Student Who Helped Lead Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Protests Arrested in Vermont at Citizenship Interview

By Paul Heintz Globe Correspondent

April 15, 2025, 9:28 a.m.

Federal authorities on Monday detained a Palestinian student activist in Vermont after he was summoned for a citizenship interview with immigration officials, according to his attorneys and the state’s congressional delegation.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student who was active in protests there and who lives in Vermont, has been a legal permanent resident of the United States for the past decade, his attorneys wrote in a court filing Monday. But after he appeared at a US Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, he was detained and transferred to federal custody.

Video captured by a friend, Christopher Helali, shows officers leading Mahdawi from the building in handcuffs and escorting him to one of several unmarked vehicles. In the video, he appears to smile and make two peace signs with his cuffed hands. Some of the officers are hooded and in plain clothes; one wears a jacket with the acronym for Homeland Security Investigations.

“He knew this was a possibility, but he handled it very gracefully,” Helali said.

Mahdawi is the latest in a series of pro-Palestinian student activists to be detained by federal authorities in recent weeks — including Mahmoud Khalil, a fellow Columbia student, and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk. The Trump administration has claimed broad powers to deport students it believes have expressed anti-Israel viewpoints.

Soon after his detention, Mahdawi’s attorneys filed a petition seeking his immediate release and calling on a federal judge to keep him in Vermont. The filing said it appeared he had been detained under the same rarely used legal doctrine as had the other pro-Palestinian protesters.

Mahdawi’s precise whereabouts after the arrest were not immediately clear, but a federal database indicated that he was in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of his attorneys, Luna Droubi, told the Globe that he was being held in Vermont.

A federal judge, William K. Sessions III of the District of Vermont, issued a brief order Monday afternoon agreeing with Mahdawi’s attorneys’ request that he be kept in the state until further notice.

In a statement to the Globe, Droubi decried her client’s detention, describing it as politically motivated.

“The Trump administration detained Mohsen Mahdawi in direct retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and because of his identity as a Palestinian,” she said. “His detention is an attempt to silence those who speak out against the atrocities in Gaza. It is also unconstitutional.”

Another member of Mahdawi’s legal team, New York attorney David A. Isaacson, said his client’s “detention is illegal for a number of reasons.” He added that a federal judge has ordered the government to keep Mahdawi in Vermont, and “if they fail to do that, that would be a serious problem.”

Vermont’s congressional delegation also unanimously criticized the Trump administration’s actions.

“This is immoral, inhumane, and illegal,” wrote Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch and Representative Becca Balint in a statement Monday afternoon. “Mr. Mahdawi, a legal resident of the United States, must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.”

Born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, Mahdawi moved to the United States in 2014, according to his attorneys. He was set to graduate from Columbia this spring and return as a graduate student in the fall. A practicing Buddhist, he was a cofounder of the Palestinian Student Union at Columbia, along with Khalil, and had protested the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. In a December 2023 “60 Minutes” interview, Mahdawi related how, as a child, he saw his best friend killed by an Israeli soldier.

But he stepped back from student activism in March 2024, according to his attorneys.

Mahdawi lives in the Upper Valley region of Vermont and owns a cabin in West Fairlee, according to Helali, an Iranian-American who lives in nearby Vershire and had bonded with Mahdawi over the years over shared cultural and political affiliations.

Friends said Monday that Mahdawi had contacted them in recent weeks to inform them that he’d been summoned for the citizenship interview. He feared it was a ruse.

“I agreed with him that he would be ambushed and abducted and arrested at that point,” said Helali, a law school student. “That was the real fear.”

State Senator Becca White, a Democrat from nearby White River Junction and a friend of Mahdawi’s, said she had also been alarmed.

“I told him not to go to the interview,” White said. “He also had some trepidation with it because we thought potentially it was a honeytrap — and that’s what it was.”

Helali and White were among a small group of friends who met up with Mahdawi for breakfast Monday morning and quizzed him on American history ahead of the purported citizenship test before accompanying him to Colchester. While waiting outside the building for his return, they received text messages around noon indicating that he had been handcuffed inside. He was led out shortly thereafter, they said, and left in a small convoy of vehicles.

White said she was distraught at Mahdawi’s detention.

“Mohsen is not a criminal,” she said. “He is a kind, sweet, peaceful thirty-something-year-old man. He’s highly educated. He’s well-spoken. He’s beloved in the Upper Valley. He’s the exact opposite of anyone we should be spending resources on detaining. It doesn’t even compute on that level.”

Until Monday, White said, she felt insulated from the actions of the Trump administration.

“I had felt that Vermont was a safe place before this,” she said. “And I do not feel Vermont is a safe place now.”

-Staff writer Shelley Murphy contributed to this report.