Mahmoud Khalil was denied release on Friday by a judge who, earlier in the week, had rejected the Trump administration’s main legal basis for seeking to deport and detain the pro-Palestinian activist.

Khalil has been detained since he was arrested in March. The government has argued that the secretary of state can “personally determine” whether he should remain in the country.

A federal judge ruled this week that the government could not continue to hold the Columbia University graduate under the rarely invoked law it originally used to detain him.