Ruling is seen as a win for Khalil but does not guarantee he will be moved out of the detention facility in the southern state of Louisiana.

A United States federal court judge has ruled in favour of pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, allowing him to challenge the legality of his arrest in New Jersey rather than in Louisiana, where he is being held at a detention facility without charges.

The decision by US District Judge Michael Farbiarz on Tuesday marked the second time the President Donald Trump administration’s legal team was unsuccessful in moving the Columbia University student’s case over to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana – the country’s most conservative appeals court – to get Khalil deported.

Khalil’s lawyer, Baher Azmy, said his team was grateful the court understood the government’s “transparent attempt” to manipulate the jurisdiction of US courts to shield their “unconstitutional” and “chilling” behaviour.

Dr Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s pregnant wife who is a US citizen, said she was relieved by the decision but that “there is still a lot more to be done”, to release Khalil, whose green card was revoked by US authorities.

Although Tuesday’s case was a win for Khalil, it only settled the jurisdictional dispute of which court would be able to hear his attempts to challenge the legality of the Trump administration’s efforts to deport him – a dispute that originated when Khalil was held in a New Jersey detention facility for several hours following his arrest in Manhattan on March 8, before being moved across state lines to Louisiana.

Khalil’s case is seen as a test of Trump’s efforts to deport pro-Palestinian activists who have not been charged with any crime.

The Trump administration said it has revoked the visas of hundreds of foreign students it says took part in demonstrations that swept college campuses across the US, protesting against the government’s military support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Lawyers say the Trump administration has improperly targeted people for holding particular political views.

Khalil’s lawyers have also asked Judge Farbiarz to release their client from detention in Louisiana as efforts to deport him in a separate case before an immigration court play out and, in part, to allow him to be with his wife for the birth of their son.

A doctor’s letter filed in court estimates that the baby is due on April 28.

Critics are trying to reform Louisiana’s eviction process and stop justices of the peace, which handle such cases, from collecting thousands in fees each year, Louisiana Illuminator reports.

State law allows justices of the peace to charge defendants $120 for each eviction case they handle plus another $20 for each additional defendant. To execute the eviction, their courts receive $60 per case and another $20 per defendant. 

Critics allege that some judges are scheduling multiple evictions by the same landlord to be decided in rapid succession. 

The organizations suing Steven Sanders, an East Baton Rouge Parish justice of the peace, say he handles 300 to 400 evictions a week. The seemingly expedited eviction process is at the heart of the lawsuit against Sanders, whose caseload generated nearly $2.7 million in court fee revenue from 2019 to 2023 based on figures from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s office.

Sanders’ total court expenses averaged less than $20,000 annually over that same period, leaving revenue for him to tap into to augment his base salary of around $5,000 a year that the state allocates. 

Sanders’ take-home pay from 2019 to 2023 averaged $232,419 a year, making him the highest-paid justice of the peace in East Baton Rouge Parish, according to reports filed with the office. That places him well ahead of the average salaries for state district court judges ($173,788) and Louisiana Supreme Court justices ($193,227).

“It’s a very, very lucrative business,” says Hannah Adams, a plaintiff’s attorney with the National Housing Law Project. 

The State Attorney General’s office, which represents local justices of the peace in legal matters, declined to comment on the lawsuit. Reached by phone Monday, Sanders said he could not discuss the pending litigation under advisement from the attorney general. 

Read the full story. 

While filming a documentary about oceans on a boat in the Pacific Ocean several years ago, producer and director Steve Cowan encountered a shocking scene. “We were surrounded from horizon to horizon by floating plastic,” Cowan said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” 

Cowan and his colleagues at the nonprofit Habitat Media wondered where all of this plastic was coming from—and why so much of it is manufactured in the United States. With “Single-Use Planet,” their new documentary premiering on PBS in April, they hope to answer those questions. 

The documentary tells the stories of two states with a major stake in the plastics economy: Louisiana and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania segment focuses on Beaver County’s Shell ethane cracker plant, a massive facility for manufacturing plastics that began operations in the fall of 2022. 

Since then, residents living nearby have complained about noise, odors and light pollution, and local activists are concerned that Shell is exacerbating the region’s existing plastic pollution problems. 

