He Was One of the First Swept Up in Donald Trump’s Darkest Agenda. If You Thought It Was Over, You Were Wrong.

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When Mohsen Mahdawi last walked on the Columbia University campus, for his graduation last May, he required special permission from a judge to be there. Though he was a lawful permanent resident, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had detained him at an immigration appointment on the orders of the Trump administration, which had urged the judge to block his attendance at the ceremony. But he made it, and many in the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

As the new school year began again earlier this month, Mahdawi was back at Columbia as a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in diplomacy, security, and conflict resolution. When I first met him, it was the first day of classes. This time, he moved more carefully—baseball cap, sunglasses, “camouflage,” he called it—to avoid constant interruptions from people who recognized him from the press coverage.

While most of his peers were still swapping syllabi and feeling out new professors, Mahdawi had started his day not in a classroom, but in immigration court—virtually, on Webex. Soon he would have to conference with his lawyers to prepare for a late-September appeal hearing that could put him back in jail.

We met after his classes that evening at Qahwah House, a Yemeni café a few blocks from school. I ordered a latte. He ordered a tea. “You’re going to be up all night,” he teased. Mahdawi, with wavy black hair, glasses, and a sharp black shirt, looked more restless than celebratory. Other students were headed to bars or house parties. He, on the other hand, was meeting with a reporter.

ICE had detained Mahdawi back in April, during what was supposed to be a routine citizenship interview in Vermont, and held him for over two weeks before a judge blocked his transfer and ordered his release, for now.

He carried himself with a calm confidence, but the way he kept scanning the street suggested a low hum of anxiety.

“ICE itself, and how they function, you don’t know what’s the next step that they’re going to take,” he said. “They can break the law. Generally speaking, this is abnormal for me to be hanging out in a public place. I just come for very short visits, and I leave.”

Mahdawi grew up in the Far’a refugee camp in the West Bank. He was 12 when he saw his best friend, then 14, shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. A year earlier, on his 11^th birthday, his uncle was killed, shot twice in the head and once in the shoulder, turning what should have been a birthday celebration into a funeral. Two cousins and several neighbors were also killed. At 15, Mahdawi himself was shot by Israeli soldiers. He said it took him a long time to overcome that grief. When ICE detained him at his citizenship interview, he said, he recognized the feeling of being punished first, processed later.

For now, the atmosphere around him feels calm, even welcoming. Even in the middle of our conversation, people kept stopping by. A fellow Palestinian and an Israeli student both paused to greet him warmly. They were both friends he made during months of activism that eventually landed him in the crosshairs of the U.S. government.

That morning, as Mahdawi had logged on for his immigration hearing, he could see Columbia’s lawns buzzing with first-week energy from his apartment window. The hearing was ultimately pushed back because a detainee’s hearing was prioritized, giving him temporary relief—but it also sent him spiraling back to the memory of shackles around his wrists, waist, and ankles.

But with his hearing delayed, Mahdawi got back on with his first day of school: He made tea, caught up on work emails, squeezed in back-to-back interviews with the Guardian and the New York Times, and finally rushed to SIPA, the School of International and Public Affairs, for afternoon classes.

Support on campus, he said, has been steady. New classmates offer encouragement. Faculty tell him they’re glad he’s back. During orientation, when a slide about “community agreements” suggested refraining from calling out genocide, several students openly objected. “That gave me hope,” Mahdawi said.

Not everyone is happy to have him back on campus, however. In the SIPA elevator bank on his way to class, he ran into a student who he says doxed him last year and publicly celebrated his detention. “He couldn’t look at me,” Mahdawi said of the other student. “He saw me and he did not have the courage to look at me. He saw me and turned his head. It was surreal,” he recalled. After a quiet ride up the elevator, he went to class.

He attended two courses Monday, including Foundations of International Security. The class engaged in a discussion on the principles of realism: the acknowledgment that self-interest is one of the highest coercive powers internationally, not nonviolent forms of mediation like diplomacy. For someone the federal government has labeled a national security threat, it was an odd juxtaposition. Mahdawi, who often cites his belief in the Geneva Conventions and nonviolence as foundational principles, listened, took notes, and framed the lesson this way: “It is unfortunate and painful to see that this is the world that we live in.”

But his bigger worries are outside the classroom. Columbia, he argued, has “failed Palestinian students” by bowing to political pressure and cutting a deal with the Trump administration, adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, and signaling that criticism of Israel could now be punishable. He pointed to the Milstein Library sit-in last year, where more than 80 students were suspended or expelled^[2] after a mass New York Police Department arrest. “We don’t know where the boundaries are,” he said. “We don’t know when the university might come and say you have committed a violation. And they have promised to hit you with an iron fist.”

Over our drinks, Mahdawi ticked off his three major concerns while returning to campus: that the federal government is actively appealing his release; that Columbia’s ambiguous campus speech codes will be used to silence students critical of Israel; and that other students might bait him into a controversy.

Why return at all? Some alumni have burned their diplomas in protest. Dozens of suspended students can’t come back. Mahdawi gave me two reasons. First, he said, “The university is not only the senior administration and the board of trustees, and this fight for justice or equality against supremacy will continue. I want to be part of this fight.” Second is the good he could do with a diplomacy degree. “For us Palestinians, we really lost everything that we had as refugees. We lost our land, money, the opportunity to live a life of dignity. And the only hope that we have is through education. They are trying to steal away whatever hope is left there. And my hope is, through education, I can bring forward a just resolution for my people.”

Near the end of our conversation, I asked if he worried about self-censorship, keeping his head down just to survive the semester. He didn’t seem nervous about that. He joked that when a New York Times reporter asked him earlier in the day if he planned to carry a bullhorn around campus, he told them he’d bring two. Then he turned serious again: “We are building this time to restore international law and make it enforceable through divestment, boycott, and sanctions. There is no other peaceful means that can create change, to stop the genocide that’s ongoing, and the apartheid and annexation that is about to take place in the West Bank.”

Soon, he had to go. For ICE and the U.S. government, Mahdawi was an active threat. For Columbia, he’s a test of its new rules. For him, it’s just the first week of class.

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