Mohsen Mahdawi had a feeling his naturalization appointment would go awry. A week before his meeting with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Mahdawi called his friend Chris Helali and told him he was concerned. “He thought it was likely — and I agreed — that he would be arrested, that they would ambush him at this interview,” Helali tells The Verge. Mahdawi had been so fearful of being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that he had reportedly been in hiding for weeks. But Mahdawi couldn’t miss the appointment. According to USCIS, “failure to appear for a scheduled interview” almost always “results in denial” of a person’s application.
The interview was scheduled for 11AM on April 14th. Helali waited outside the building. “We started to realize that something was amiss,” Helali says. Around noon, the group was told Mahdawi had been handcuffed. Three minutes later, he was escorted out of the building by two Department of Homeland Security officers. Helali captured the arrest, first reported by The Intercept, on video.
It’s unusual — though not unheard of — for immigrants to be arrested during USCIS interviews. Matt Cameron, a Boston-based immigration attorney, says it has happened to a couple clients of his, but “always because they have previous immigration or criminal history which makes them deportable.” Mahdawi’s attorneys say he has no criminal record and is a “committed Buddhist” who “believes in non-violence and empathy as a central tenet of his religion.” He doesn’t appear to have violated immigration law. But Mahdawi, who was born in the West Bank, was involved in Columbia University’s student protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. He knew about the Trump administration’s efforts to deport any noncitizens — even those with green cards and visas — for their involvement in pro-Palestine activism under the auspices of a McCarthy-era immigration law.
“He knew he was a target,” Helali says. For him, the arrest was “shocking” — not because it was unexpected but because it made him feel as if “the rule of law that we constantly talk about is not as stable and not as foundational as we might think it is.” What was most striking, though, was how calm Mahdawi appeared. “Mohsen is a calming presence,” Helali says. “He went like a Buddhist: peacefully, calmly, and serenely.”
In the video Helali captured, Mahdawi seems calm as he walks out of the USCIS building flanked by agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division. Handcuffed, Mahdawi threw up two peace signs to the camera but didn’t say a word as the agents put him in an unmarked car and drove off. Unlike other videos of ICE arrests, in which the targets appear confused or scared after being approached by plainclothes officers and told they’re under arrest, Mahdawi immediately understood what was happening to him. He knew it was a possibility before he even walked in.
In a habeas corpus petition filed shortly after Mahdawi’s arrest, his attorneys wrote that 10 days after Trump’s inauguration, the far-right and Zionist group Betar US posted about Mahdawi on X, saying he was “on our deport list.” In a March Instagram post, Canary Mission, another right-wing group, said Mahdawi had “justified Hamas terrorism.”
‘Mr. Mahdawi was always willing to engage in dialogue with people whose views and beliefs differed from his own.’
Both Betar and Canary Mission have claimed that they’re providing lists of foreign students involved in anti-Israel advocacy to the Trump administration, which has conflated opposition to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with antisemitism writ large. Canary Mission added an “Uncovering Foreign Nationals” page to its website in late March, which identifies foreign students that the group wants Trump to deport. That same month, Betar reportedly claimed it had “reason to believe” that Mahdawi and the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha were “on the short list of those who will shortly be deported.”
News of other students being arrested by ICE — including Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk — gave Mahdawi’s attorneys time to prepare for his potential apprehension. Attorneys filed a habeas petition just hours after the arrest, requesting not only that Mahdawi be released on bond but that he not be removed from the country or from the state of Vermont.
Both Khalil and Ozturk were transferred to ICE detention facilities in Louisiana, where they remain incarcerated far from their attorneys and families — and in jurisdictions that are friendly to the Trump administration. On Monday, a federal judge in Vermont issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting DHS from deporting Mahdawi for now. The order also forbade ICE from removing him from Vermont.
Like others arrested by ICE for their pro-Palestine activism, Mahdawi is likely being targeted for statements that would have no legal repercussions if he were a US citizen. Under Trump’s “Executive Order 14188—Additional Measures To Combat Anti-Semitism,” government departments were ordered to come up with ways to “Combat Campus Anti-Semitism.” For DHS, that has meant arresting students involved with pro-Palestine activism.
In a State Department memo obtained by the New York Times, secretary of state Marco Rubio claimed, without evidence, that Mahdawi had “engaged in threatening rhetoric and intimidation of pro-Israeli bystanders.” Mahdawi’s lawyers denied Rubio’s assertion.
Mahdawi remains detained for now. Advocates are calling for his release, noting that he has spoken out against both antisemitism and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians — a point also made in his habeas petition. “Mr. Mahdawi was always willing to engage in dialogue with people whose views and beliefs differed from his own,” it reads. The Intercept reports that in December 2023, Mahdawi got coffee with Shai Davidai, a Columbia professor and vocal supporter of Israel who is now gloating about his arrest.
Around the same time he got coffee with Davidai, Mahdawi started meeting with a group of Israeli students at Columbia.
“His compassion blew me away,” Roni Ziv, one of the Israeli students who attended the meetings, told Haaretz. “Especially in the US, where people on the left often take an ‘anti-normalization’ stance — he didn’t. The fact that I served in the military wasn’t a dealbreaker for him. That’s rare.”
Helali describes Mahdawi as a “bridge-builder.” “[Mahdawi] is very much about reconciliation,” he says.
