A federal judge has ordered that Mohsen Mahdawi be released from U.S. immigration custody on bail as he challenges the Trump administration’s effort to deport him over his participation in pro-Palestine protests when he was a student at Columbia University last spring. The 34-year-old green card holder was arrested by federal authorities on April 14th when he showed up for an interview for his U.S. citizenship petition.
“Against all of the heinous accusations, horrible attacks, chills of speech, First Amendment violations, he has made a very brave decision to let me out. And this is what justice is,” Mahdawi said outside the courthouse on Wednesday, referring to U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford’s ruling. The former student, who is expected to graduate with a degree in philosophy from Columbia next month, continued by invoking one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous phrases: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had previously justified Mahdawi’s detention by claiming that his “presence and activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest,” citing a Cold-War era statute called the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). This same statute has been used in going after other student activists for Palestine, like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, both of whom remain in detention.
Khalil, Öztürk, and Mahdawi have never been charged with a crime, as the Trump administration is claiming that the INA grants it authority to deport them unilaterally without any due process (i.e. without any possibility to challenge the veracity of its claims or the deportation). The attempts to deport them are part of a larger trend from the Trump administration, as a recent analysis by the Associated Press found that “at least 1,024 students at 160 colleges, universities and university systems have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated since late March.”
Öztürk has been in ICE detention in LaSalle, Louisiana, since March 25th, when federal officers in plainclothes and masks stopped her on the street near Tufts University, where she was a doctoral student in child development and a Fulbright scholar. Khalil is also being held at the same detention facility, after being arrested on March 8th. Both Mahdawi and Khalil are of Palestinian parentage, born in a refugee camp after their families were forced out of their homes in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. They and Öztürk are in the middle of legal proceedings challenging their detainments and deportations.
