A civil rights lawsuit filed on Tuesday accuses White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller of orchestrating a deportation conspiracy with a group its own spokesperson allegedly called "a vigilante force."
The suit was filed in federal court in New York under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 — a Reconstruction-era law designed to give federal courts power over conspiracies to strip people of their constitutional rights through terror and intimidation.
The plaintiff is Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian permanent resident and former Columbia University student.
He was arrested by plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in March 2025 and held for 104 days in a Louisiana detention facility more than 1,300 miles from his pregnant wife.
The defendants include Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and a constellation of private organizations — among them Betar, a nationalist group the lawsuit says bragged about running "a vigilante force."
In January 2025, according to the court filing, a representative of the Betar "vigilante" group admitted to communications directly with Miller and Rubio to hand over a pre-selected list of Palestinian activists it wanted the Trump administration to arrest and deport.
The day after Khalil's March 2025 arrest, Betar posted on X to boast about its role in the arrest.
"As we said 5 weeks ago, Khalil is on our deport list... We have provided information on many others who will shortly as well be detained and deported," the post stated, according to the filing.
That same day, Miller warned on X that those "who sympathize with terrorism are unwelcome on our shores" and "will be denied entry or sent home."
The suit also names Victoria Coates, a Heritage Foundation official who co-authored "Project Esther" — the blueprint the complaint says Miller helped develop for the deportation campaign.
The filing quotes her book, published the year before the arrests began, as saying Palestinians' "default mechanism is sadistic savagery."
The filing alleges Miller worked collectively with Coates to build that blueprint, shared her anti-Palestinian views, and was "public about his work with the Heritage Foundation" before returning to the White House.
In an April 2025 Fox News interview, Miller was asked directly whether Khalil would be deported.
"Yes, he will," Miller said. "As will anyone who preaches hate for America."
A federal judge in a related Massachusetts case had already described the broader operation in starker terms — agents "snatching" people off the street using tactics "akin to the despised Ku Klux Klan," designed to "terrorize Americans into quiescence."