Since U.S. Citizenship and Immigration officers detained Mohsen Mahdawi last April, the pro-Palestinian activist and graduate student’s status in the country has been uncertain.
But an immigration judge’s ruling this month to block the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mahdawi has given him some optimism.
“The battle from the beginning is about destroying any faith that we have in the Constitution, and destroying our hope…So for an immigration judge to make such a decision and to terminate the case, that is a light of hope,” Mahdawi said in a Thursday interview.
In a ruling made public Tuesday, Judge Nina Froes, based in Chelmsford, Mass., terminated the case against Mahdawi on the basis that government attorneys failed to properly certify an official memo they planned to use as evidence, Associated Press reported.
The judge’s ruling sends the message that the Trump administration’s “tactic to intimidate and to scare people and to basically violate Constitutional rights is not working because judges like Nina Froes have a moral compass and an understanding of the rule of law,” Mahdawi said.
A U.S green card holder who grew up in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and who has lived in the country for over a decade, Mahdawi was detained by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service agents when he arrived for a citizenship interview in Colchester, Vt., last April.
At the time of his arrest he was an undergraduate student at Columbia University, where he had led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus and helped found the school’s Palestinian Student Union.
A federal judge granted Mahdawi’s release from prison after two weeks at Northwest State Correctional Facility in St Albans, Vt.
In the months that followed, the government continued efforts to deport Mahdawi, citing a memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio arguing that noncitizens can be expelled from the country if their presence could undermine U.S foreign policy, Associated Press reported.
While government attorneys submitted a photocopy of Rubio’s memo to Froes, they failed to certify it under federal law.
Last month, a different judge blocked the government’s efforts to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national and Tufts University graduate student, who immigration officials had targeted because of an op-ed she wrote criticizing the school’s response to the war in Gaza.
Mahdawi attributes his case’s dismissal in part to the fact that his legal team was able to keep the case in Vermont and then Massachusetts, where Froes issued the ruling.
After ICE agents apprehended Mahdawi in April, the government attempted to transfer him to a detention center in Louisiana, until U.S District Court Judge William K. Sessions III, who is based in Vermont, issued a temporary restraining order that allowed him to stay in Vermont.
“The outcome in Louisiana would have been very different,” Mahdawi said.
Leqaa Kordia, he pointed out, has been held in an immigration detention center in Texas for almost a year after she was arrested during a protest against the war in Gaza outside Columbia University.
Earlier this month, Kordia, who is originally from the West Bank, was chained to her hospital bed after suffering a seizure, the New York Times reported.
“I could have been in her shoes,” Mahdawi said.
He also expressed gratitude for the communities in the Upper Valley that have rallied around him since his arrest, and who have embraced him long before it.
“The Upper Valley not only has been welcoming, the Upper Valley made me feel at home,” said Mahdawi, who has a residence in White River Junction and a cabin in West Fairlee.
“It has provided me with support that I have not seen anywhere else,” he added.
While the judge’s ruling has provided a glimmer of hope, the Trump administration still has the ability to appeal the decision. At this point, whether they will “remains to be seen,” Tala Alfoqaha, a member of Mahdawi’s legal team, said.
Mahdawi also has an ongoing case in federal district court arguing that he was unlawfully detained.
From the outside, the last 11 months of Mahdawi’s life may look “very difficult,” he said. “But the more I am inside the fire, the more I feel at peace and I have clarity.”
“This is the path that I must walk,” he said. “I’ve been praying all my life to be in service for justice and for peace.”
Now a master’s student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Mahdawi is continuing to speak out against the war in Gaza and give talks on nonviolent action across the country.
“If we don’t acknowledge it as a genocide, then we are not actually acknowledging the reality of it,” he said, pointing to the roughly 70,000 Palestinians who have been killed in the conflict.
“This all was done with American money…with American political coverage…and also with American weapons,” he said.
He plans to return to the Upper Valley in early March to speak during Town Meeting week when Hartford is considering whether to join a pledge that would work to end support of Israel’s apartheid regime.
“I believe that this is a time when the Upper Valley can show up and can show that they are taking peaceful, empathetic, compassionate action,” Mahdawi said.