When Mahmoud Khalil appeared before an immigration judge at the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, for the second time yesterday, he quoted back to the judge something she had said at his hearing three days prior. “[You told us] that there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” the activist and former Columbia University graduate student said. “Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process.”

Khalil’s statement came after immigration judge Jamee E. Comans, a former lawyer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s bid to expel him from the United States. In seeking to do so, the Trump administration has focused not on any criminal activity on Khalil’s part but on his political speech in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

To achieve this end, the Trump administration has revived an obscure provision of a McCarthy-era law called the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which allows the secretary of state to revoke an individual’s legal status if their presence in the United States is deemed to have “adverse” consequences for US foreign policy. A two-page memo signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and delivered to Comans just two days before the ruling constituted the government’s case against Khalil, a Palestinian citizen of Algeria who grew up in a refugee camp in Syria. While this is a dramatic setback for Khalil — and for free expression in the United States — it is far from the end of the road.