Mohsen Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, has lived in the United States for 10 years and was arrested in Vermont. He has not been charged with a crime.
By Sharon Otterman and Ana Ley
Mohsen Mahdawi, an organizer of pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year at Columbia University, was detained by immigration officials on Monday after arriving for an appointment in Vermont that he thought was a step toward becoming a U.S. citizen, his lawyers said.
Hours later, Mr. Mahdawi’s mother, older sister and lawyers were scrambling to find him after his abrupt detention at an immigration center in Colchester, Vt. His lawyers requested a temporary restraining order to prevent federal officials from transferring him to a more conservative jurisdiction — a tactic used in the detention and attempted deportation of at least four other college demonstrators.
A Vermont federal judge, William K. Sessions III, swiftly granted that request, ordering that Mr. Mahdawi, an outspoken critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, not be removed from the United States or transferred out of Vermont until he orders otherwise.
His lawyers said that as of Monday afternoon, they had confirmed that he was still in Vermont.
“This is their M.O.,” Mr. Mahdawi’s lawyer, Luna Droubi, said. “They just continue to hide the individual to the point where their attorneys can’t quite understand or identify where to file. And so, you know, we’re operating blind, and they have all the information, and yet we’re tasked with attempting to file in the right jurisdiction.”
A green card holder for the past 10 years, Mr. Mahdawi is the latest Palestinian student to be caught in the Trump administration’s dragnet that has been targeting foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian organizing on U.S. college campuses.
Mr. Mahdawi was born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, where he lived until he moved to the United States in 2014, according to a petition filed by his lawyers on Monday demanding his immediate release. His arrest was first reported by The Intercept.
He is finishing his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Columbia’s School of General Studies and was planning to enroll as a master’s degree student at its international affairs school in the fall. Representatives for Columbia declined to comment, citing federal
student privacy regulations.
Mr. Mahdawi has not been accused of a crime. According to his lawyers, the Trump administration appears to be seeking his removal from the country under the same legal provision that it is using to detain another recent Columbia student and Palestinian,
Mahmoud Khalil, contending that his presence is a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.
Immigration officials have argued that pro-Palestinian demonstrators have enabled the spread of antisemitism, but they have not offered evidence to substantiate the claim.
After the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Mr. Mahdawi, who is in his mid-30s, co-founded Dar: the Palestinian Student Society at Columbia University with Mr. Khalil, to “celebrate Palestinian culture, history and identity,” according to his lawyers’ petition. He also helped found Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a broader coalition that went on to lead many pro- Palestinian demonstrations on campus, pushing the university to
divest from Israel.
But Mr. Mahdawi took a step back from student organizing in March 2024, before the establishment of encampments on campus and the takeover of a campus building, Hamilton Hall.
In interviews at the time, he said this was driven in part by his immigration status and his beliefs as a practicing Buddhist. For two years, he was the president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association. He spoke publicly about his experience as a child seeing his best friend killed by an Israeli soldier, mentioning it during a “60 Minutes” interview in December 2023.
But he also said he wanted a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “My motivation comes out of love now, not out of anger, not out of hate,” he said in an interview.
As with Mr. Khalil, several hard-line pro-Israel groups have been agitating online for Mr. Mahdawi’s detention and deportation since President Trump’s return to the White House.
Betar USA, one of those groups, posted on X on Jan. 30 that “visa holder Mohsen Mahdawi is on our deport list.” In March, they repeated that, posting “Mohsen Mahdawi is next and also on the deport list.”
He was also profiled by Canary Mission, another group naming students and calling for action to be taken against those they assert are pro-Hamas.
On Monday morning, Mr. Mahdawi turned up for an interview he had been told was related to his naturalization. Instead, immigration officers, some with their faces covered, placed Mr. Mahdawi in handcuffs and arrested him, according to a statement Monday from Vermont’s two senators, Bernie Sanders, an Independent, and Peter Welch, a Democrat, and Representative Becca Balint, a Democrat.
Mr. Mahdawi, whose permanent address is in White River Junction, Vt., had sought help from the lawmakers before his appointment, fearing the worst. They denounced his arrest and demanded his release.
“This is immoral, inhumane, and illegal,” the three lawmakers said in a statement. “Mr. Mahdawi, a legal resident of the United States, must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.”
Mr. Mahdawi’s friend Mikey Baratz described him as deeply empathetic and said that, at his core, Mr. Mahdawi believed that all humans deserved to be treated with dignity. Mr. Mahdawi reached out to Mr. Baratz about six months ago because he wanted to meet Israeli students at Columbia — Mr. Baratz is Jewish and was born and raised in Israel until he left at the age of 12.
They would spend hours talking about their lives and found surprising common ground. Mr. Baratz, who graduated from Columbia in December with a master’s degree in international
security policy, recently applied for a job at The New York Times. “This is a Palestinian. I’m an Israeli. Our people are at war,” Mr. Baratz, 31, said. “And his willingness to actually hear and actively learn and understand the Israeli experience — I mean, I’ve never met anyone who so quickly was willing to take feedback.”
Culled from The New York Times
