Mohsen K. Mahdawi arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, Vermont, on Monday. A Palestinian student at Columbia University, he hoped that, after 10 years in the U.S., he would pass the test to become a naturalized citizen.

Instead, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him and began the process to deport him to the occupied West Bank. Mahdawi, a leader of the campus protest movement against Israel’s war on Gaza, became yet another green card holder arrested and facing removal.

“Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi said in a statement to The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.”

Mahdawi’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on Monday morning challenging the legality of his detention, alleging the government was violating his statutory and due process rights by punishing him for speech related to Palestine and Israel. The filing said it appears that Mahdawi was facing deportation under the obscure provision used in other recent cases that gives Secretary of State Marco Rubio the right to unilaterally declare immigrants as threats to American foreign policy.

EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE: Columbia student and Palestinian Mohsen Madawi was just arrested during a visit to the immigration office here in Colchester, VT. More to follow. Footage by: Christopher Helali pic.twitter.com/I9JvPS2DLn

Mahdawi was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestine student protest movement until spring 2024, when he said he took a step back from the movement to focus on building bridges with Jewish and Israeli communities on campus.

In December 2023, Mahdawi asked Columbia professor Shai Davidai, a controversial pro-Israel figure at the school, to get coffee. The two met, but Mahdawi later said that Davidai left in the middle of the coffee. Less than two months after the meeting, Davidai posted a video of Mahdawi to Twitter in a thread characterizing him and other protest organizers as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. (Davidai did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Since then, Mahdawi became a focus of attacks from a

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