Dr. Noor Abdalla and graduate student Mahmoud Khalil became proud parents yesterday, but the father was denied permission by the Trump administration to be by his wife’s side for the delivery of their first child.
Khalil, who is being held at a detention center in Jena, Louisiana, was denied a request for temporary release to meet their son, according to emails reviewed by ABC News.
Khalil's lawyers requested a two-week furlough, noting that his wife, Dr. Abdalla, had gone into labor "eight days earlier than expected," an email addressed to New Orleans ICE ERO Field Office Director Mellissa B. Harper shows.
In the email, the lawyers also recommended that Khalil could be placed in ankle monitor and could do check-ins with ICE.
The GOP still claims to be the political party of “family values” but forcing the absence of the father during a such milestone birth is an anathema to those principles.
And in related kidnapping news, Senator Welch visited another permanent resident, Mohsen Mahdawi, detained by ICE after showing up for his citizenship interview.
Welch announced on social media that he met with Mahdawi at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.
Mahdawi, a Columbia University student living in Vermont, was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement at what he thought was a citizenship interview in Colchester.
Mahdawi was part of the Gaza war protests at Columbia last spring. His supporters say he was taken into custody as part of a Trump administration crackdown on international students involved in pro-Palestinian activities. Senator Welch is now calling for his release.
Also on Friday, a federal judge ordered another kidnapped student anti-war protester, Rumeysa Ozturk, to be returned to Vermont from that notorious ICE detention center in Louisiana mentioned earlier.
At a hearing last week, while Ozturk was detained far away, the lawyers spoke calmly. The judge thanked both sides for their professionalism, and the government’s extremism was almost hidden in the politeness. The government argues that even if Ozturk’s rights to free speech and due process were violated, the Vermont judge cannot hear her case and cannot order her release. (A hearing now scheduled for May would address the possibility of release on bail.)
Ozturk’s lawyers had originally filed a habeas corpus petition in Massachusetts, where their client was arrested. The Massachusetts judge sent the case to Vermont because it turned out that Ozturk was in the government’s custody there — somewhere in a government vehicle — by the time the case was filed. The government didn’t want the case heard in Massachusetts or Vermont, near Ozturk’s lawyers, her community, her school and her work.
Hopefully these immigrants, permanent residents and the countless others facing illegal deportations will be able to exercise their US Constitutional rights of due process and access to the courts before the Trump regime can traffic them around the country, then outside of US jurisdiction permanently.