The Case That Won, Then Lost, and Is Being Appealed Again: Mohsen Mahdawi and the Government's Relentless Pursuit of a Green Card Holder Who Spoke Against a War

The case of Mohsen Mahdawi is, by the time you reach today's filing, already a labyrinth of rulings, reversals, firings, appeals, and procedural skirmishes that spans more than fourteen months of litigation across multiple federal courts and immigration tribunals. On Tuesday, June 10, 2026, the ACLU of Vermont confirmed that Mahdawi is now appealing a ruling from the Board of Immigration Appeals that would allow him to be removed from the United States — reinstating deportation proceedings that an immigration judge had previously terminated in February, only to have that termination overturned after the judge herself was fired by the administration whose case she had ruled against. That sentence, in its entirety, is a fair summary of the due process environment in which one of the most consequential immigration and free speech cases of the Trump second term is unfolding.

Mohsen Mahdawi is 34 years old, a Palestinian man born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, a lawful permanent resident of the United States holding a green card, a graduate student at Columbia University in New York, and a resident of Vermont's Upper Valley. He is not a citizen. He is not undocumented. He has been in the United States legally, building a life, completing a graduate education, and engaging in political speech that the Constitution protects for citizens and, in most circumstances, for permanent residents as well. He co-founded the Palestinian Student Union at Columbia University in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel's subsequent military campaign in Gaza, and he served as one of the most visible student organizers in the pro-Palestinian campus protest movement that swept American universities in the spring and fall of 2024.

On April 14, 2025, Mahdawi appeared at an appointment in Vermont that he believed was his naturalization interview — the final step toward becoming a United States citizen, a status he was actively seeking through the legal process designed for that purpose. Masked and hooded ICE agents were waiting for him. He was arrested, taken into custody, and held for more than two weeks without being charged with a crime. His legal team filed a habeas corpus petition challenging the arrest, and U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford in Burlington issued an order that Mahdawi not be deported or removed from Vermont. He was released on bail. The legal battle that began that day has not ended, and as of this writing its resolution remains genuinely uncertain.

The legal mechanism under which the Trump administration sought to deport Mahdawi was unusual and has been the source of significant constitutional controversy since his arrest. The administration invoked an obscure provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act — specifically the foreign policy deportation ground — that allows the Secretary of State to seek the removal of a non-citizen if their presence in the United States is deemed to pose "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences." Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a memorandum to that effect regarding Mahdawi, characterising his advocacy activities and public statements as constituting a foreign policy threat that justified his deportation. The same mechanism was simultaneously invoked against Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian Columbia graduate student and green card holder who was arrested the previous month and whose own deportation case has been moving through parallel proceedings.

The foreign policy deportation ground is not commonly used and had rarely been invoked against people for their political speech prior to the current administration. Legal scholars who specialise in immigration law noted immediately after the Mahdawi and Khalil arrests that using this provision to deport green card holders for engaging in campus political protests raised profound First Amendment questions, because if the government can deport non-citizen permanent residents for speech activities that would be entirely protected if engaged in by citizens, it creates a constitutional second class of people — permanent residents who hold most of the rights of citizenship but whose right to political expression is conditioned on that expression not displeasing the Secretary of State's foreign policy sensibilities. Courts across the country have been working through these questions in parallel with the immigration proceedings, and no definitive ruling on the constitutional merits has yet issued in Mahdawi's specific case.

The immigration court proceedings went through their first major turn on February 13, 2026, when Immigration Judge Nina Froes terminated the removal proceedings against Mahdawi. Her reasoning was procedural but decisive: the Trump administration had relied in part on the Rubio memorandum as evidence that Mahdawi was removable, but had failed to properly authenticate and certify the document before submitting it to the court. Without that authentication, the memorandum was inadmissible as evidence. Without admissible evidence sufficient to meet the government's burden of proving removability, the case could not proceed. Froes terminated the proceedings on those grounds, declining to reach the constitutional merits of whether the foreign policy deportation ground can lawfully be applied to protected political speech by a permanent resident.

Mahdawi's statement after that ruling was characteristically direct: "I am grateful to the court for honoring the rule of law and holding the line against the government's attempts to trample on due process. This decision is an important step towards upholding what fear tried to destroy: the right to speak for peace and justice." The Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin responded with equal directness, saying the administration remained committed to removing Mahdawi. The DHS was as good as its word.

