ICE detains Columbia student Hamas sympathizer, activist leader profiled by 60 Minutes

Columbia University student activist Mohsen Mahdawi was summoned to a meeting with immigration officials in Vermont on Monday but was instead detained. Mahdawi holds a green card in the US but was raised in the West Bank until moving to the US in 2014.

At that meeting, ICE began the process of deporting Mahdawi to the West Bank. Mahdawi's lawyer, per The Intercept, said that he was "unlawfully detained for no reason other than his Palestinian identity. 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."

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has cited a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Rubio made the comments in regard to the detainment and deportation of former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, saying that Rubio could determine if Khalil could legally remain in the US.

Rubio said, "The foreign policy of the United States champions core American interests and American citizens and condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective." He also said that Khalil's remaining in the US would create a "hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States."

An immigration judge "signed a temporary restraining order on Monday to keep Mahdawi from being moved out of Vermont while his case is pending," The Intercept reports.

Mahdawi was profiled by 60 Minutes in 2023 when he was speaking at a Columbia protest and said he could "empathize" with Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack against Israel. He was also named in a complaint from Students Against Antisemitism against the Trustees of Columbia University and Barnard College.

60 Minutes' Bill Whitaker spoke to Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who was opposed to the student protests against Israel. In the segment, Mahdawi was shown protesting on campus. He can be heard yelling, "Shame on Israel."

The 60 Minutes transcript reads: "We met another leader who has emerged on campus. Mohsen Mahdawi is co-president of Columbia's Palestinian Students Union. When then SJP and another group, Jewish Voice for Peace, were suspended last month- Mahdawi stepped up to lead a diverse, growing coalition of more than 80 campus groups."

In that interview, Mahdawi said that he empathized with Hamas and detailed his upbringing in the West Bank. He complained that then-university president Minouche Shafik "did not acknowledge the Palestinian side, at all" and said, “The pro-Israel side, wants the administration to silence us. Not giving us space to mourn. Or protest the killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza. It's a genocide for us."

Mahdawi told 60 Minutes that his friend was shot by Israeli soldiers when Mahdawi was ten years old and that he'd promised to avenge the death. "I promise, I promise, I will revenge," he recollected to Whitaker. 60 Minutes narration said, "Twenty-one years later, he says his revenge is showing the world the human face of Palestinians... the Hamas terror attack aroused old feelings."

"When somebody is hurting you, when you see this person is being punched in the face. And this feeling it is ‘You now feel my pain,’" Mahdawi said.

"But this Hamas attack wasn't a punch in the face. This was a horrible terror attack," said Whitaker.

"I did not say that I justify what Hamas has done," Mahdawi clarified. "I said I can empathize. To empathize is to understand the root cause, and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum. This is, for me, the path moving forward."

"At the event," the complaint against the Trustees of Columbia and Barnard read, regarding the protest event on November 9, 2023, just one month after the Oct. 7 massacre, "Mohsen Mahdawi, a student organizer, yelled, 'back' and 'shame' into a megaphone while instructing other students to physically push a small group of pro-Israel students back as the protestors conducted a 'die-in' and shouted, 'from the River to the Sea.' These incidents were reported to Public Safety both during and after the event. Gerald Rosberg, Senior Executive Vice President of Columbia University and Chair, Special Committee on Campus Safety, acknowledged after the rally that it was filled with 'threatening rhetoric and intimidation.'"

Mahdawi, reports The Intercept, "took a step back" from the student protests in 2024 to "focus on building bridges with Jewish and Israeli communities on campus." Davidai, who met with Mahdawi for coffee at the student's request in December 2023, later shared video of Mahdawi, in January 2024, saying that "there's nothing, nothing more honorable than dying for a noble cause for freedom, for humanity, for justice."