By Bruce S. Ticker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The anti-Israel mob concocted a novel legal strategy on Monday when former Columbia University students sued their alma mater: the defendant mobilized a pattern of “deliberate indifference.”
The ex-students at Columbia – part of a spring 2024 movement that violated university rules, assaulted employees, seized and vandalized a classroom building and harassed Jewish students – charged that the university’s “indifference” facilitated harassment of the students, particularly activist leader Mahmoud Khalil; the Trump administration attempted to deport him after it arrested him in March 2025.
That’s right. They employed the term “deliberate indifference.” The Associated Press quoted Khalil thusly:
“Columbia laid the groundwork for my targeting by the Trump administration through its deliberate indifference and discrimination against Palestinian students. For over two years, we pleaded with Columbia, and Columbia did not care. Our safety and wellbeing did not serve the ideological project its Board of Trustees was protecting, so they traded us away. We are suing because no one should go through the hell Columbia put us through.”
I could not figure out how the university harmed Khalil and his fellow students, at least not so severely as to make a federal case of it. Then again, that is the entire premise of the lawsuit.
“I’m not suing Columbia for what ICE did,” Khalil said. “I’m suing Columbia for creating the conditions for ICE to do what it did.”
I am not an attorney, but I sense that the lawsuit will be laughed out of court. Most of the arguments reported by various media outlets make no sense.
Khalil, 31, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on March 8, 2025, and spent 104 days in detention until he was released. He missed the birth of his first child. He is still fighting his pending deportation in court. He was the first of many foreign students whom the Trump administration has tried to deport.
He told The New York Times that prior to his arrest he repeatedly asked university officials to protect him from growing threats he received for his pro-“Palestinian” advocacy. He said Columbia would not help him.
(Note – I try to avoid using words such as “Palestine” and “Palestinian” because neither word has ever been defined.)
Why Columbia? If Khalil felt threatened, he could have called the police. It is the NYPD’s job to protect New Yorkers from threats. He lives in the Morningside Heights section of upper Manhattan.
It was not Columbia that arrested Khalil. ICE did. Khalil served as negotiator for pro-Arab students, with university leaders, during the 2024 protests. I can envision Columbia officials feeling exasperated in their so-called negotiations with Khalil, and they could have alerted federal investigators to his likely complicity.
The suit also alleges that Columbia violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as members of the Palestine Working Group were “antagonized and harassed without consequence” since PWG was launched in 2018, and the harassment escalated after Hamas’ savage invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The suit claimed that members were doxxed by outside groups, threatened by peers on campus and Columbia itself dubbed PWG a “hostile group.”
The university suspended PWG in May 2025, according to AP. Can anyone blame them?
The suit seeks to compel Columbia to reinstate PWG, expand action against anti-Muslim discrimination, allow Khalil to return to the grounds, and pay monetary damages to the affected PWG members, according to AP.
A Columbia spokesperson said without directly responding to the suit, “Columbia is committed to protecting our community from discrimination and harassment and responding promptly and appropriately when concerns arise.”
The pro-“Palestinian” movement triggered a national nightmare when students and others installed illegal encampments on Columbia’s campus during April 2024. Participating in these encampments means they violated the law. These tactics were replicated on campuses nationwide.
Not only that, but thugs broke into Columbia’s Hamilton Hall where they fought with and injured two employees, and then they occupied and vandalized the building.
While activists may be victims of Columbia’s “deliberate indifference,” they are lucky they did not spend long stretches on Rikers Island (NYC’s vast prison complex).
The Times reports in the following passage that Khalil “said that Columbia should have pushed back against claims from the Trump White House and others that its pro-Palestinian students were dangerous and antisemitic. It is a charge that he and the other activists strongly reject.”
Does anyone out there wonder if Columbia officials in the first place told the White House that Khalil and company “were dangerous and antisemitic?”
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.
Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.