By Nate Raymond
Feb 17 (Reuters) – A U.S. immigration judge has rejected efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to deport Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, who was arrested last year following his participation in pro-Palestinian protests.
Lawyers for Mahdawi detailed the immigration judge’s decision in a court filing on Tuesday with a federal appeals court in New York, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to his release from immigration custody in April.
It was the latest case in which an immigration judge rejected a case brought as part of the broader effort by Trump’s administration to detain and deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views who engaged in campus activism.
Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based Immigration Judge Nina Froes wrote in a decision on Friday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security failed to meet its burden of proving he was removable, which it sought to do using an unauthenticated document signed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“This decision is an important step towards upholding what fear tried to destroy: the right to speak for peace and justice,” Mahdawi said in a statement.
The administration has the option of challenging the judge’s decision before the Board of Immigration Appeals, part of the U.S. Department of Justice.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security in a statement called the judge an “activist” and said it was a “privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live and study in the United States of America,” one that could be revoked.
Mahdawi, born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, was arrested in April 2025 upon arriving for an interview for his U.S. citizenship petition. A judge swiftly ordered Trump’s administration not to deport him from the U.S. or take him out of the state of Vermont.
After two weeks in detention, Mahdawi walked out of the federal courthouse in Burlington, Vermont, after U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered that he be released.
In another case, an immigration judge on January 29 terminated removal proceedings the administration initiated against Tufts University Ph.D. student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was targeted after co-authoring an editorial that criticized her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Last month, a federal judge in Boston ruled that the administration had adopted an unlawful policy of detaining and deporting scholars like Ozturk and Mahdawi that chilled the free speech of non-citizen academics at universities. The Justice Department is appealing that decision.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by David Gregorio and Jonathan Oatis)
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