Last week, Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, the first known pro-Palestinian activist arrested by ICE under the Trump administration, was let out of a Louisiana prison on bail by a federal judge who called his detainment unconstitutional. That decision followed the release of another previously detained student activist from Columbia: Mohsen Mahdawi.
In April, Mahdawi was scheduled for an immigration interview to obtain US citizenship. But after watching what happened to Khalil, Mahdawi knew he could be handing himself over to federal agents just by showing up. “I had conflicted feelings,” he says of appearing at the immigration office. “Is this an actual interview for my citizenship that I’d been waiting for for over a year? Or is it a trap?”
Soon after Mahdawi took an oath of allegiance to the US, ICE officers surrounded and arrested him, and the Department of Homeland Security accused him of jeopardizing the country’s foreign policy interests. But Mahdawi was prepared. Through his lawyers, he quickly sued the administration over his detainment and was released on bail a couple of weeks later. He says he believes he was detained “to intimidate other students, to make an example of me.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Mahdawi sits down with host Al Letson to discuss his arrest, the accusations that Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protests made Jewish students feel unsafe on campus, and the troubling images that linger from his time growing up in a refugee camp in the West Bank.
Interview:
