Freed Palestinian student accuses Columbia University of inciting violence

A Palestinian student arrested as he was about to finalise his US citizenship accused Columbia University on Thursday of eroding democracy with its handling of campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, who led anti-war protests at the Ivy League school in New York in 2023 and 2024, spent 16 days in a Vermont prison before a judge ordered him released on April 30. He spoke to The Associated Press on Thursday, a day after pro-Palestinian protestors clashed with campus security guards inside the university's main library. At least 80 people were taken into custody, police said.

Mahdawi said instead of being a beacon of hope," the university is inciting violence against students. 

Columbia University is participating in the destruction of the democratic system, Mahdawi said in the interview. They are supporting the initiatives and the agenda of the Trump administration, and they are punishing and torturing their students.

A spokesperson for Columbia University, which in March announced sweeping policy changes related to protests following Trump administration threats to revoke its federal funding, declined to comment Thursday beyond the response of the school's acting president to Wednesday's protests.

The acting president, Claire Shipman, said the protesters who had holed up inside a library reading room were asked repeatedly to show identification and to leave, but they refused. The school then asked police in to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community, she said in a statement Wednesday evening, calling the protest actions outrageous and a disruption to students for final exams.

The Trump administration has said Mahdawi should be deported because his activism threatens its foreign policy goals, but the judge who released him ruled that he has raised a substantial claim that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees.

Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, was born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and moved to the United States in 2014. At Columbia, he organized campus protests and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union with Mahmoud Khalil, another Palestinian permanent resident of the U.S. and graduate student who was arrested in March. 

On April 14, Mahdawi had taken a written citizenship test, answered verbal questions and signed a document about the pledge of allegiance at an immigration office in Colchester when his interviewer left the room. Masked and armed agents then entered and arrested him, he said. Though he had suspected a trap, the moment was still shocking, he said, triggering a cascade of contrasting emotions.

Light and darkness, cold and hot. Having rights or not having rights at all, he said.

Immigration authorities have detained college students from around the country since the first days of the Trump administration, many of whom participated in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. Mahdawi was among the first to win release from custody after challenging his arrest.

In another case, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday in favor of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, upholding an order to transfer her from a Louisiana detention center back to New England to determine whether her rights were violated and if she should be released.

Mahdawi said his message to the Turkish student and others was stay positive and don't let this injustice shake your belief in the inevitability of justice.

People are working hard. Communities are mobilising, he said. The justice system has signalled to America with my case, and with Rumeysa's yesterday with the Second Circuit, that justice is functioning and checks and balances is still in function.

Mahdawi's release, which is being challenged by the government, allows him to travel outside of his home state of Vermont and attend his graduation from Columbia in New York later this month. He said he plans to do so, though he believes the administration has turned its back on him and rejected the work of a student diplomacy council he served on alongside Jewish, Israeli and Lebanese students.

I plan to attend the graduation because it is a message," he said. "This is a message that education is hope, education is light, and there is no power in the world that should take that away from us.