A radical pro-Hamas student at Cornell University has opted to leave the United States after his lawsuit against the Trump administration did not go the way he’d hoped.
On March 14, the State Department reportedly revoked the student visa of Momodou Taal, a 31-year-old British and Gambian citizen studying Africana Studies at Cornell, and ordered him to report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as Blaze News previously reported.
‘I have lost faith that … the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs.’
The next day, Taal and two other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and Secretary Kristi Noem. The lawsuit asked U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Coombe to review two Trump executive orders targeting foreigners living in the U.S. who “bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles” and who engaged in “anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses.”
Taal and his fellow plaintiffs argued that these executive orders violated constitutional protections regarding free speech. Taal hoped Coombe would halt enforcement of the executive orders and intervene in his particular immigration case.
Judge Coombe, a Biden appointee, denied both of those requests last Thursday.
Rather than continuing to fight, Taal elected to show himself out of the country. “Today I took the decision to leave the United States, free and with my head held high,” he wrote in a message posted to social media on Monday.
In his statement, he also railed against the government of the country where he tried to stay. “Trump did not want me to have my day in court,” he claimed.
“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 continued. “I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted.”
Then, after slamming the American judiciary for failing to provide him the reassurances he wanted, Taal further warned: “We are facing a government that has no respect for the judiciary or for the rule of the law.”
‘We are in solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine from the river to the sea.’
Considering the accusations that Cornell officials have leveled against him, Taal may be the one out of step with the rule of law in America. According to a letter issued by the university last April, the foreign radical repeatedly engaged in disorderly conduct, disrupted university activities, ignored university officials’ lawful directives, and made unauthorized entry to various private spaces at Cornell.
Roy Stanley, the unit chief of the Counterterrorism Intelligence Unit at ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations’ Office of Intelligence, also said in a sworn statement that Taal faced multiple suspensions from Cornell “due to his disorderly behavior and long-term pattern of disregarding the rights of other students and the general public and was in fact banned from campus for a period of time while one suspension was being reviewed.”
Following the horrendous terror attacks on innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, Taal made a string of statements to show his support for Hamas and the Palestinian cause.
“Glory to the Resistance,” he posted to social media. He also added that “colonised peoples have the right to resist by any means necessary.”
“We are in solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine from the river to the sea,” he told the Cornell Daily Sun.
Then, when others simply asked him to condemn the terrorist tactics of Hamas, he cried racism. “I think it’s quite racist, Islamophobic that before I’m allowed to have a view on genocide, I have to condemn a terrorist organization,” he said at the time, though he did condemn “the killing of all civilians no matter where they are and who does it.”
While Eric Lee, Taal’s attorney, did not respond to a request for comment from CNN regarding Taal’s self-deportation, he did post a message on social media decrying America — but then strangely suggested he has since put Taal’s case behind him.
“I feel like a stranger in my country. What is America if people like Momodou are not welcome here?” Lee wrote. “Onward to the next fight.”
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Hamas, Terrorism, Palestine, Momodou taal, Cornell university, Donald trump, Self-deport, Politics