ICE officials detained a Columbia University graduate student who led a coalition of anti-Israel groups and endorsed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack.
Mohsen Mahdawi had his green card revoked by the Trump administration and was taken into custody on Monday in Burlington, Vt., where he was scheduled to take a citizenship test. Mahdawi’s attorney told the Intercept that Mahdawi was detained for his “Palestinian identity” and that he had come “to this country hoping to be free to speak about the atrocities he has witnessed.”
A public ICE database on Monday afternoon listed Mahdawi, who was born in Jordan, as being in custody.
But Mahdawi, a graduate philosophy student in Columbia’s School of General Studies, has also said he “can empathize” with Hamas over the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 slaughter and has publicly called for the destruction of Israel. Last year, he honored a commander in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a U.S.-designated terror group that participated in the attack alongside Hamas.
Most recently, Mahdawi served as co-president of Columbia’s Palestinian Students Union, a coalition of anti-Israel student groups, including Columbia’s suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters. The union has organized protests calling for Columbia’s divestment from Israel alongside Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the student organization behind the illegal encampments that plagued the school last spring and led to the violent storming of a campus building, Hamilton Hall.
Mahdawi’s detention is the Trump administration’s latest move in its effort to deport pro-Hamas green card and visa holders, fulfilling one of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises. Mahdawi joins two other Columbia students who have faced removal proceedings. On Friday, a federal immigration judge ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, a fellow protest leader and encampment negotiator who has been detained since March 9, can be deported. Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia activist, chose to self-deport after the Trump administration pulled her student visa.
Mahdawi is facing a deportation order that would send him to the West Bank, which he called a “kind of death sentence.” Columbia declined to comment on Mahdawi’s arrest.
“I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system,” he told the Intercept on Monday.
Mahdawi has long espoused his hatred for Israel. He has said in media interviews that he “grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp” and has served as a leader in anti-Israel campus groups since first moving to the United States more than a decade ago. In another interview, he recalled throwing rocks at an Israeli military tank when he was a child.
“Hamas is a product of the Israeli occupation,” he told a New England newspaper two weeks after the terror attack. Mahdawi, according to the newspaper, also helped pen an Oct. 14, 2023, statement issued by anti-Israel groups at Columbia that said the “Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land.”
“If every political avenue available to Palestinians is blocked, we should not be surprised when resistance and violence breaks out,” the statement read.
Later in December, during a 60 Minutes interview, Mahdawi said he empathizes with Hamas and argued that the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack, which killed nearly 1,200 Israelis, should not be looked at in a vacuum.
“I did not say that I justify what Hamas has done. I said I can empathize. To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum. This is for me that path moving forward,” he said.
In August, Mahdawi posted pictures to his Instagram account honoring the “martyrdom” of his “cousin,” Maysara Masharqa, who served as a prominent field commander in the military wing of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Mahdawi praised Masharqa as a “fierce resistance fighter” who had been fighting since he was 17, adding that he spent seven years in an Israeli prison.
“Here is Mesra who offers his soul as a sacrifice for the homeland and for the blood of the martyrs as a gift for the victory of Gaza and in defense of the dignity of his homeland and his people against the vicious Israeli occupation in the West Bank,” Mahdawi wrote in the post.
Months earlier, at a Jan. 24, 2024, campus protest, Mahdawi told a crowd of students that “there’s nothing, nothing more honorable than dying for a noble cause.”
In addition to serving as the co-president of Columbia’s Palestinian Student Union, Mahdawi is also a Visionary Advisor for the Columbia Buddhist Association and a member of Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.
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