Mohsen Mahdawi’s case appears to mirror that of his associate Mahmoud Khalil, who was ruled deportable last week.
Over the weekend, I detailed the immigration court ruling that former Columbia student and lawful permanent resident alien (LPR) Mahmoud Khail could be deported based on the conclusion of Secretary of State Marco Rubio that his presence and activities in the United States harm American foreign policy interests.
On Monday in Vermont, immigration agents detained Mohsen Mahdawi, Mahmoud’s close associate and co-founder with Mahmoud of the radical Columbia University Apartheid Divest organization (CUAD). Mahdawi, who is also an LPR, was arrested when he arrived at a federal office building for a naturalization proceeding.
As we covered in connection with Khalil, LPR is the highest class of legal alien status, generally the final step toward U.S. citizenship. Toward that end, Mahdawi appeared yesterday for a scheduled meeting with immigration officials only to learn that, rather than interviewed in connection with his application for citizenship, he was being placed under arrest in anticipation of deportation.
In light of these developments, Mahdawi’s lawyers filed an emergency application in Vermont federal court (an application for a temporary restraining order, according to the New York Times, and a habeas corpus petition) in an effort to prevent his rapid transfer to a detention facility outside the state. The Times says the TRO was granted by Judge William K. Sessions III, and that Mahdawi’s lawyers say he is still in Vermont — apparently detained at an immigration detention center in Colchester.
The administration has been trying to race the legal aliens it arrests (such as Khalil) to Texas and/or Louisiana before their lawyers can file emergency petitions at the local federal courthouse. It is in Louisiana that the government is conducting deportation proceedings; it is detaining many aliens in deportation proceedings in Texas, which is the headquarters of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The Trump administration clearly believes that tribunal would be more sympathetic to its position than other federal courts. Vermont is in the Second Circuit, which sits in Manhattan.
Immigration courts are part of the executive branch — a component of the Justice Department. After an immigration judge rules in a deportation case, there is an appeal to the Bureau of Immigration Appeals; only then can an appeal be taken to a judicial court — a Circuit Court of Appeals — the scope of whose review is limited by statute. Appeals from Louisiana immigration court proceedings would be heard by the Fifth Circuit. Moreover, to the extent aliens seek to challenge their detention by habeas corpus, which the Supreme Court last week held was the proper remedy for Venezuelans seeking to block their deportation, such petitions must be filed in the place where the alien is in custody at the time of the filing. Mahdawi’s petition appears to have been properly filed in Vermont.
Madawi’s habeas petition does not give his age. It says he was born in the West Bank, came to the United States in 2014, and has been a green-card holder for ten years. He expected to graduate from Columbia in May with a B.A. in philosophy, and says he has been accepted into the master’s program at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs (from which, coincidentally, Khalil graduated last December).
It appears that in Mahdawi’s case, the Trump administration is relying on the same provision it invoked in Khalil’s case, resting the deportation decision on the Secretary of State’s finding about negative ramifications for American foreign policy. On that score, I note in the weekend column that Rubio’s submission in Khalil’s case appeared to refer to “an apparent associate of Khalil’s whose name was redacted from the submission.” It is not clear at this point whether the associate was Mahdawi.
The government’s specific allegations against Mahdawi are not yet fully reported. We can be confident that they will mirror those against Khalil, with whom, in addition to CUAD, Mahdawi co-founded a group called “Dar,” also known as the Palestinian Student Society. Regarding CUAD, I’ll repeat what I outlined over the weekend:
As the New York Times reports, CUAD expressly backs “armed resistance” by Hamas and recently rescinded an apology it had offered after one of its members said Columbia should be “grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” The group promotes the radical leftist claim that the United States and Canada are oppressor regimes that are “occupying” “Turtle Island,” having seized it from indigenous peoples. CUAD has also promoted a “Resistance 101” panelthat featured a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — a designated foreign terrorist organization — who proceeded to laud his “friends and brothers” from Hamas and yet another foreign terrorist organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (Another panelist at the event: “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas. . . . These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.”)
In connection with Khalil and the associate whose name was redacted, I summarized Secretary Rubio’s conclusions as follows:
Rubio represented that he had made the determination in the case of Khalil (and of an apparent associate of Khalil’s whose name was redacted from the submission) based on information in the government’s files regarding Khalil’s “participation and role . . . in antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters [sic] a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.” Moreover, Rubio based his decision on “citations for unlawful activity during these [campus] protests” (which I’ve described above).
Khalil’s activities and presence, Rubio assesses, “undermine U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States.” The secretary also stressed that it is Trump administration foreign policy to “champion core American interests and American citizens”; consequently, “condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective.”
We’ll monitor Mahdawi’s case.