An attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who’s overseeing a high-profile deportation case in Louisiana says she was stripped of her electronics moments before a pivotal hearing, preventing her from accessing evidence and court records that remained available to the three US government attorneys in the room, each of whom were allowed use of a laptop by the court.
Louisiana immigration judge Jamee Comans ruled late last month that Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was eligible for deportation. During that hearing, however, Khalil’s attorney Nora Ahmed says she was barred from bringing her laptop into the courtroom, despite having filed the proper paperwork in advance and being a frequent visitor to the immigration facility.
“There should not be an advantage, no matter how small or how large, provided to a particular party over the other,” says Ahmed. “Because that starts to infect the proceedings themselves and the notion of fundamental fairness that we all uphold in courtroom proceedings.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. Attempts to reach Comans through the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) were unsuccessful.
The son of Palestinian refugees, Khalil,—a US green card holder—became a key figure last year in the Columbia University protests against the war in Gaza, joining a coalition of student organizations espousing outrage and calling for divestment over the Israeli military’s bombings of hospitals, schools, and homes in the wake of the surprise attacks by Hamas-led militants in October 2023. Khalil remains one of the most high-profile targets of the Trump administration’s ongoing push to expel foreign students protesting Israel’s actions.
The US government has not accused Khalil, whose wife and newborn son were born in the US, of committing any crime. The government acknowledged last month that Khalil had been detained without a warrant due to “exigent circumstances,” claiming the 30-year-old graduate student, whose wife was eight months pregnant at the time, was a “flight risk.”
Following his arrest at his university-owned apartment complex in New York on March 8, Khalil was transported to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a for-profit prison overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where he is now subject to a tribunal system that bears little resemblance to the US courts that hear citizens’ cases. A majority of people fighting deportation cannot afford—nor do they have any recognized right—to legal representation. (This includes, most glaringly, the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who enter the US each year.) Political influence weighs heavily on the system, which, nestled under the Justice Department, is invariably subject to the whims of the current occupant of the White House, with its judges serving by appointment of the US attorney general.
In an unusual move, on April 8, Comans booted nearly 600 people attempting to observe one of Khalil’s hearings over the court’s videoconferencing software, declaring that, going forward, only his attorneys or wife would be permitted to view the proceedings online. Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, appeared to argue against the enhanced secrecy on April 11.
Electronics in the detention area are strictly forbidden, but Ahmed had filed paperwork the previous night to ensure that when the hearing began, she’d be allowed, as Khalil’s legal representative, to enter the courtroom with her laptop in line with EOIR policy. Nevertheless, in a sworn declaration, Ahmed says that minutes before the hearing began she was informed by the detention center staff that, on Comans’ instructions, she was forbidden from bringing her devices inside, forcing her to turn over her laptop to the faculty and enter the courtroom empty-handed. Once the hearing began, Khalil says, she sat opposite three Homeland Security attorneys, with each their own laptop.
The Hollywood image of attorneys wheeling stacks of bankers’ boxes into court is mostly antiquated, says Ahmed, whose gigabytes worth of trial data are digitally stored. “You effectively are using the technology that you have to be able to respond in real time, or inquire in real time, or to show your client in real time, what evidence the government may be talking about or responding to,” she tells WIRED. “That’s always very critical, because you want to make sure that any representation that’s being made by the other side is factual.”
Michelle Méndez, an attorney at the National Immigration Project, says the asymmetry in access to technology and resources between the government and non-citizens in court is a reflection of who controls it.
“As long as immigration courts are under the direction of the executive branch, non-citizens are never going to receive a fundamentally fair proceeding,” she says.
Méndez notes that, since February 2022, the Justice Department has required all immigration attorneys to file documents with the courts electronically, effectively establishing the expectation that attorneys should rely on digital access for court filings, case citations, and other subject matter, rather than risk expensive continuances in notoriously backlogged courts.
