trump informed him she would be released and Aghayeva was out of custody later that day.

The other four are among a number of pro-Palestinian noncitizens targeted by federal immigration authorities last year, after protests against Israel’s military operation that devastated large parts of Gaza swept through the US. Trump had pledged to crack down on noncitizens protesting Israel, whom he framed as “Hamas sympathizers.” The wave of arrests sparked outrage and concern from civil rights advocates, who have argued the detainees were targeted for constitutionally protected speech.

Only one of the four – Leqaa Kordia, a 33-year-old Palestinian woman who had lived in Paterson, New Jersey, for close to a decade – is in custody, according to her attorneys. The other three are fighting their immigration cases from home.

The government “targeted individuals who had spoken out in various ways and to various degrees in support of Palestinian human rights,” Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU who is representing Khalil and Mahdawi, told CNN. “It took these actions against them, to detain and remove them from the country, as retaliation for that speech.”

A White House official said there was no update to provide. CNN has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment on each of the individuals.

The continued immigration proceedings against the four protesters come after a federal judge lambasted Trump and his administration for attacking free speech “under the cover of an unconstitutionally broad definition of Anti-Semitism” used in efforts to deport pro-Palestinian students.

Here’s what we know about the four and where their cases stand:

Mahmoud Khalil

Mahmoud Khalil, a 31-year-old with a green card then studying for a master’s program at Columbia University, was the first pro-Palestinian student protester arrested by federal immigration authorities. Khalil, an Algerian citizen who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, had acted as a spokesperson for Columbia’s pro-Palestinian encampment. Mimicking anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, students erected the tent encampment to call for Columbia to divest from its academic ties to Israel and its investments in weapons manufacturers and tech companies that do business with Israel’s government.

In video captured by his wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time, Khalil was detained by plainclothes federal agents at his university-owned apartment on March 8, 2025.

The agents didn’t have a warrant but said they were acting on orders from the State Department. They first told Khalil they were revoking his student visa. When his wife showed agents his green card, they said “the State Department had ‘revoked that too.’” He was swiftly transported hundreds of miles away to Louisiana, where he was detained at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center.

To justify Khalil’s deportation order, the State Department cited a little-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows for the removal of noncitizens based on “otherwise lawful” beliefs if the Secretary of State determines their presence or activities pose a threat to US foreign policy interests.

In immigration court, the federal government submitted a brief memo signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that said letting Khalil remain 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.”

Khalil spent over three months in immigration detention, missing the birth of his son. In May, a judge ruled in federal court the foreign policy basis for his detention was likely unconstitutional. He was released in June 2025 after the same judge said he was not a flight risk or danger to public safety and cited “extraordinary circumstances” in the case, including a “due process violative effort to punish” him.

But he still may face deportation: In January, a federal appeals panel reversed a lower court decision that had released him from detention, determining the federal court doesn’t have jurisdiction until his immigration case comes to a close.

That decision doesn’t go into effect “until we exhaust our appeals in the Third Circuit,” Kaufman, the attorney at the ACLU representing Khalil and Mahdawi, told CNN. Kaufman said Khalil’s lawyers plan to file a petition for review by the full appellate court by the end of March.

Khalil has maintained he was targeted for constitutionally protected free speech.

“My arrest 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,” he wrote in a 2025 letter from detention.

Yunseo Chung

Immigration officials moved to deport Yunseo Chung, a then-21-year-old Columbia undergraduate from South Korea with permanent resident status, in March 2025 after she and other students were arrested by local law enforcement at a sit-in at the university.

Federal immigration agents came looking for her at her parents’ home and searched her Columbia dorm, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court. And a federal law enforcement official told Chung’s lawyers her lawful permanent resident status was being revoked.

In the lawsuit, Chung’s lawyers described her attempted deportation as “an unprecedented and unjustifiable assault on First Amendment and other rights, one that cannot stand basic legal scrutiny.”

