ABC News host Sunny Hostin argued on “The View” that anti-Israel agitator Mahmoud Khalil should have the same rights and protections as an American citizen, referring to him as a “political prisoner” and suggesting that President Donald Trump was trying to have him “disappeared.”
Hostin addressed the issue during Monday’s broadcast of the midday talk show, where she claimed that Khalil’s status as a Green Card-holder afforded him the same rights any citizen would have and complained that the Trump administration — and the U.S. State Department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio — was overstepping in efforts to strip him of his immigration status and deport him.
WATCH:
The View’s Sunny Hostin defends Hamas sympathizer Mahmoud Khalil, calls him a “political prisoner.”
REMINDER: Khalil is behind the violent Columbia University Apartheid Divest riots in New York City. pic.twitter.com/qCJzdO3V6Z
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 24, 2025
“I love how you started this, Whoopi [Goldberg], because you started it with the law, with Tom Homan saying Americans, once you are here, especially if you have a Green Card, you are a permanent legal resident of the United States,” Hostin began. “Which means that you have the constitutional protections that every American citizen has — and that includes free speech, and it certainly includes due process from being disappeared.”
“And so I want to point out that on March 8th, a legal permanent resident who has a Green Card, his name’s Mahmoud Khalil, was taken from Columbia University housing,” Hostin continued. “His pregnant wife is due next month. Plain-clothed men in New York grabbed him into an unmarked car, then moved him to Jersey, which is something that is done in authoritarian governments, and moved him to Louisiana, which is one of the worst detention centers that we know of in this country.”
“He has said — there’s a letter that everyone I hope reads — calls himself a political prisoner. I believe that he is,” she said. “He wrote on March 18th, 2025, and what is so shocking to me is that this could happen to someone who is a permanent legal resident with a Green Card, with an American wife about to have an American child being disappeared because of — because he spoke out. Because he has his freedom of speech and because he basically spoke out and gave an opinion that now the State Department is saying is against our foreign policy.”
Hostin left out the reason Secretary Rubio had determined Khalil’s “opinion” ran counter to U.S. foreign policy — the fact that Khalil was affiliated with a group that rallied behind the mission of dismantling the whole of western civilization and had actively fomented anti-Israel protests that resulted in vandalism, violence, and threats against Jewish students and professors.
The ABC personality also left out the most recent updates on Khalil — specifically, the fact that when Khalil applied to change his immigration status and obtain his Green Card, he allegedly left out relevant information regarding his affiliation with several groups that would most likely have raised red flags.
Among those groups was the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, known as UNRWA, which had members who participated alongside Hamas terrorists in the atrocities that took place on October 7, 2023. According to the New York Post, Khalil worked with UNRWA as a political affairs officer as recently as 2023. Khalil was also reportedly working for the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon — another association allegedly left off his application — at the time he applied to change his immigration status. Additionally, the State Department has alleged Khalil never revealed ties to the anti-Israel group that disrupted things at Columbia University over the last year: Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
Rubio laid out the State Department’s case shortly after Khalil was taken into custody, saying that if Khalil had revealed his plans to engage in such activities on his visa application, it would have been denied — and by that logic, Rubio declared that it could be revoked for the same reason.
