The Trump administration will argue before a panel of three conservative federal judges Tuesday to put Columbia University graduate student Mohsen Mahdawi back behind bars. One judge has already expressed support for the government’s right to imprison Mahdawi, a Palestinian student protest leader.
“They’re arguing that I should be put in prison just for speaking up against the genocide of my people,” Mahdawi told The Intercept.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took Mahdawi away in handcuffs in April after he arrived at what he thought was his naturalization interview to become a U.S. citizen, as The Intercept first reported. Since a federal judge ordered Mahdawi’s release on bail in May, the Trump administration has been working to re-imprison him and remove him from the country.
Speaking to The Intercept, Mahdawi connected his case to President Donald Trump’s larger project to crush his political opponents. Trump has deployed the National Guard to cities he perceives as strongholds for his rivals, Mahdawi noted, while facilitating Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and backing plans to take over Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
“There is a very clear connection that I see between what is happening in America and what’s happening in Israel. Both of them don’t want democracy,” Mahdawi said. “They want strength and domination and control.”
On Tuesday, attorneys for the U.S. government will argue in federal appeals court to overturn Mahdawi’s release on the grounds that the federal court that freed him was operating outside of its jurisdiction. All three judges on the panel were appointed by Republican presidents: two Trump appointees, William J. Nardini and Steven J. Menashi, and a George W. Bush appointee, Debra Ann Livingston. Menashi has already argued that it was not within the court’s jurisdiction to question the government’s detention of Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk, another student ICE abducted earlier this year.
The U.S. and Israel “want strength and domination and control.”
The case carries significant weight not only for Mahdawi’s future, but also for broader free speech protections under the Trump administration’s attacks. It will center on whether a district court judge had jurisdiction to hear the case challenging Mahdawi’s detention — a detail that, while technical, could restrict judges’ abilities to review unlawful detention in cases like Mahdawi’s if the panel rules in the government’s favor.
“The government has made the same argument of every one of the cases, this jurisdiction argument,” said Luna Droubi, an attorney on Mahdawi’s team, referring to ongoing cases involving other pro-Palestine students.
Separately, Mahdawi’s legal team is working on his pending immigration case — contending with another government system Trump has been using to crack down on his critics. No hearing date has been set.
“There Is No Protection Whatsoever”
Mahdawi returned to Columbia University this month, stepping back onto the campus where he first became a target of the Trump administration’s sweeping attacks on pro-Palestine students.
Now working on his master’s in peacemaking and conflict resolution at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Mahdawi criticized his school for capitulating to the Trump administration’s demands to overhaul its curriculum and policies related to diversity, speech, and protest activity on campus.
“Columbia is one of the largest [schools] that have the ability and the power to fight back,” Mahdawi said. “And it has decided willingly, without showing any level of resistance, to capitulate and to give the Trump’s administration what they wanted.”
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In July, Trump applauded Columbia for agreeing to pay a $200 million settlement to his administration over allegations that the school failed to protect the civil rights of Jewish students after the October 7 attacks. Trump said Columbia had committed to ending what he called its “ridiculous” diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and “protecting the Civil Liberties of their students on campus.”
Amid Trump’s attacks across higher education, Columbia has agreed to change its disciplinary process, its diversity and equity policies, and to review all of its programming related to Middle Eastern studies. Still, Acting President Claire Shipman said publicly in late July that the school “retains control” over its academic and institutional decisions.
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Mahdawi said Columbia administrators betrayed him before he was taken by ICE, and he’s worried it will happen again. He said he hasn’t received contact from any officials in the university administration since he was detained, nor since his release — even as he faces ongoing legal battles that could affect his studies and determine whether he is deported to the West Bank, where he grew up in a refugee camp.
A Columbia spokesperson said they thought senior administrators had been in touch with Mahdawi, but did not provide more information.
Before his ICE interview in April, Mahdawi told The Intercept that he pleaded with Columbia to give him safe harbor on campus as he feared being abducted after watching what happened to his colleague, Mahmoud Khalil.
“They ignored me,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “To this moment, none of the officials have reached out to me.”
“That the government wielded its authority on private institutions is so devastating.”
Droubi, Mahdawi’s attorney, said that “cowardice” was leading universities to perpetuate the Trump administration’s authoritarianism: “That the government wielded its authority on private institutions is so devastating to us all. We should all be horrified that academia is being stifled in this way.”
Mahdawi said Trump is attacking universities because they’re often the birthplace of critical thinking, mobilization, and mass consciousness. The federal government has tried to paint Mahdawi as antisemitic and violent, but his colleagues have described him as a peacebuilder and someone willing to work across ideological lines.
“I don’t know when the moment might come that Columbia would compromise my safety and what kind of deal that they have made with the Trump administration that would actually hand me over again on a plate of gold,” he said. “There’s no protection whatsoever.”
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Mahdawi and another one of his attorneys, Cyrus Mehta, both also pointed out that right-wing Zionist groups like Betar and Canary Mission had worked to bring him into the government’s crosshairs.
“When Betar put it on Twitter, it seemed to follow, like ICE then picked him up,” Mehta said, referring to one of several posts in the months leading up to Mahdawi’s arrest. “We’ve seen that with others also, when they’ve been targeted by Betar, then ICE has followed up.”
“The whole campaign of my detention did not come out of nowhere,” Mahdawi said. “It came from pro-Israel groups that highlighted my profile and attacked me and encouraged the U.S. government to come and pick me up.”
The post Mohsen Mahdawi Faces Conservative Judges as Trump Administration Tries to Lock Him Back Up appeared first on The Intercept.
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