Says authorities did not meet the burden of proof, resists broader crackdown on non-citizen student protesters
Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi poses for a portrait on the Columbia University campus in New York City, New York, U.S., May 18, 2025. PHOTO: REUTERS
A US immigration judge has rejected efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to deport Mohsen Mahdawi, a student at Columbia University who was arrested last year after taking part in pro-Palestinian protests.
Lawyers for Mahdawi detailed the immigration judge’s decision in a court filing on Tuesday with a federal appeals court in New York, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to his release from immigration custody in April.
It was the latest case in which an immigration judge rejected proceedings brought as part of the broader effort by Trump’s administration to detain and deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views who engaged in campus activism.
Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based Immigration Judge Nina Froes wrote in a decision on Friday that the US Department of Homeland Security failed to meet its burden of proving he was removable, which it sought to do using an unauthenticated document signed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“This decision is an important step towards upholding what fear tried to destroy: the right to speak for peace and justice,” Mahdawi said in a statement.
The administration has the option of challenging the judge’s decision before the Board of Immigration Appeals, part of the US Department of Justice.
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A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, in a statement, called the judge an “activist” and said it was a “privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live and study in the United States of America”, one that could be revoked.
Mahdawi, born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, was arrested in April 2025 upon arriving for an interview for his US citizenship petition. A judge swiftly ordered Trump’s administration not to deport him from the US or remove him from the state of Vermont.
After two weeks in detention, Mahdawi walked out of the federal courthouse in Burlington, Vermont, after US District Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered his release.
In another case, an immigration judge on 29 January terminated removal proceedings that the administration initiated against Rumeysa Ozturk, a PhD student at Tufts University who was targeted after co-authoring an editorial that criticised her university’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Last month, a federal judge in Boston ruled that the administration had adopted an unlawful policy of detaining and deporting scholars such as Ozturk and Mahdawi, which chilled the free speech of non-citizen academics at universities. The Justice Department is appealing that decision.
