A district judge denied a temporary restraining order in Mahmoud Khalil’s case against Columbia University attempting to block the transfer of student records to the GOP-led House Education and the Workforce Committee.
Khalil, the former lead negotiator for Columbia's pro-Palestinian encampment who has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sued the school alongside multiple other students to stop it from giving disciplinary records to the lawmakers. The suit also aimed to end the government’s pause of $400 million in federal funding to Columbia and to stop the university from implementing any reforms it had agreed to in an attempt to get the federal money back.
District Judge Arun Subramanian denied the request for a temporary restraining order, citing issues in the plaintiffs' motion such as not addressing their standing to sue or their risk of irreparable harm from these actions.
“But as plaintiffs all but conceded at last week’s hearing, the current complaint and motion papers fail to address some threshold requirements they need to satisfy to obtain this wide-ranging relief,” Subramanian wrote.
The judge notes some records have already been sent to the lawmakers and cannot be undone, but the university did scrub any identifying student information before sending the files over.
“As to any further production of records, Columbia says it doesn’t intend to produce any at the present time. And for their part, the Congressional defendants aren’t currently asking for any further records,” Subramanian said.
The judge is allowing the plaintiffs to amend their complaint.
In their original complaint, the students alleged privacy laws and First Amendment rights were in jeopardy due to Columbia’s actions.
“The records demanded by the Committee are not substantially related to antisemitism. Rather, the Committee has instrumentalized accusations of antisemitism to attack ideas it ideologically opposes. It traffics in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic dog whistles to justify unjustifiable intrusions on First Amendment rights,” one part of the suit said.
The lawsuit came after Khalil, a green-card holder, was already arrested by ICE, kicking off an ongoing battle between foreign students and the Trump administration.