In a previous statement to Inside Climate News, a Shell spokesperson said the company was “committed to the health and well-being of its employees and the surrounding community,” and said the company was working to improve so that it “can be the good environmental steward, neighbor, and business partner this region wants and deserves.” Though Shell was lured to Pennsylvania with more than $1.6 billion in tax subsidies, new research shows that the promised economic boom has failed to materialize.

“There are stories of explorers trying to find the headwaters of the Amazon River, and it takes them to the Andes, to these tributaries way up in the steep slopes of those mountains,” Cowan said. “I liken that to what we’ve done with this story. We took it all the way to the headwaters of plastic to answer, where does this stuff come from?” 

Inside Climate News spoke with Cowan about the origins of the project and what he and his team learned about the Shell plant. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

KILEY BENSE: How did you decide to focus on Pennsylvania and Louisiana for this film?

STEVE COWAN: Trying to figure out where all this plastic was coming from, our first stop was the petrochemical facilities, these giant ethane crackers that produce plastic from natural gas and fossil fuels. We talked to people that live nearby in these communities, and a lot of the people aren’t too happy with it. 

In Louisiana, the [companies] site these facilities in areas with marginalized communities, where they don’t expect there’s going to be a lot of complaints and pushback. That was our Louisiana story, and then we went further upstream, because the Mississippi River eventually becomes the Ohio River through Appalachia. We checked out the … Shell ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, and we talked with community members there, many of whom wish that that plant never arrived. 

To feed the plant, they need ethane. It’s an ethane cracker, and that’s natural gas. There’s a lot of fracking that goes on in Pennsylvania and Ohio and West Virginia, and some people aren’t so happy with that either.

BENSE: I think a lot of people don’t realize that plastics manufacturing is fed by fracking wells.

COWAN: We made that connection, and we asked this community, well, how did Shell end up here? If half the people are horrified by it, how did it happen? And they all said, “It was a $1.6 billion subsidy provided by our legislators in our state capital in Harrisburg. They’re the ones that invited … Shell. They’re the ones that championed and enabled the whole thing.” So we went further upstream to Harrisburg and met some of these lawmakers.

In Harrisburg, talking with these legislators, the biggest part of their funding is coming from fossil fuel, natural gas and petrochemical companies, and so they need that money. We tried in the film not to villainize these lawmakers, in part because it takes so much money to get elected, and average citizens don’t have the kind of cash they need to buy all the TV ads and everything they have to do to win a seat in the House or the Senate or the governor’s mansion. 

So they have their go-to sources [of funding]. They don’t even have to go ask for it. The lobbyists are coming in and offering it, and it’s just this low-hanging fruit. Whether it be a subsidy bill or whether it be some kind of law to ease regulations and oversight of the industries, the lobbyists draft the legislation, they take it to the lawmakers and the lawmakers make policy out of them. These are the true headwaters of plastic.

We did meet some lawmakers in Harrisburg that are in the film, like Sen. Katie Muth or Chris Rabb from Philadelphia in the House, and they’re actually more in touch with the realities that a lot of their constituents have to face. They’re in the minority, though. That’s the problem. They vote against this, or they try to get some legislation going to bring in renewables, and they can’t even get the bills out on the floor. They’re powerless because they’re in the minority. 

And the reason they stay in the minority is because this river of money is going to legislators who sign on with fossil fuels and plastic. It’s a worrisome thing, and I don’t see how, especially since the last election, it’s going to end any time soon.

BENSE: What do you hope viewers will take away from “Single-Use Planet”?

COWAN: Change isn’t going to come from the top down. These people that have figured out how to stay in power, they’re not going to sponsor legislation to lessen the impact of industry or to change our electoral system. Change has to come from the bottom up. 

And that’s actually how it happened in France–they have general strikes. They shut the whole economy down. And it’s forced a lot of reforms in France, and I don’t know if that’s what’s coming to the U.S. or not, but I hope that people realize that they need to get more involved. People need to engage these issues, rather than just going about their daily lives and hoping somehow that their elected representatives in Harrisburg or Baton Rouge or Washington, D.C., are going to do anything about this. They’re not.