Mohsen Mahdawi helped to organise demonstrations at Columbia University last year, which the Trump administration claim gave rise to multiple violent and antisemitic incidents
April 15, 2025 16:26
A student activist who helped organise last year’s pro-Palestine demonstrations at Columbia University, has been arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during his citizenship interview.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a co-founder of Columbia's Palestinian Student Society, was a prominent face of the campus protests and gave a CBS interview in December during which he accused Israel of committing a genocide.
Born in a West Bank refugee camp, Mahdawi moved to the US in 2014 and has held legal permanent residency – better known as a green card – since 2015, according to his lawyers. He was attempting to become a US citizen through the naturalisation process, they added.
This allows green card holders of five years or more to apply to be granted citizenship, giving them equal legal status to those born in the US.
However, his lawyers claim that he was detained in Colchester, Vermont on Monday while attending his citizenship interview at an immigration office – one of the final stages of the naturalisation process. His current whereabouts are unknown.
Neither ICE nor the state department has yet commented on the reasons for Mahdawi’s detention, but it follows similar arrests of several other student activists over allegations of antisemitism on picket lines.
They are believed to stem from a pair of executive orders signed by President Trump emphasising the importance of ensuring that non-citizens “do not … advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security” and pledging to “investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities” and “deport Hamas sympathisers and revoke student visas”.
According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, around 300 foreign student visas have since been rescinded in service of those aims.
However, Luna Droubi, who is representing Mahdawi, claimed: “The Trump administration detained Mohsen Mahdawi in direct retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and because of his identity as a Palestinian.
"His detention is an attempt to silence those who speak out against the atrocities in Gaza. It is also unconstitutional.”
Droubi lodged a motion in a Vermont federal court to place a temporary restraining order against Mahdawi’s deportation, which was quickly approved.
The swiftness with which the order could be key following the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador who illegally immigrated to the US as a teen but was granted legal status in 2019. Garcia was living in Maryland with his wife and child, both of whom are American citizens, when he was arrested and deported back to El Salvador.
A similar injunction was issued in his case but he was already on a deportation flight by the time it was approved and the administration now claims the “administrative error” means it is unable to comply with a Supreme Court order to return him.
Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor claimed that this could establish the precedent that the government “could deport and incarcerate any person, including US citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene”.
Elsewhere, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled that the administration can deport Mahmoud Khalil, another green card holder involved in the Columbia protests, under an obscure 1950s national security law on the grounds that his continued presence in the US could hinder its foreign policy objectives of combatting antisemitism.
Khalil is set to appeal the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals and has also filed a separate suit in a New Jersey federal court arguing that his detention and removal are unconstitutional. The latter could see the case appealed to the Supreme Court and delay his deportation by several months.
Neither Garcia, Mahdawi nor Khalil have been charged with any crime and, in the latter two cases, there is no suggestion that they engaged in criminal conduct.