The Trump administration used the machinery of immigration enforcement to punish constitutionally protected political speech — and it did so through a coordinated conspiracy with private surveillance organizations that compiled the names. That is what is on the record. The question now before a Manhattan federal court is whether the law written to stop exactly this kind of operation still applies.
Mahmoud Khalil filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against senior Trump administration officials — White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem — and against the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, and Betar US. The complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court by the Center for Constitutional Rights and brought under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 — the statute Congress passed to combat organized vigilante violence against constitutional rights — alleges a documented chain of coordination: private groups built the lists; the Heritage Foundation wrote the blueprint; the administration made the arrests.
The specific mechanism is not alleged. It is testified to.
Peter Hatch, a senior official within ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, testified during last year’s trial over the administration’s campaign against pro-Palestinian scholars that the agency assembled a dedicated team to investigate student protesters. The team compiled more than 100 reports based on a list of 5,000 individuals identified on the Canary Mission website. “The direction was to look at the website,” Hatch said. “That we should look at the individuals named in the Canary Mission website.”
Betar US submitted thousands of names to the administration for similar treatment. The group publicly claimed credit for Khalil’s arrest. The Guardian reported last year that the group had submitted “thousands of names” to the administration for similar treatment. More information about the government’s reliance on the groups emerged during the trial surrounding the administration’s campaign against pro-Palestinian scholars.
The Heritage Foundation led the formulation of what the complaint calls “Project Esther” — the blueprint, the complaint alleges, for a “public-private partnership” designed to defeat the movement for Palestinian rights. The document, the complaint states, “described the plan to identify and target pro-Palestinian, non-citizen students and scholars, who would then be arrested and deported by the federal defendant participants in the conspiracy.” The complaint alleges government officials worked “hand-in-hand” with the groups to deprive selected individuals of fundamental rights and to broadcast the message that Palestinians and their supporters would face state repression for their constitutionally protected political viewpoints.
Miller is alleged to be the architect of the operational framework. The complaint identifies him as a central participant in the conspiracy.
Khalil — a permanent US resident, born in Syria to Palestinian parents, married to a US citizen, a Columbia University graduate student — was the proof of concept. Federal immigration authorities arrested him in March 2025 over his advocacy for Palestinian rights. He was sent to an ICE detention center in Louisiana and held for 104 days, during which he missed the birth of his child. The government argued his views posed a threat to US foreign policy. Rubio invoked a provision of immigration law permitting deportation when a non-citizen’s presence would have “adverse foreign policy consequences.”
When that legal theory confronted judicial scrutiny, the government pivoted. Officials alleged Khalil had “misrepresented” information on his green-card application. His lawyers have vehemently denied the charge. The sequence — a constitutionally deficient theory of deportation, abandoned and replaced by a factual pretext once challenged — is the signature of an operation conducted for reasons the law does not authorize.
The government has not relented. Although Khalil was released from immigration detention last June, the administration is pursuing deportation. A federal appeals court struck a blow to his case when it ruled it must proceed in immigration court rather than in federal court. His attorneys have said they will ask the Supreme Court to intervene, a petition that raises the same structural questions this lawsuit now surfaces from a different angle.
The administration’s response to the lawsuit reveals its posture. A White House spokesperson said Khalil “obtained his visa by willfully and intentionally failing to accurately report information relevant to his background” and warned that “those who lie to the government to obtain entry into the United States will face justice.” A DHS spokesperson said the agency “acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority” and added: “We would encourage him to use the CBP Home app and self-deport now before he is arrested, deported, and never given a chance to return.” The Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, and Betar US did not respond to requests for comment.
The complaint’s legal architecture under the KKK Act is designed to answer the question that other statutory frameworks cannot reach: whether a conspiracy between government officials and private organizations to punish constitutionally protected speech constitutes a civil-rights violation. The complaint alleges that the defendants agreed to deprive Khalil of his First Amendment rights through arrest and deportation — the precise arrangement the KKK Act was enacted to reach. The 1871 statute was written for this kind of operation — private actors operating in coordination with state power to deprive targeted individuals of their constitutional rights.
But the case sits inside a doctrinal structure the Roberts Court has spent more than two decades building — a structure that has systematically foreclosed the judicial mechanisms through which an unlawful use of federal enforcement power could be litigated and remedied. The Bivens contraction, as the Court has executed it in Ziglar v. Abbasi, 582 U.S. 120 (2017), Hernandez v. Mesa, 589 U.S. 93 (2020), and Egbert v. Boule, 596 U.S. 482 (2022), has eliminated the implied damages remedy for federal officers who violate constitutional rights. The political-question doctrine and qualified immunity, applied as the Court applies them, insulate executive immigration decisions from meaningful constitutional review. The standing barriers identified in Hernandez — the family of a Mexican teenager killed by a Border Patrol agent across the border was denied relief — operate with equal force when the injury is detention, deportation, and the silencing of political speech.
These doctrinal moves have been bipartisan. They hardened across administrations of both parties. The regime they produce is this: the executive can deploy immigration enforcement as a political weapon; private organizations can provide the targeting information; and the doctrinal architecture the Court has built forecloses the judicial mechanisms by which the constitutional violations could be remedied on the merits. The Trump administration is the first to operate the regime at this intensity and with this explicitness. It is not the administration that built the lock.
The lawsuit in Manhattan and the petition before the Supreme Court are different entry points into the same structural question. The First Amendment binds federal immigration enforcement. The KKK Act prohibits conspiracy between government officials and private actors to deprive persons of constitutional rights. The doctrines the Roberts Court has installed do not formally overrule either. They make both functionally unenforceable — by contracting the remedies, foreclosing the standing, and characterizing the decisions as constitutionally committed to the political branches.
The regime in operation is not the same thing as the constitutional answer. The constitutional answer is that federal immigration enforcement may not be used to punish constitutionally protected political speech. The court in Manhattan and the justices now asked to intervene will decide whether the First Amendment binds immigration enforcement even when the government coordinates with private actors to suppress speech — or whether the doctrinal architecture the Roberts Court built makes that answer unenforceable.