A Cornell University graduate student whose visa was revoked following his involvement in a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its actions against pro-Palestinian student protesters announced Monday that he will be leaving the U.S. voluntarily.
In a post to his X account, Momodou Taal, a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and Gambia, said he made the decision to leave the country “free and with my head held high.”
“Given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,” Taal wrote. “I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted. Weighing up these options, I took the decision to leave on my own terms.”
Taal, 31, said this was not the outcome he wanted after filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration last month along with two U.S. citizens — a Cornell professor and a PhD student — challenging its executive orders to “combat anti-semitism” on college campuses and expel foreign nationals who the administration says pose national security threats.
In the lawsuit, Taal and the other plaintiffs argued that the administration’s sweeping orders “unconstitutionally silenced Plaintiffs and chilled protected expression, prohibiting them from speaking, hearing, or engaging with viewpoints critical of the U.S. government or the government of Israel, under threat of criminal prosecution or deportation.”
The administration has revoked at least 300 student visas of foreign-born people, most of whom were part of the pro-Palestinian movement that swept campuses last year, including Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk. A green card-holder, Mahmoud Khalil, was also detained and has been held in Louisiana since his March 8 arrest.
Taal said he decided to sue the Trump administration hoping that it would protect him and others in similar situations. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the Department of Justice asked Taal to surrender to immigration authorities.
The 31-year-old and his lawyer, Eric Lee, said the administration sent ICE agents to his home, revoked his student visa and took actions to prevent the lawsuit from going to court. According to Lee, unidentified authorities arrived outside Taal’s student apartment building and asked others about him before staff asked them to leave. ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Taal said the first motion of the lawsuit was denied and they were going to submit a second briefing in order to keep him out of detention while the lawsuit was in progress. The lawsuit was dismissed Monday night on behalf of all three plaintiffs following Taal’s announcement, Lee told NBC News.
“This is of course not the outcome I had wanted going into this, but we are facing a government that has no respect for the judiciary or for the rule of the law,” Taal wrote on X.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the suit being dropped and Taal’s statement.
Taal ended his post with a warning that the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists sets a dangerous precedent.
“The repression of Palestinian solidarity is now being used to wage a wholesale attack on any form of expression that challenges oppressive and exploitative relations in the U.S.,” he wrote.
