Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: AN immigration judge has blocked the Trump administration from deporting Mohsen Mahdawi, a 34-year-old Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist who was arrested by federal agents last year during a US citizenship interview in Vermont. Lawyers for Mahdawi gave details of the decision in a court filing on February 17 with a federal appeals court in New York.
Mahdawi is a permanent US resident, or green card holder. The judge, Nina Froes, had ruled last week that the evidence that the Trump administration had submitted to the court was not admissible, due to an inability to “meet its burden of proving removability”.
Mahdawi was born and raised in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, and immigrated to the US over a decade ago. In 2021, he enrolled at Columbia University, in New York, where he was the president of the Buddhist association and co-founded the Palestinian student union. He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in April last year and held in detention for over two weeks, based on the government’s citation of an obscure provision of immigration law.
