By MICHAEL HILL and JAKE OFFENHARTZ, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — A Cornell University student who sued the Trump administration because he feared it would try to deport him for participating in pro-Palestinian protests has been asked to surrender to immigration authorities.

Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana studies, got a notice Friday telling him to report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, according to his attorneys. The agency didn’t set a deadline.

Taal, 31, filed a lawsuit March 15 seeking to block enforcement of executive orders by President Donald Trump that have led to a growing crackdown on international students who participated in campus protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Taal is a citizen of the United Kingdom and Gambia.

Some students and faculty have had their visas revoked or been blocked from entering the U.S. because they attended demonstrations or publicly expressed support for Palestinians in the conflict with Israel.

In one of the most high-profile cases, the Justice Department detained a Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil, and told him his green card was being revoked because of his participation in protests.

The government has also detained a scholar at Georgetown University and refused to let a professor at Brown University’s medical school enter the U.S.

In a court filing, U.S. Department of Justice lawyers said Taal’s student visa had also been revoked, even before he filed his lawsuit, but ICE agents had trouble locating him.

The revocation is based on Taal’s alleged involvement in “disruptive protests,” disregarding university policies and creating a hostile environment for Jewish students, the government said.

An attorney for Taal, Eric Lee, said Monday that his client is not being required to surrender before Tuesday’s scheduled hearing on the lawsuit in Syracuse.

Taal was suspended from Cornell for a second time last fall after a group of pro-Palestinian activists disrupted a campus career fair. He has limited access to the upstate New York campus as he continues his studies remotely.

In his lawsuit, Taal and his co-plaintiffs argue that Trump’s executive orders violate the free speech rights of international students and scholars. Taal claims he was at the career fair protest for five minutes and had faced no criminal charges.

Related Articles

Yemen strike plan shared on text app, report

Trump wants Supreme Court to block ‘power grab’

Body camera footage is released showing scene outside Gene Hackman’s home

Judge blocks DOGE access to Social Security, income data at US agencies

Flammable devices found at Tesla dealership in Austin, Texas

“If the First Amendment does not protect the right to attend a demonstration, what’s left?” Lee said. “Not much.”

In the case involving Khalil, government lawyers filed new paperwork saying that besides participating in protests, Khalil had not disclosed his past work with the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees and his continued employment with the British embassy for Syria, based in Beirut. They also said he did not disclose his involvement with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition group of anti-Israel student organizations.

Ramzi Kassem, an attorney for Khalil, called the allegations “plainly thin,” noting the government would have to prove any omission was both willful and materially important.

“It’s very obviously a rearguard action to shore up their immigration case,” he said. “This doesn’t change the fact that this is still a case about Mr. Khalil’s pro-Palestinian speech and the fact that the government doesn’t like it.”

The Trump administration had previously also argued that Khalil’s prominent role in the Columbia University protests amounted to antisemitic support for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Khalil, who received his master’s degree from Columbia’s school of international affairs last semester, served as a negotiator for students as they bargained with university officials over an end to the tent encampment erected on campus last spring.

The administration’s argument rests on a seldom-invoked legal statute that authorizes the secretary of state to revoke the visa of any noncitizen whose presence in the United States could be considered a threat to the country’s foreign-policy interests.

Hill reported from Albany, New York.