The administration's response to Judge Froes's ruling was not to appeal through normal channels, at least not only through normal channels. Froes was fired by the Trump administration after issuing the ruling. She was, in the description of her colleagues and of immigration law practitioners, a career immigration judge who issued a procedurally grounded decision that the government disagreed with, and she was subsequently terminated. The firing of an immigration judge after she rules against the government in a high-profile case involving one of the administration's stated enforcement priorities raises questions that go well beyond the Mahdawi proceedings: immigration judges are employed by the Executive Office for Immigration Review within the Department of Justice and serve at the pleasure of the executive branch, meaning they can be dismissed without the civil service protections that would apply to federal judges with Article III appointments. The administration has used this authority to remove immigration judges whose decisions it found unsatisfactory, a practice that has generated extensive criticism from immigration law practitioners and that the ACLU and other civil liberties organisations have argued undermines the independence of the immigration court system.

The Board of Immigration Appeals — the appellate body within the Executive Office for Immigration Review that reviews immigration court decisions — then reversed Froes's ruling. The BIA's reversal reinstated the deportation proceedings against Mahdawi, finding either that the evidentiary ruling was incorrect or that the proceedings should be allowed to continue. The BIA, like the immigration courts below it, is part of the executive branch and does not have the independence from political influence that Article III federal courts possess. When the BIA reversed the ruling of an immigration judge who had subsequently been fired, the sequence produced a result that civil liberties organisations described as the administration using its control of the immigration court system to override an adverse ruling through a combination of judicial removal and appellate reversal.

That is now the ruling that Mahdawi is appealing through the ACLU of Vermont, as of today's announcement. His lawyers are challenging the BIA's reversal in federal court, arguing that the reinstatement of deportation proceedings is unlawful. The parallel proceedings in the Second Circuit, where his habeas petition and the challenge to his original arrest remain under consideration, continue alongside the immigration court track. The Second Circuit previously received the February immigration court termination as a filing in the ongoing case, and the BIA's subsequent reversal of that termination adds a new layer to those proceedings.

The government's case against Mahdawi, as presented in various filings and public statements, rests on several categories of allegation that are themselves contested. The primary basis for the foreign policy deportation ground, as set out in the Rubio memorandum, is that Mahdawi's leadership role in pro-Palestinian campus protests constitutes a threat to American foreign policy interests. The administration has argued that the protests Mahdawi helped organise were disruptive, that some protesters' conduct crossed the line from protected expression into conduct that institutions and law enforcement could legitimately address, and that Mahdawi's public statements and organizing activities rose to the level of foreign policy consequences that the Secretary of State is entitled to find deportable.

The government has also cited allegations from 2015, when Mahdawi was interviewed by the FBI after reportedly making antisemitic remarks at a Vermont gun store and a firearms museum. Mahdawi has denied these allegations, and no criminal charges were filed following the 2015 FBI interview. The introduction of an eleven-year-old FBI interview, from which no charges or formal findings resulted, into a current deportation proceeding illustrates the breadth of the evidentiary record the government has assembled in its effort to establish Mahdawi's removability.

The civil liberties framework through which Mahdawi's legal team, the ACLU, and supporting academics are contesting the case is grounded in a consistent argument: that what the government is calling foreign policy consequences and national security threats is, when stripped of those labels, a Palestinian student expressing opposition to Israel's military operations in Gaza, which is precisely the kind of political speech that the First Amendment was designed to protect, and that applying the foreign policy deportation ground to remove a green card holder for political advocacy of that kind is an unconstitutional use of the immigration power to suppress dissent.

The administration's counterargument is that the First Amendment does not prohibit the government from considering the foreign policy implications of a non-citizen's speech activities when determining whether their continued presence in the United States serves the national interest, and that the foreign policy deportation ground was designed for exactly this kind of situation. The administration points to the disruption caused by campus protests, to statements attributed to protest leaders that it characterises as antisemitic or threatening, and to what it describes as the foreign policy complications arising from American students and residents visibly opposing the actions of a key American ally in the Middle East.

