By Luc Cohen and Brendan O’Brien
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Federal agents searched two student residences at Columbia University, its interim president said, a week after immigration agents detained Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s campus protests, who the Trump administration wants to deport.
The search came hours after the Trump administration sent a letter to Columbia demanding changes to its student discipline and admissions policies.
The joint letter from the Department of Education, the General Services Administration and the Health and Human Services Department said the school must implement a series of changes as a precondition to talks on restoring $400 million in federal grants and contracts that were canceled last week.
The searches came after agents from the Department of Homeland Security served the university with two warrants signed by a federal magistrate, allowing them to enter and search the residences, Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong said in a statement on Thursday. No one was arrested or detained, no items were removed, and no further action was taken, she said.
The development was a further sign of the growing pressure that the Trump administration is exerting on the university, which was the epicenter of anti-Israel protests at dozens of U.S. college campuses last spring. Since then, it has become a prime target of President Donald Trump and his administration, which has accused it of an inadequate response to antisemitism on campus and allowing Jewish students to be intimidated.
In the letter, the administration ordered the school to formally define antisemitism, ban the wearing of masks “intended to conceal identity or intimidate” and place the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership” for at least five years.
“Columbia University … has fundamentally failed to protect
American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” the letter said.
A Columbia spokeswoman told the New York Times that the school was reviewing the letter. Reuters could not immediately reach a Columbia representative for comment.
Earlier Thursday, the school announced that it had meted out a range of punishments to students who occupied a campus building last spring during the pro-Palestinian protests. It did not name the students.
The discipline comes days after Khalil’s deportation was temporarily blocked by a federal judge. The student leader, who has not been charged with any crime, is being held in a federal facility in Louisiana.
In a Thursday night court filing, Khalil’s lawyers said the Trump administration’s stated policy of deporting foreign nationals who participate in pro-Palestinian protests is unconstitutional, and urged U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan to immediately release him from immigration detention.
Earlier this week, Justice Department lawyers representing the government said Khalil, 30, was subject to deportation because Secretary of State Marco Rubio had determined that his presence or activities in the country could have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
The government did not elaborate in court papers on how Khalil could harm U.S. foreign policy. Trump, without evidence, has accused him of supporting Hamas, and Rubio told reporters earlier this week that non-citizen protesters who disrupt campus life should have their visas revoked.
“The government’s unlawful policy of targeting noncitizens for arrest and removal based on protected speech is…viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment,” Khalil’s lawyers led by Amy Belsher of the New York Civil Liberties Foundation wrote in their first filing since the government articulated its legal basis for arresting Khalil.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen and Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Frank McGurty and Franklin Paul)
