A federal immigration judge last week ordered Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist arrested in Colchester, Vt., last year, to be removed from the U.S. to Jordan, according to legal filings made public Wednesday.

Mahdawi, a green card holder who lives in the Upper Valley, has already moved to appeal the federal government’s decision, according to a press release from the American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of his legal team.

The ACLU said Mahdawi is protected from being deported, at least for now. That’s because he is still challenging the legality of his April 2025 arrest, which was during an interview he attended as part of the process of seeking U.S. citizenship. That challenge is a separate but related legal proceeding from his appeal of the latest deportation order.

After his arrest, Mahdawi was detained for more than two weeks in a Vermont prison before a U.S. District Court judge in Burlington ordered his release on bail.

The Trump administration has said it targeted Mahdawi over his involvement in pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia’s campus. His case quickly became a high-profile example of the administration’s crackdown on activism by international students critical of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Trump officials have argued that Mahdawi, who’s Palestinian, is a threat to the U.S.’s foreign policy goals in the Middle East.

Even after he was released from custody in 2025, Mahdawi was facing the possibility of being deported. That looked like it could change in February when a federal immigration judge, Nina Froes, dismissed the government’s attempt to deport Mahdawi, on the grounds it had not supported its effort with the proper documentation.

The Trump administration then challenged Judge Froes’ ruling before the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals. In late April, the board decided the government’s deportation proceedings should resume and sent it back to an immigration court for additional review, according to a memo from Mahdawi’s lawyers this week.

About two months after Froes blocked the Trump administration’s effort to deport Mahdawi, the administration terminated her employment. Administration officials denied that the decision was related to her ruling, according to WBUR.

Federal immigration courts are part of the U.S. Department of Justice. That means they’re part of the executive branch, rather than the judicial branch, giving the president’s administration more power over their operations than it has over other federal courts.

Last week, a different federal immigration judge, Angela Munson, ordered that Mahdawi be deported, citing the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision.

In Wednesday’s news release, Mahdawi’s lawyers criticized the latest decision.

“The original immigration judge correctly dismissed Mohsen’s immigration case before she had been fired, and the government cynically appealed the case within the Trump administration-controlled immigration court system knowing that the BIA would reverse,” said Cyrus Mehta, who is part of the student’s legal team.

Mahdawi’s appeal of the recent decision to remove him from the country was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, according to his lawyers’ memo.

“I take this fight to the First Circuit with love and faith — because the First Amendment is sacred, and I refuse to be silenced,” Mahdawi said in the news release.

In addition to the ongoing immigration case, Mahdawi’s legal challenge to his arrest in Colchester — known as a habeas corpus petition — is being litigated in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.