NEW YORK: A Palestinian student detained just before obtaining US citizenship charged Columbia University on Thursday with undermining democracy by managing anti-Israel-Hamas demonstrations on campus.
The 34-year-old Mohsen Mahdawi, who spearheaded anti-war demonstrations at the Ivy League university in New York in 2023 and 2024, was imprisoned in Vermont for 16 days before a court on April 30 granted his release.
A New York appeals court on Friday refused the government’s plea to stay that decision. The court stated that the Trump administration’s jurisdictional arguments were unlikely to succeed and that it had not demonstrated that Mahdawi’s release had caused irreparable injury.
The three-judge panel at the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals concluded, “The government’s feeble claims of administrative and logistical costs are greatly outweighed by individual liberty.”
The court that granted Mahdawi bail stated that he had made a “substantial claim” that the government had detained him in order to suppress speech that it disagreed with, despite the Trump administration’s insistence that he should be deported because his activity jeopardises its foreign policy objectives.
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