A lawsuit has been filed against top U.S. administration officials for their coordination with various anti-Palestine vigilante groups—including Canary Mission and Betar USA—to target and prosecute pro-Palestinian activists. It charges the government with violation of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act—so named as it was designed to stop the government from coordinating with the Ku Klux Klan in suppressing the rights of citizens. Named in the lawsuit are Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with the then-DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
The suit was filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday by Mahmoud Khalil, who had been seized without a warrant by plainclothes ICE agents in New York City on March 8, 2025. Rubio declared that Khalil’s pro-Palestinian activism “harmed” U.S. foreign policy. He was kept for 104 days at the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana.
Khalil said, as quoted by the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA), that the lawsuit is “about exposing the network of organizations, political actors, and institutions that work together to criminalize solidarity with Palestine... For decades, the state of Israel and the Zionist organizations in this country that operate on behalf of Israel have understood that their conduct cannot survive honest scrutiny. So rather than defend or change their conduct, they resorted to make scrutiny itself impossible. They brand criticism of a government as hatred of a people. They rebrand documented atrocities as debates.”
