The federal government and a Columbia University student threatened with deportation for his leading role in campus protests against Israel have been sparring in court over the Trump administration’s move to ship him across the country to an immigration lockup in Louisiana.

The government said he could not be detained at an immigration facility near where he was originally arrested in part because of a bedbug infestation, so it sent him to Louisiana. The student, Mahmoud Khalil, says there was no such discussion of bedbugs and he feared he was being immediately deported.

Khalil was detained for deportation due to support for the Hamas terrorist group. He “was given the privilege of coming to this country to study at one of our nation’s finest universities and colleges and he took advantage of that opportunity by siding with terrorists, Hamas terrorists,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this month. He “organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers,” Leavitt said. Khalil attended a recent protest at Barnard College, a Columbia affiliate, during which activists handed out pamphlets from the “Hamas media office.”

Khalil said in a declaration filed in Manhattan federal court Monday that while he was being held overnight at a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, “I........

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