“The image of somebody coming in with boxes is definitely apt in those circumstances,” she says, of the sheer volume of material attorneys would be required to lug around without electronic access. “The worst-case scenario is that the attorney misses out on being able to offer the court whatever it is that the court seeks from them. They don’t have it.”
According to Ahmed, both the ICE center’s warden, Shad Rice, and Khalil’s judge denied ordering the ban, which Ahmed says she received word of only minutes before the hearing began. “When I inquired as to why, I was told that it was the immigration judge that had made the determination,” she tells WIRED. She requested to speak with the judge privately before the hearing, she says, but her request was denied.
Ahmed says Comans eventually informed her that the electronics ban had come at the request of the ICE facility. But when pressed to allow Ahmed to confer with the warden, who was also in the room at the time, the request was denied. “It seemed particularly unjust to Mr. Khalil,” she says, “as he looked at the Department of Homeland Security attorneys who had three laptops at their table.” During the hearing, she adds, the government lawyers were conducting Google searches, writing emails, and reading from papers as the proceedings took place.
In a declaration filed with the court, Ahmed states that she spoke to Warden Rice after the hearing had concluded and that the warden indicated that the judge “appeared to contradict herself” when she blamed the faculty at the detention center for denying Amhed access to her devices. Ahmed corresponded with Rice over the following week, working to ensure that the computer ban would not remain in effect.
The warden eventually responded on April 25, saying they’d met with the EOIR, which oversees removal proceedings on behalf of the DOJ. Ahmed was informed there’d be no attempt from the facility to strip her of her devices going forward, but that the judge ultimately held the authority to remove any electronics deemed “a distraction” or inessential to “representing the client.”
In a subsequent motion, Ahmed wrote that the courts had long recognized the obligation of prison officials to refrain from “placing obstacles in the way” of an attorney communicating with a prisoner, adding that the denial of her electronics during the hearing not only contradicted DOJ policy, but “greater notions of fundamental fairness that animate our legal system.”
ICE declined to comment. Warden Rice could not be reached for comment. Christopher Ferreira, a spokesperson for GEO Group, which runs the ICE detention center, says the for-profit prison company follows the guidance handed to it by its government partners: “Decisions related to access to courtrooms and legal visitation areas at the ICE Processing Centers, where GEO provides support services, are made in consultation with ICE and EOIR.”
Anthony Enriquez, an attorney with RFK Human Rights, says much of what’s happening in the Khalil case is emblematic of larger structural issues in the immigration system. “We talk a lot about due process, about how it applies to everyone in the country, whether or not you’re a citizen or a non-citizen,” he says. “But the very procedures and the courts that we use to determine whether or not people do have a right to stay in the United States, there’s a fundamental flaw in them where both the prosecutor and the adjudicator are part of the same prosecutorial branch, the executive branch.”
“The judges that are presiding over immigration cases; they’re called immigration judges in name,” he adds. “But in actual form, they’re really just employees of the Department of Justice.”
Second only to Texas in number of detainees, Louisiana’s nine immigration detention centers have faced allegations of human rights abuses in recent years, from physical and sexual assaults to medical neglect and bug-infested food. In an August 2024 report, compiled in part by the ACLU itself, the system was described by a coalition of civil rights organizations as an “inhumane” corporate “profit machine,” where “basic human rights are systematically ignored.”
Khalil’s case in Louisiana is effectively on hold for much of this month following a ruling by a US District Court judge in New Jersey, who last week shot down the Trump administration effort to stop Khalil from suing the government. In a 108-page ruling, New Jersey District Judge Michael Farbiarz said the government had no authority to prevent the court from reviewing Khalil’s claims. Khalil has accused the US government of unlawfully detaining him for political views in violation of the First Amendment.
In a statement, Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, a Michigan-born dentist, said the New Jersey ruling had come to her as a relief. “This is an important step toward securing Mahmoud’s freedom. But there is still more work to be done,” she says. “I will continue to strongly advocate for my husband, so he can come home to our family and feel the pure joy all parents know of holding your first-born child in your arms.”
