Montpelier, vt. (AP)-A Palestinian student who was arrested when he was about to complete his American citizenship De Columbia University on Thursday of the eroding of democracy with the treatment of campus protests against the war in Israel-Hamas.
Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, who led anti-war protests at the Ivy League school in New York in 2023 and 2024, spent 16 days in a prison in Vermont before a judge ordered him on 30 April. He spoke on Thursday with the Associated Press on Thursday, one day after Pro-Palestinian protestors that were linked to the university's main library. At least 80 people were taken into custody, the police said.
Mahdawi said instead of being a 'beacon of hope', the university on violence against students.
“Columbia University participates in the destruction of the democratic system,” Mahdawi said in the interview. “They support the initiatives and the agenda of the Trump government, and they punish and torture their students.”
A spokesperson for Columbia University, who announced major policy changes in March with regard to protests after the threats of Trump to withdraw her federal financing, refused to comment on Thursday after the response of the acting president of the school to Wednesday's protests.
The acting president, Claire Shipman, said that the protesters who were locked up in a reading room in a library were repeatedly asked to show and leave identification, but they refused. The school then asked the police “to help secure the building and the safety of our community,” she said on Wednesday evening in a statement and called the protests “scandalous” and a disturbance of students for final exams.
The Trump government has said that Mahdawi must be deported because his activism threatens its goals from foreign policy, but the judge who released him, ruled that he increased a “substantial statement” that the government has arrested him to suppress speech with which it does not agree.
Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, was born in a refugee camp on the West Bank of Israel and moved to the United States in 2014. In Columbia he organized campus protests and was co-founder of the Palestinian student union with Mahmoud Khalil, another Palestinian permanent resident of the American and Graduate student who was arrested in March.
On April 14, Mahdawi had taken a written citizenship test, answered oral questions and signed a document about the promise of Trouw at an immigration office in Colchester when his interviewer left the Chamber. Masked and armed agents then arrived and arrested him, he said. Although he had suspected a fall, the moment was still shocking, he said, who caused a cascade of contrasting emotions.
“Light and darkness, cold and hot. Have rights or have no rights at all,” he said.
Immigration authorities have retained university students from all over the country since the first days of the Trump government, many of whom participated in the campus protests about the war in Israel-Hamas. Mahdawi was one of the first to win the release of detention after challenging his arrest.
In another case, a Federal Court of Appeal ruled on Wednesday in favor of the student Rumeysa Ozturk from Tufts University, maintaining an order to transfer her from a detention center of Louisiana back to New England to determine whether her rights were violated and whether she should be released.
Mahdawi said his message to the Turkish student and others was: “Stay positive and don't let this injustice shake your belief in the inevitability of justice.”
“People work hard. Mobilize communities,” he said. “The legal system indicated to America with my case, and with rumeysa yesterday with the second circuit, which justice functions and controls and Saldi is still in function.”
The release of Mahdawi, who is challenged by the government, enables him to travel outside his home state of Vermont and later this month to graduate of Columbia in New York. He said he is planning to do this, although he believes that the government has turned his back on him and rejected the work of students from the diplomacy of students where he served together with Jewish, Israeli and Lebanese students.
“I plan to attend the graduation because it is a message,” he said. “This is a message that education is hope, education is light and there is no power in the world that takes that from us.”
