Khalil and other graduates filed a federal civil complaint accusing Columbia University and SIPA Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo of Title VI violations.
Page A2From§Eachthe supper edition — 15 September 2026
Khalil, jailed three months over an antisemitism probe now called fake, sues Columbia for anti-Palestinian bias.
As it ran on the front
My neighbor put up a fence last spring. Six feet, cedar, nothing fancy, and within a month the county mailed him a violation notice: four hundred dollars, for crossing the property line by eleven inches. Take it down, they said, or pay it. He didn't have a survey handy. Who does. He paid the four hundred dollars, and the fence stayed exactly where it was, eleven inches worth of nothing, because that's cheaper than a lawyer.
Six months go by. He's at the hardware store, of all places, and runs into a man who used to work in the county's code office, retired now, talkative. Turns out the office had been running most of that year off a plat map that predated a nineteen eighty-seven resurvey, the whole grid off, not by a little. Half the violations that spring weren't violations of anything, except a map somebody should have thrown out decades ago. My neighbor never got his four hundred dollars back. Nobody offered. The fine came first, and the truth came whenever it felt like showing up, and by the time it showed up, the fine had already done its job, which was to be paid.…
…(cont) I don't usually start with somebody's fence, but bear with me, because I have a piece of paper here that has nothing to do with it, and it does the exact same thing, in the exact same order.
In March of 2025, immigration agents arrested a Columbia University graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil, revoked his green card and his student visa, and took him into custody over the role he had played in the pro-Palestinian protests on that campus. He sat in custody for three months. In June, the record says, he was released.
Fourteen months after that release, in August of this year, a career attorney at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Haley Van Erem, filed a complaint of her own. She had been inside the task force built to investigate antisemitism at universities including Columbia, Harvard, and Brown, and what she says she found was not an investigation that turned up evidence and then acted on it. She says it ran the other way: an unlawful process, in her words, built to reach a political outcome it had already chosen, that pushed schools into settlements no matter what the record showed. The settlements got signed. Whatever evidence was supposed to justify them, Van Erem says, mostly was not there.
Early this month, on September 4th, Columbia's own Knight First Amendment Institute sent out an invitation, to a different Palestinian graduate student, Mohsen Mahdawi, facing a deportation case, asking Mahdawi to speak at a panel marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the War on Terror. The school that the task force said it was protecting from antisemitism was, that same week, handing a stage to exactly the kind of student the task force existed to police.
Eleven days after that invitation went out, Khalil filed a federal lawsuit. Not against the Justice Department, not against ICE, against Columbia itself, and against the SIPA dean by name, for what he is calling persistent anti-Palestinian discrimination. Title VI, the same statute the antisemitism probes were built to enforce, pointed now in the other direction.
So my neighbor's four hundred dollars was never coming back, and I don't imagine anybody is handing Khalil his three months back either. The fine gets paid, the map gets corrected later, and later does not refund anybody.
One more thing before I let you go, and it isn't about the fence. The whistleblower says the antisemitism probes were built backward, the verdict first, the evidence after, if it showed up at all. The government that produced that finding is the same government that had a student in custody for three months on the strength of exactly that kind of finding. Whose three months was that?
“The same government that jailed a kid for three months over "antisemitism" just had its own lawyer say those investigations were built backward — verdict first, evidence maybe. Somebody paid for that: three months in custody, a canceled visa, a green card revoked, and now a lawsuit is the only refund on the table. That's not oversight, that's the business model — manufacture the crisis, cash the settlement, let the person on the ground eat the cost.”
“The task force wasn't rounding up students, it was protecting them — real settlements, real accountability, from schools that let this fester for years. One attorney's complaint doesn't erase that record, and frankly her motives — did I say her motives? I don't know anything about her motives, strike that. Khalil's suit is just an activist trying to relitigate a national security call as a civil rights case, and Columbia will fight it, obviously, because — because they have to, that's not an admission of anything.”
The receipts
· Palestinian who says he can ’empathize’ with terrorists invited to Columbia University’s 9/11 event from the morgue, 4 Sep 2026
· DOJ Whistleblower Confirms "Antisemitism" Probes Against Universities Were Sham Investigations from the morgue, 21 Aug 2026
· Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil is released from prison, after being in custody for three months. (NBC News) from the morgue, 20 Jun 2025
· U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student who played a prominent role during pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, and revoke his green card and from the morgue, 9 Mar 2025
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.