deport

Mahdawi, a Palestinian student activist, faced deportation proceedings amid a protest crackdown under the Trump administration.

An immigration judge in the United States has ruled against an attempt under President Donald Trump to deport Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student arrested last year for his protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The decision, issued on February 13, became public as part of court filings on Tuesday from Mahdawi’s lawyers.

The filing was submitted to a federal appeals court in New York, which has been considering a challenge from the Trump administration against Mahdawi’s release from custody.

In a public statement released through the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Mahdawi thanked the immigration court for its decision, which he framed as a strike in favour of free-speech rights.

“I am grateful to the court for honoring the rule of law and holding the line against the government’s attempts to trample on due process,” Mahdawi said. “This decision is an important step towards upholding what fear tried to destroy: the right to speak for peace and justice.”

But the ACLU indicated that the immigration court’s decision was made “without prejudice”, a legal term that means the Trump administration could refile its case against Mahdawi.

Raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, Mahdawi is a lawful permanent resident who has lived in Vermont for 10 years.

He enrolled at Columbia, a prestigious Ivy League university, to study philosophy. But he was also a visible member of the campus’s activist community, founding a Palestinian student society alongside fellow student Mahmoud Khalil.

Columbia became a hub for pro-Palestinian protests in 2024, and Trump campaigned for re-election, in part, on cracking down on the demonstrations.

Khalil became the first student protester to be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in March of last year, less than three months into Trump’s second term.

Then, on April 14, Mahdawi was arrested at a meeting set up by the government, allegedly to process his citizenship application.

ICE detained him in “direct retaliation for his advocacy of Palestinian rights”, the ACLU said in a statement at the time.

The Trump administration attempted to transfer Mahdawi out of state to Louisiana, but a court order ultimately blocked it from doing so.

Mahdawi was ultimately released on April 30, after US Judge Geoffrey Crawford accused the Trump administration of doing “great harm” to someone who had committed no crime.

Human rights advocates have described the Trump administration’s attempts to deport foreign-born student activists as a campaign to chill free speech.

After his release last year, Mahdawi walked out of the court with both hands in the air, flashing peace signs as supporters greeted him with cheers.

As he spoke, he shared a message for Trump. “I am not afraid of you,” Mahdawi said to Trump.

He also addressed the people of Palestine and sought to dispel perceptions that the student protest movement was anything but peaceful.

“We are pro-peace and antiwar,” Mahdawi explained. “To my people in Palestine: I feel your pain, I see your suffering, and I see freedom, and it is very soon.”

Mahdawi’s arrest comes as part of a wider push by the Trump administration to target visa holders and permanent residents for their pro-Palestine advocacy.

Trump has also pressured top universities to crack down on pro-Palestine protests in the name of combating anti-Semitism. In some cases, the Trump administration has opened investigations into campuses where pro-Palestinian protests were prominent, accusing them of civil rights violations.

Last July, Columbia University entered into a $200m settlement with the Trump administration, with a further $21m given to end a probe into allegations of religious-based harassment.

The university, however, did not admit to wrongdoing.

Lawyers say immigration judge found that the Department of Homeland Security failed to prove the Tufts student should be removed from the US.

A judge in the United States has blocked the deportation of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Tufts University student who was arrested last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists, according to her lawyers.

Ozturk’s lawyers detailed the decision in a letter filed at the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday.

They said the immigration judge concluded on January 29 that the US Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her.

Ozturk, a PhD student studying children’s relationship to social media, was arrested last March while walking down a street as the administration of US President Donald Trump began targeting foreign-born students and activists involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Video showed masked agents handcuffing her and putting her into an unmarked vehicle.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper a year earlier, criticising her university’s response to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

A petition to release her was first filed in federal court in Boston, where Tufts is located, and then moved to the city of Burlington in Vermont. In May of last year, a federal judge ordered her immediate release after finding she raised a substantial claim that her detention constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of her free speech rights.

Ozturk, who spent 45 days in a detention centre in southern Louisiana, has been back on the Tufts campus since.

The federal government appealed her release to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.

The January 29 decision, however, ends those proceedings for now.

Ozturk said it was heartening to know that some justice can prevail.

“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the US government,” she said in a statement released by her lawyers.

Ozturk’s immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said the decision was issued by Immigration Judge Roopal Patel in Boston.

Patel’s decision is not itself public, and the Trump administration could challenge it ‌before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the US Department of Justice.

Khanbabai hailed Patel’s decision, while slamming what she called the Trump administration’s weaponisation of the US immigration system to target “valued members of our society”.

“It has manipulated immigration laws to silence people who advocate for Palestinian human rights and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” she said. “With this ruling, Judge Patel has delivered justice for Rumeysa; now, I hope that other immigration judges will follow her lead and decline to rubber-stamp the president’s cruel deportation agenda.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement that Judge Patel’s decision reflected “judicial activism”.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can ‌come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism – think again”.

The video of Ozturk’s arrest in the Boston suburb of Somerville was widely shared, turning her case into one of the highest-profile instances of the effort by Trump’s administration to deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian views.

Separately, a federal judge in Boston last month ruled that Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had adopted an unlawful policy of detaining and deporting scholars like Ozturk that chilled the free speech of non-citizen academics at universities.

The Justice Department on Monday moved to appeal that decision.