A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday ruled that a federal judge in Vermont should not have ordered the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist, from immigration custody last year.

Mahdawi, a lawful U.S. permanent resident who lives in the Upper Valley, was not immediately expected to be taken into custody again, according to a news release from the American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of his legal team.

But the ruling, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, further ratchets up the Trump administration’s pressure on Mahdawi as the government pushes to deport him over his involvement in campus protests that criticized the U.S. and Israeli military campaign in Gaza. It also marks the second time in as many months that the Trump administration has succeeded, at an appeals court, in challenging a lower court ruling that sided with student activists it has sought to remove from the country.

Mahdawi was held in a Vermont prison for more than two weeks in April 2025 after he was arrested by federal agents in Colchester, Vt. He was attending an interview that was part of the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. Then, U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford ruled from the federal court in Burlington that he should be released on bail while continuing to challenge the legal merits of his detention.

However, Crawford was wrong to intervene in the case at that point and instead should have waited to do so until after Mahdawi’s case was adjudicated by the federal immigration court system, the New York City-based appeals panel said Tuesday.

“We conclude that the district court should not have reached this question,” U.S. Circuit Judge Debra Ann Livingston wrote in the decision.

Immigration courts are separate from the federal judicial system and staffed by employees of the U.S. Department of Justice. Last month, an immigration judge ordered that Mahdawi be deported after a federal immigration appeals panel overturned a previous ruling that he could not be removed from the country. The immigration judge who made the initial ruling in Mahdawi’s favor, Nina Froes, was subsequently fired from her post.

Mahdawi is appealing the latest deportation order, his attorneys said Tuesday.

The two judges joining Livingston in Tuesday’s decision, U.S. Circuit Judges Steven J. Menashi and William J. Nardini, were both appointed to their posts by Trump during the president’s first term. Livingston was appointed by then-President George W. Bush.

In Crawford’s court last year, Mahdawi asked the judge to invalidate a formal finding by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Mahdawi should be removed from the country because he presented a threat to U.S. foreign policy goals in the Middle East.

The Vermont judge found that Mahdawi was likely to succeed in showing that the government had targeted him based on a legally protected activity — free speech — and the judge saw no compelling reason for Mahdawi to remain in custody.

However, the appeals panel ruled Tuesday that federal law bars a district court judge, such as Crawford, from considering questions about the legality of how the federal government enforces its immigration policies so soon after a person is arrested. Congress intended to keep district court and immigration court proceedings separate, the panel said, and any overlap would effectively muddy the immigration court process.

The New York judges also based their decision on a ruling in May by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in which those judges reached a similar conclusion in the case of another pro-Palestinian activist, Mahmoud Khalil, who previously attended Columbia and has a green card like Mahdawi.

Mahdawi’s lawyers pushed back on those findings in a news release Tuesday, saying it leaves activists with little short-term recourse against a zealous federal administration.

“The government is claiming the unprecedented power to detain people for months or even years on end to censor their speech, with no ability to challenge their detention in court,” said Michael Tan, an ACLU lawyer. “This is as absurd as it is dangerous.”

This story was first published by VtDigger and is republished with permission as part of the Vermont Journalism Trust’s Community News Sharing Project.