Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate detained by the Trump administration last weekend, and seven current students asked a federal court Thursday to block the school from producing student disciplinary records to a House committee that demanded them last month.

The committee’s request and the school’s compliance with it would violate the First Amendment rights of Khalil and the students and the university’s obligation to protect student privacy, the lawsuit said.

The seven current students also asked the court to allow them to proceed anonymously and are referred to in the lawsuit with pseudonyms such as Sally Roe and Ned Noe.

House Committee on Education and Workforce Sends Letter to Columbia

Last month, the House Committee on Education and Workforce sent a letter to Katrina Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, and the university board chairs, David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, that said “numerous antisemitic incidents” had taken place.

It demanded disciplinary records connected to 11 incidents dating to the previous school year, including the student “takeover and occupation” of Hamilton Hall last April, a protest against a class taught by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the disruption of an Israeli history class.

Khalil, a prominent figure in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the campus, was arrested by federal immigration agents in New York on Saturday and is being held in Louisiana. He earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December.

He has not been charged with any crime. But the Trump administration has accused Khalil of siding with terrorists and justified his detention by citing a little-used statute that allows the secretary of state to deport anyone whose presence is adversarial to foreign policy and national security interests.

Rubio Speaks on Khalil Participating in Protests

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, talking to reporters during a stop in Ireland on Wednesday, accused Khalil of participating in antisemitic activities, including protests that Rubio said expressed support for Hamas.

“This is not about free speech,” Rubio said. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”

The White House has said Khalil is only the first of many whom it plans to detain and deport.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. It names Columbia and Armstrong; Barnard College and its president, Laura Ann Rosenbury; and the House Committee and its chair, Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich.

A Columbia spokesperson declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. A Barnard representative did not immediately comment.

Walberg said in a statement that the lawsuit changed nothing. “Our committee will continue its work to protect Jewish students and hold schools accountable for their failures to address rampant antisemitism on our college campuses,” the statement said.

The suit says that to fully comply with the committee’s request, Columbia would have to turn over private files of hundreds of its students, faculty and staff members. Such information could be used to harass and make threats against the individuals, “whose personal privacy and safety would be jeopardized by the committee’s politically charged investigation,” the suit adds.

The lawsuit says hearings by the committee on campus antisemitism, which led to the resignations of university presidents, and the requests for student information “were a naked attempt to attack and harass individuals who expressed viewpoints critical of Israel.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Benjamin Weiser/Juan Arredondo
c. 2025 The New York Times Company