Immigration judge rejects Trump effort to deport anti-Israel Palestinian student

A US immigration judge has rejected efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to deport Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, who was arrested last year following his participation 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 a case 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.

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 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 take him out of 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 that he be released.

Mahdawi, along with fellow Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, was a prominent figure in Columbia’s coalition of anti-Israel protesters, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). Khalil, a permanent resident of the US and graduate student, has also been detained by immigration authorities and is facing possible deportation.

CUAD led protests on campus that included harassment of Jewish students, an unauthorized protest encampment, building takeovers, clashes with police, and property damage. CUAD has called for the “eradication of Western civilization,” distributed Hamas material on campus, backed calls for violence against “Zionists” and said that “violence is the only path.”

Yet, Mahdawi, who was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, spoke out against antisemitic rhetoric at a Columbia rally in November 2023, the Columbia Spectator student newspaper reported at the time. He also denounced antisemitic speech among pro-Palestinian protesters during a December 2023 appearance on “60 Minutes.”

In another case, an immigration judge on January 29 terminated removal proceedings the administration initiated against Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was targeted after co-authoring an editorial that criticized her school’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 like Ozturk and Mahdawi that chilled the free speech of non-citizen academics at universities. The Justice Department is appealing that decision.