AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about one of your clients, the detained Columbia student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who came up in New York City’s mayoral debate last night ahead of a primary election this month. This is one of the leading contenders, State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: He should be set free. He should be at home with his wife Noor and their young child. And the fact that he is still in Louisiana is an abomination. It’s an attack on our First Amendment. And it is clear, another example of Donald Trump weaponizing the very real issue of antisemitism to then throw Palestinian New Yorkers into detention facilities and not even tell us what the crime is that they’re charge with.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who’s currently polling second to former New York [state] Governor Andrew Cuomo, who notably echoed Mamdani and agreed Mahmoud Khalil should be released from detention and, quote, “shouldn’t have been detained in the first place,” unquote. This is a change from Cuomo’s response to Khalil’s detention in March, when he didn’t call for the Trump administration to release him and also criticized what he called the antisemitic agitators at Columbia. Tell us the latest. You represent Mahmoud Khalil. Talk about what’s happening in immigration court in Louisiana and federal court in New Jersey.

BAHER AZMY: Yeah. Thanks, Amy, for bringing this up.

Yeah, Mahmoud Khalil is one of a number of student protesters who were targeted by ICE. And we’re nearing, almost to the day, the three-month anniversary of his arrest and abduction by ICE officers in front of his eight-month — then-eight-month-pregnant wife and spirited off to our immigration gulags in Louisiana, a private detention facility in the middle of Louisiana, five hours from New Orleans and 1,500 miles from his family.

We have a team of lawyers challenging his detention in two forums. In the immigration court, where the Department of Homeland Security is suggesting he is detainable and can be deported because the secretary of state, Rubio, has determined, in an utterly conclusory fashion, that his presence in the United States would be adverse to the foreign policy interests of the United States, and when that charge became vulnerable, they added some pretextual and made-up charges suggesting some misrepresentation on his application. In the immigration court, it appears that the Homeland Security has all but abandoned the claim of misrepresentation, because it’s factually preposterous, and it’s just doubling down on this really chilling Rubio finding that he and other students are deportable just simply on the Dear Leader’s say-so, a kind of Soviet-style diktat.

And so, separately, we are in federal court in New Jersey challenging the legality, that the unconstitutionality of the Rubio determination is a violation of the First Amendment, and because it’s so void — so vague that no — that it violates basic principles of due process. A district court judge last week found that the Rubio determination as applied to Mahmoud is likely unconstitutional. It’s so vague and indecipherable that it, you know, can’t stand constitutional muster, and invited his lawyers to submit evidence on other questions before the court — namely, how is this causing him harm, and what is in the public interest? And last night, we filed an avalanche of evidence on those two points, that we’ll be making public later this afternoon.

AMY GOODMAN: Baher Azmy, we want to thank you for being with us. We’ll cover your 2 p.m. news conference, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which challenged the first Trump travel ban, along with others, part of the legal team representing Columbia student protest leader, still detained, Mahmoud Khalil.

When we come back, the U.S. has once again vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The vote, 14 to 1. We’ll speak to well-known peace activist Kathy Kelly. She’s just entered her third week on hunger strike outside the U.N.

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AMY GOODMAN: “My Blakean Year,” Patti Smith in our Democracy Now! studio.