Mohsen K. Mahdawi arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, Vermont, on Monday. A Palestinian student at Columbia University, he hoped that, after 10 years in the U.S., he would pass the test to become a naturalized citizen.
Instead, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him and began the process to deport him to the occupied West Bank. Mahdawi, a leader of the campus protest movement against Israel’s war on Gaza, became yet another green card holder arrested and facing removal.
“Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi said in a statement to The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.”
Mahdawi’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on Monday morning challenging the legality of his detention, alleging the government was violating his statutory and due process rights by punishing him for speech related to Palestine and Israel. The filing said it appears that Mahdawi was facing deportation under the obscure provision used in other recent cases that gives Secretary of State Marco Rubio the right to unilaterally declare immigrants as threats to American foreign policy.
A federal judge signed a temporary restraining order on Monday to keep Mahdawi from being moved out of Vermont while his case is pending.
Mahdawi was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestine student protest movement until spring 2024, when he said he took a step back from the movement to focus on building bridges with Jewish and Israeli communities on campus.
In December 2023, Mahdawi asked Columbia professor Shai Davidai, a controversial pro-Israel figure at the school, to get coffee. The two met, but Mahdawi later said that Davidai left in the middle of the coffee. Less than two months after the meeting, Davidai posted a video of Mahdawi to Twitter in a thread characterizing him and other protest organizers as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. (Davidai did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Since then, Mahdawi became a focus of attacks from a member of Congress and Zionist groups like Canary Mission and Betar.
With Donald Trump’s inauguration, groups like Betar and Canary Mission have been at the center of a push to place scrutiny on foreign students active in campus pro-Palestine movements. At Columbia, one behind-the-scenes push came from a WhatsApp group that included alumni and faculty who organized to get the students deported. Davidai was a member of the group, though there’s no indication he participated in talk of deportation, whether about Mahdawi or other students.
Even before his friend and fellow Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration authorities, Mahdawi asked university administrators to help him find a safe place to live so he would not be taken by ICE agents, according to emails reviewed by The Intercept. The school did nothing in response, Mahdawi said.
After ICE abducted Khalil last month, Mahdawi sheltered in place for more than three weeks for fear of being picked up himself.
Instead of taking him off the street, however, immigration authorities scheduled the citizenship test at the Colchester USCIS office and took Mahdawi into custody when he arrived.
Now, Mahdawi is facing an order to deport him to the occupied West Bank, where escalating attacks from both the Israeli military and Jewish settlers have led to increased casualties among Palestinians.
“It’s kind of a death sentence,” Mahdawi said. “Because my people are being killed unjustly in an indiscriminate way.”
His fears arise from the toll Israel’s attacks and occupation have taken on Mahdawi’s family. Growing up in the West Bank, his community has suffered losses for years. He said he lost his childhood best friend, his uncle, two cousins, several of whom were killed in the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against occupation that lasted from 2000 to 2005.
“I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.”
More recently, he lost two cousins in the growing violence in the occupied Palestinian territories since the October 7 attacks, Mahdawi said. His aunts and uncles’ homes have been destroyed, and his father’s store was blown up as part of the violence in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Now, he is the ninth Columbia student targeted for deportation as hundreds across the country have had their visas revoked under the Trump administration’s sweeps and abductions of immigrants. Mahdawi is one of the few cases of legal permanent residents arrested, meaning he did not have a student visa revoked but is facing an effort by the government to cancel his green card. Other permanent residents have faced deportation over allegations that they violated immigration law or had their residency revoked over pro-Palestinian views.
“This is the outcome,” Mahdawi said. “I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.”
Attacks and Government Scrutiny
In December 2023, Mahdawi appeared in a “60 Minutes” segment focused on antisemitism on college campuses.
Mahdawi criticized how Columbia’s then-President Minouche Shafik had responded to the October 7 attacks, saying that she was ignoring the plight of Palestinians. And, a past leader of Columbia’s Palestinian student union, Mahdawi said pro-Israel factions on campus wanted to silence those protesting genocide.
In the wake of the interview, he became the subject of increasing surveillance and attacks from Zionist groups. He said he also started receiving death threats. Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism, two Zionist groups that have become hubs for doxing and bullying of Palestine solidarity activists, created profiles for him. The profiles claimed that Mahdawi — whose activist work centered on finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts between Israelis, American Jews, and Palestinians — was anti-Israel and pro-Hamas.
By late 2024, Mahdawi was visited at his apartment by an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force official. Mahdawi said he is still unsure of the purpose of the FBI visit. Mahdawi said Columbia refused to provide him with video footage of his apartment complex capturing the visit. (Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Then, in early 2025, Trump formalized his plans to deport pro-Palestine student protesters with an executive order.
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Shortly after, Betar, which said it sent a list of students it wanted deported to the White House, posted about Mahdawi. So did the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at ColumbiaU, which is run by a member of the pro-Israel WhatsApp group that worked to deport students. The group posted multiple times about Mahdawi and other organizers, tagging law enforcement agencies.
Shortly afterward, Mahdawi went into hiding. In response to a final email last month pleading with the school to move him to a safe location, a high-ranking official in the Columbia administration wrote, “The University’s outside counsel will be in touch with your counsel.” Mahdawi’s lawyer said Columbia responded and said they could not give him safe campus housing where he would be better insulated from ICE.
Last month, Betar posted about Mahdawi again. The group said Mahdawi was part of a group of students Betar was confident would “shortly be deported.”
Earlier this month, Mahdawi received an email from USCIS notifying him that he was scheduled to conduct an interview to obtain his U.S. citizenship. He said he was expecting the interview to take place in December or January, in line with the expected timeline to move from his green card status through the naturalization process. When he received the email, however, he was worried it might be a trap.
In anticipation of the worst, Mahdawi contacted his representatives in Congress, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., as well as Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., to make them aware of his situation and ask them to intervene if possible.
Mahdawi said he spoke personally with Welch, who said his office would be on standby pending what happened with Mahdawi’s case. Offices for Sanders and Balint said they would remain on standby pending news of Mahdawi’s status after the interview. (Welch, Sanders, and Balint did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
Mahdawi said the government’s efforts to chill speech went beyond issues related to Israel or Palestine.
“That’s why they’re crushing universities now, it’s not only about Palestine,” Mahdawi said.
As for his hopes of becoming a U.S. citizen one day and continuing his master’s degree studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Mahdawi’s future is unclear.
“People ask me why I would want to become a citizen of a country committing genocide,” Mahdawi said. “I have faith in the people living in this country. The government is not the people.”
Update: April 14, 2025, 5:40 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a filing made by Mohsen Mahdawi’s legal team challenging his detention and a restraining order from a federal judge prohibiting the government from moving him out of Vermont.