A judge blocked immigration officials from detaining Chung in a March order, saying there was “no indication she was a foreign threat.”

“After the constant dread in the back of my mind over the past few weeks, this decision feels like a million pounds off of my chest,” Chung wrote in a statement after the order.

The Justice Department said in a statement at the time that it “makes no apologies for its efforts to defend President Trump’s agenda in court and protect Jewish Americans from vile antisemitism.”

Mohsen Mahdawi

Mohsen Mahdawi, a 35-year-old Palestinian student with a green card studying at Columbia, was detained in Vermont after he arrived for a naturalization appointment on April 14 last year.

Mahdawi was born and raised in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and came to the US in 2014. Like Khalil, he had been involved in pro-Palestinian activism on Columbia’s campus, though he took a step back from organizing in March 2024. He spoke publicly about witnessing friends and loved ones killed by the Israeli military and said he was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier when he was 15, according to the Columbia Spectator.

During the April 14 appointment, the student passed his naturalization test and was given the oath to become a US citizen – only to be detained by Homeland Security Investigations agents on site, according to his attorneys. He was released on bond in May.

After Mahdawi was released, the government continued efforts to deport him, using the same foreign policy rationale as in Khalil’s case, the AP reported. Mahdawi also has an ongoing case in federal district court arguing he was unlawfully detained. He started a master’s degree at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs last fall, according to the ACLU.

Earlier this month, a judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting Mahdawi, citing a procedural misstep by government attorneys, the AP reported.

But the government can still appeal that decision. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, described Mahdawi as a leader of “pro-terrorist riots” whose visa should be revoked.

“No activist judge, not this one or any other, is going to stop us from doing that,” she said in a statement, according to the AP.

Leqaa Kordia

Kordia is the only protester among the four mentioned by Mamdani in custody.

She was detained less than a week after Khalil and flown to a detention center in Texas, court documents show, where she’s now been confined for close to a year. Her lawyers in court filings said she’s faced serious health challenges in detention, including a seizure in February, and she’s been denied the right to follow key tenets of her faith like eating halal and praying five times a day.

Her lawyers say Kordia, who grew up in the West Bank, was targeted because of a pro-Palestinian protest she attended outside the gates at Columbia’s campus in April 2024. She was arrested by the NYPD but quickly released, and the charges against her were dismissed, according to court documents.

Kordia had come to the US first on a tourist visa and then transitioned to a student visa, studying English while working as a waitress and at a clothing store and helping care for her US citizen mother and brother, her attorneys said. In 2022, after her family-based visa petition for Lawful Permanent Resident status was approved, she withdrew from the student visa program – not knowing she had to wait until a visa became available, according to her lawyers.

DHS told CNN that Kordia was arrested “for immigration violations related to overstaying her expired student visa.” They also noted what they called her involvement in “pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University” and claimed she was “found to be providing financial support to individuals living in nations hostile to the U.S.”

Her lawyers say the “financial support” refers to payments Kordia made to family members in the West Bank and Gaza to help pay their bills and rebuild their homes and businesses after Israeli airstrikes.

An immigration judge has twice ordered Kordia released on bond. But in both instances, DHS ordered an automatic stay, keeping her detained. She’s currently in the midst of ongoing legal cases both in immigration court and federal court, where her lawyers are arguing she was unconstitutionally targeted because of her free speech and that her religious rights are being violated in detention.

Kordia’s cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, welcomed Mamdani’s support.

“Mayor Mamdani is absolutely right to call on President Trump to release Leqaa Kordia, the beloved daughter of an American citizen,” he said in a statement.

“For nearly a year, my cousin Leqaa has been locked away in ICE detention, robbed of precious birthdays, holidays, and irreplaceable moments with her family,” he went on.

“Leqaa is a young woman who belongs at home, safe, free, and surrounded by the people who love her. The time for delay is over. We urge President Trump to release Leqaa immediately and allow her to reclaim her freedom, her dignity, and her life.”

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