A foreign graduate student and protest leader at Cornell University is suing the Trump administration over its executive order calling to expel pro-Hamas visa holders, arguing that the order has forced him to withdraw from “public engagement” and thus “deprived” his friends “of their rights to listen” to his “ideas and suggestions.” Such suggestions include a call for campus protesters to take their “cue from the armed resistance in Palestine.”
The student, British and Gambian dual national Momodou Taal, is studying at Cornell on an F-1 student visa, his lawsuit states. The administration’s pledge to deport such students who engage in pro-Hamas protests, according to the suit, has left him “in constant fear that he may be arrested by immigration officials or police.” As a result, he has “began withdrawing from broader forms of public engagement” including “academic conferences, public political meetings, off-campus protests, and even less formal political discussions in public places like cafés, sidewalks, restaurants, and other locations.”
Taal would meet frequently with two other plaintiffs on the suit, Cornell professor Mukoma Wa Ngugi and graduate student Sriram Parasurama, at such locations. In the wake of the Trump administration’s executive order, however, the plaintiffs “have ceased interacting with one another in public locations, fearing that their associations may draw scrutiny.” The suit, then, calls on a federal judge to nullify the order for effectively prohibiting Ngugi and Parasurama, both U.S. citizens, “from speaking, hearing, or engaging with viewpoints critical of the U.S. government.”
“Prof. Wa Ngugi and Mr. Parasurama have been deprived of their rights to listen to Mr. Taal’s ideas and suggestions about planning peaceful protests and organizing educational meetings about the rights of the Palestinian people,” the suit states, “as well as his political insights into the historical, political, and sociological roots of what they understand to be a genocide against the people of Palestine.”
“The loss of Mr. Taal’s voice in these spaces has diminished the richness and diversity of political dialogue within the community and has deprived the citizen-Plaintiffs of an important source of intellectual and organizing leadership.”
The suit attempts to use a unique legal argument to halt the administration’s student visa revocation efforts—one that focuses less on the administration’s ability to revoke student visas and more on the purported “chilling effect” the threats to do so have on U.S. citizens. It also downplays Taal’s rhetoric, characterizing the graduate student as a peaceful activist “in support of the Palestinian people,” rather than an advocate for Hamas.
Taal, however, has openly called for the destruction of the United States and Israel, boasting that “anyone the US calls my enemy is my friend.” He celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks with an X post that read, “Glory to the resistance!”
Taal posted similar statements online in 2022 as he applied for his student visa. In one post, he wrote, “The end of the US empire in our lifetime in sha Allah.” Months later, he celebrated receiving his student visa, writing, “Student Visa issued. We going to America baby! Alhamdulillah!” Shortly thereafter, he tweeted, “My hatred of the US empire knows no bound. Wallahi.”
Taal has continued to post anti-American comments from his perch at Cornell. Last summer, he said he would support any group that sought the destruction of the United States.
“When the enemy is US imperialism, then absolutely anyone the US calls an enemy is my friend,” he posted in July. “My hatred for US imperialism and the global system it reproduces knows no bounds. At this point; any movement, nation, people who are working to decrease the impact and effects of US imperialism on the world has my support,” he wrote one month prior.
That includes Hamas. While leading an anti-Israel campus demonstration last year, Taal called on his fellow student protesters to take their “cue from the armed resistance in Palestine.”
“We are in solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine from the river to the sea,” he said. Taal made a similar statement hours after the Oct. 7 attacks, writing, “The dialect demands: That wherever you have oppression, you will find those who are fighting against it. Glory to the resistance!”
In an affidavit filed alongside the lawsuit this week, Taal said that the executive orders have forced him to lock his X account. As of Wednesday morning, however, his account remains public, and he has used it to declare support for Yale Law School scholar Helyeh Doutaghi, a member of the designated terror financier Samidoun.
“Helyeh remains a model for me and so many others,” wrote Taal on Monday.
Taal also expressed support for anti-Israel rioters after they violently occupied the Barnard College library last month, sending at least one campus employee to the hospital.
“Where are the faculty standing with students in the videos emerging from Barnard?” he wrote on Mar. 5.
Taal drew national media attention in October when he was suspended for “escalating, egregious behavior and a disregard for the university policies,” including through an anti-Israel demonstration that shut down a school career fair. Cornell planned to disenroll him, a move that would have brought about his deportation, but the school reversed course after pressure from anti-Israel groups.
“I don’t think they anticipated the level of backlash,” Taal said of Cornell.
