Diyar Guldogan and Rabia Iclal Turan
30 April 2025•Update: 30 April 2025
WASHINGTON
A Palestinian student from Columbia University who was arrested during a citizenship interview, was released after an order by a US district judge in the state of Vermont, his legal team said Wednesday.
US District Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered Mohsen Mahdawi’s release on bail, pending the outcome of his habeas petition, the ACLU said in a statement.
“The court’s order to free Mohsen today is a victory for Mohsen, in his just pursuit of continued advocacy for Palestinian lives, and it is a victory for all people in this country invested in their ability to dissent and speak and protest for causes they are morally drawn to,” Shezza Abboushi Dallal, staff attorney with CLEAR, a legal aid group at CUNY School of Law, said in a statement.
“Mohsen has committed no crime, and the government’s only supposed justification for holding him in prison is the content of his speech. We are proud to be on his legal team and we won’t stop fighting for Mohsen’s freedom,” Lia Ernst, legal director at the ACLU of Vermont, said in a statement.
“I am saying it clear and loud,” Mahdawi said outside the federal courthouse after his release, according to the Politico news website. “To President Trump and his Cabinet: I am not afraid of you.”
Mahdawi, who led a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University and has lived in the US for more than a decade, was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents April 14.
His lawyer, Luna Droubi, previously said authorities had no legal basis for his detention, stressing that it is a "disgrace to the US Constitution."
A group of Democratic lawmakers gathered outside the US State Department late Tuesday to demand Mahdawi’s release, warning that his case is part of a broader pattern under the Trump administration of targeting students, immigrants and activists without due process, including Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate from Palestinian, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University. Both are detained in the state of Louisiana.
It is part of a slew of executive actions by President Donald Trump to deport foreign nationals deemed to have "hostile attitudes" toward the US, including a crackdown on what he called antisemitism, which resulted in the deportation of foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests.
