A Palestinian student, detained just before completing his U.S. citizenship, criticized Columbia University on Thursday for undermining democracy amid its management of protests against the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, who spearheaded anti-war demonstrations at the prestigious New York school in 2023 and 2024, was imprisoned in Vermont for 16 days until a judge ordered his release on April 30. He spoke to The Associated Press following a recent incident where pro-Palestinian demonstrators encountered conflict with campus security within the university’s main library, resulting in the arrest of at least 80 individuals, according to police reports.
Mahdawi said instead of being a “beacon of hope,” the university is inciting violence against students.
“Columbia University is contributing to the deterioration of the democratic framework,” Mahdawi stated during the interview. “They endorse the initiatives and agenda set forth by the Trump administration, while subjecting their students to punishment and abuse.”
A spokesperson for Columbia University, which in March announced sweeping policy changes related to protests following Trump administration threats to revoke its federal funding, declined to comment Thursday beyond the response of the school’s acting president to Wednesday’s protests.
The acting president, Claire Shipman, said the protesters who had holed up inside a library reading room were asked repeatedly to show identification and to leave, but they refused. The school then asked police in “to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community,” she said in a statement Wednesday evening, calling the protest actions “outrageous” and a disruption to students for final exams.
The Trump administration has said Mahdawi should be deported because his activism threatens its foreign policy goals, but the judge who released him ruled that he has raised a “substantial claim” that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees.
Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, was born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and moved to the United States in 2014. At Columbia, he organized campus protests and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union with Mahmoud Khalil, another Palestinian permanent resident of the U.S. and graduate student who was arrested in March.
On April 14, Mahdawi had taken a written citizenship test, answered verbal questions and signed a document about the pledge of allegiance at an immigration office in Colchester when his interviewer left the room. Masked and armed agents then entered and arrested him, he said. Though he had suspected a trap, the moment was still shocking, he said, triggering a cascade of contrasting emotions.
“Light and darkness, cold and hot. Having rights or not having rights at all,” he said.
Immigration authorities have detained college students from around the country since the first days of the Trump administration, many of whom participated in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. Mahdawi was among the first to win release from custody after challenging his arrest.
In another case, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday in favor of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, upholding an order to transfer her from a Louisiana detention center back to New England to determine whether her rights were violated and if 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 are working hard. Communities are mobilizing,” he said. “The justice system has signaled to America with my case, and with Rumeysa’s yesterday with the Second Circuit, that justice is functioning and checks and balances is still in function.”
Mahdawi’s release, which is being challenged by the government, allows him to travel outside of his home state of Vermont and attend his graduation from Columbia in New York later this month. He said he plans to do so, though he believes the administration has turned its back on him and rejected the work of a student diplomacy council he served on alongside 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 should take that away from us.”