Both arguments have legal force, and both have legal weaknesses. The legal weakness in the government's position is that the foreign policy deportation ground, if construed as broadly as the Rubio memorandum suggests, could theoretically be used to deport any permanent resident who takes a public political position that the Secretary of State finds inconvenient — a construction that would eliminate meaningful First Amendment protection for all non-citizen permanent residents engaging in political speech. The legal weakness in Mahdawi's position is that courts have historically given the executive branch broad deference in the area of foreign affairs, including immigration decisions framed in foreign policy terms, and that the Supreme Court has not yet definitively addressed the application of First Amendment protections to permanent residents in the specific context of the foreign policy deportation ground.

Mahmoud Khalil's parallel case adds context and pressure to Mahdawi's situation. Khalil, who co-founded the Palestinian Student Union at Columbia with Mahdawi, was arrested in March 2025 and his deportation proceedings have been in litigation ever since. The administration has continued to press for Khalil's removal on the same foreign policy grounds, and Khalil's case has proceeded through the courts in New Jersey in parallel with Mahdawi's in Vermont and New York. The simultaneity of the two cases, involving the two co-founders of the same student organisation at the same university, both arrested within weeks of each other, both facing deportation under the same legal provision, has made them the most prominent civil liberties cases of the Trump second term and the clearest test of the administration's claimed authority to use immigration law to manage the political expression of non-citizen permanent residents.

The legal proceedings as of June 10, 2026, stand as follows. Mahdawi is in Vermont, on bail, under a federal court order that has prevented his deportation since the habeas proceedings in April 2025. He is appealing the BIA's reinstatement of deportation proceedings. His case is also pending in the Second Circuit. The immigration judge who terminated his case in February has been fired. The administration has affirmed its intent to remove him. The ACLU and his legal team have affirmed their intent to challenge that removal at every available procedural step. And the constitutional question at the centre of everything — whether the government can deport a lawful permanent resident for political advocacy — has not yet received a definitive answer from any court with the authority to settle it.

Mahdawi has been consistent in his public response to the legal proceedings throughout. "Nearly a year ago, I was detained at my citizenship interview, not for breaking the law but for speaking against the genocide of Palestinians," he said after the February ruling. "The harder they come on me, the more energy and power I will have, and I will continue to work for the freedom of the Palestinian people." His statement on the BIA's reversal accused the Trump administration of weaponising the immigration system to silence his advocacy for Palestinian rights. He is, by his own account, continuing that advocacy while his legal status in the country he has called home for years remains unresolved.

Sources

1. WCAX Burlington — Mohsen Mahdawi Appeals Deportation Ruling, June 10, 2026 — https://www.wcax.com/2026/06/10/mohsen-mahdawi-appeals-deportation-ruling/
2. Al Jazeera — US Reinstates Deportation Proceedings Against Mohsen Mahdawi, May 7, 2026 — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/7/us-reinstates-deportation-proceedings-against-mohsen-mahdawi
3. NBC News — Judge Blocks Deportation of Palestinian Activist Mohsen Mahdawi, February 18, 2026 — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-blocks-deportation-palestinian-activist-mohsen-mahdawi-rcna259579
4. NY Daily News / AOL — Judge Blocks Deportation of Columbia Grad Student, Palestinian Activist Mohsen Mahdawi — https://www.aol.com/articles/judge-blocks-deportation-columbia-grad-005200033.html
5. Fox News — Immigration Judge Blocks Deportation of Columbia Anti-Israel Agitator — https://www.aol.com/articles/immigration-judge-blocks-deportation-columbia-120309222.html
6. Fox News — Palestinian Activist Accused of Expressing Desire to "Kill Jews" Wins Deportation Case — https://www.aol.com/articles/palestinian-activist-accused-expressing-desire-012930037.html
7. Democracy Now! — Mohsen Mahdawi, Palestinian Columbia Student Targeted by Trump, Hails Court Ruling Blocking Deportation, February 20, 2026 — https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2/20/mohsen_mahdawi
8. DOJ Office of Inspector General — FBI Contractor Arrested During Underaged Human Trafficking Operation, Huntsville, June 2025 (contextual reference to Huntsville FBI operations) — https://oig.justice.gov/news/press-release/fbi-contractor-arrested-during-underaged-human-trafficking-operation