Columbia Pro-Palestinian Protest Leader Seeking Citizenship Detained by ICE

The detention of Mohsen Mahdawi comes several weeks after the detention of fellow Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was an associate of Mahdawi.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian man who led protests against the war in Gaza as a student at Columbia University, is detained at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, Vt., on April 14, 2025. Christopher Helali via AP

Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on April 14 during a naturalization interview in Vermont.

The move comes weeks after the detention of Mahdawi’s Columbia associate, Mahmound Khalil, as the Trump administration continues to target non-citizen students in a crackdown on alleged support for Hamas during university protests in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by the terrorist group on Israel.

In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that allows non-citizen students to be deported for expressing views aligned with Hamas and accused protesters of anti-Semitic activities on campuses.

Mahdawi’s attorneys issued a habeas corpus petition the same day as his detention, April 14. It alleges his detention violates the First and Fifth Amendments, saying the student’s “speech regarding Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, human rights, international law, obligations arising from international law, and related matters is speech protected by the First Amendment.”

“Mr. Mahdawi is fearful that, if he loses his lawful permanent resident status and he is removed to the West Bank, he will experience the same harassment, detention, and torture that his family has experienced, and would be in even more danger in light of the campaigns that have targeted and spread lies about him,” the petition states.

Within hours, a Vermont district court judge, William K. Sessions III, blocked the student’s immediate deportation.

Mahdawi was a legal permanent resident of the United States.

According to the filing, Mahdawi was born in a refugee camp in the West Bank and co-founded a Palestinian student group, Dar, at Columbia with Khalil.

Last week, an immigration judge ruled that the Trump administration could deport Khalil after the government argued his presence in the United States had “potentially serious foreign policy consequences.” Khalil’s team said they would appeal that decision.

After Khalil’s detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: “This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with.

“I think being a supporter of Hamas and coming into our universities and turning them upside down and being complicit in what are clearly crimes of vandalization, complicit in shutting down learning institutions ... if you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in,” the secretary of state added.

In the weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, Mahdawi’s student organization joined with the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition.

CUAD’s goals have included “the total eradication of Western civilization” in an Instagram post that states, “Our intifada is an internationalist one.”

In response to the July Revolution in Bangladesh, which led to the overthrow of the prime minister, CUAD’s Instagram account lauded a statement that appeared to endorse the actions taken by Hamas on Oct. 7. Attackers killed roughly 1,200 people, mostly civilian Israelis, and kidnapped more than 250.

The statement, attributed to the People of Hind’s Hall, reads: “Just as the Palestinian resistance escalated the intifada on October 7th, it is now the people of Bangladesh who are escalating the global battle for liberation.”

The filing from Mahdawi’s attorney describes him as a Buddhist who “believes in non-violence and empathy as a central tenet of his religion.” It also claims that he spoke out against anti-Semitism during a protest.

A complaint against Columbia from Stop Antisemitism and other plaintiffs in February 2024 names Mahdawi. It alleges that he “yelled, ‘back’ and ‘shame’ into a megaphone while instructing other students to physically push a small group of pro-Israel students back as the protestors conducted a ‘die-in’ and shouted, ‘from the River to the Sea.’”

It also alleges Mahdawi “encroached on and shouted through a megaphone at Jews and other Israel supporters.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), the Vermont delegation, condemned the government’s action, writing in a statement that Mahdawi “must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to ICE for comment.