A judge's order to release Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi is a victory for us all.
Any green card holder who writes a letter to a local publication taking issue with U.S. foreign policy could be subject to deportation under the Trump administration's declared immigration policies.
Introduction: I have mentioned before that I have two Substack newsletters; this one, and an online newspaper that I publish for my Hudson Valley village of Croton-on-Hudson (about an hour north of Grand Central Terminal by train.)
Increasingly, and especially with Trump’s election, a publisher of a local publication has to think globally and report locally. With that in mind, I am republishing below today’s editorial in The Croton Chronicle about the Mahdawi case. Readers might also be interested in this opinion piece published today in the Columbia Spectator, “Mohsen Mahdawi worked with us on dialogue across differences.”
There are already efforts in the right-wing press to smear Mahdawi for an incident that occurred a decade ago, was investigated by the FBI, and found to be baseless, so please watch out for that as well, and beware of disinformation.
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Wednesday, April 30, U.S. District Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford ordered the release from detention of Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, whom the Trump administration is trying to deport because of his “pro-Palestinian” activism. Mahdawi has held a green card for the past decade, but he was detained by immigration officials when he showed up for an appointment in Vermont that was supposed to be a step towards becoming a U.S. citizen.
Mahdawi has been accused of no crimes. Instead, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a memo justifying his arrest that his activism “could undermine the Middle East peace process by reinforcing antisemitic sentiment.”
By this logic, even the many thousands of Jews in the United States who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza or its continuing occupation of the West Bank are guilty of antisemitism as well. But more fundamentally, by trying to decide which speech is permitted and which is not, the Trump administration is violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on a number of occasions, constitutional protections are not only for U.S. citizens, but for all “persons” present in the United States.
What does this have to do with Croton-on-Hudson and our local community? The answer is, everything. Under current administration policy, any non-citizen who wrote a letter to The Gazette or penned a Guest Editorial in the Chronicle—or any other local publication—could have their immigration status revoked and be subject to deportation.
That’s what is currently happening to Rumeysa Ozturk, a student at Tufts University in Massachusetts who, on March 25 of this year, was arrested on the street by ICE agents and is currently in detention in Louisiana (a judge had ordered that she be transferred to a facility in Vermont so she could more effectively work with her attorneys, but that order has been temporarily stayed by an appeals court.)
Ozturk is accused of no crime, nor has the government produced any evidence in court proceedings that she is working with Hamas or has expressed anti-semitic views. The basis on which she has been detained and on which the government is attempting to deport her consists merely of an opinion piece she published, together with three other students, in the March 26, 2024 edition of the Tufts Daily. That piece urged the university administration to adopt a resolution by the Tufts Community Union Senate that was critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and that called for Tufts to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
These are views that are held by millions of American citizens and many thousands of American Jews. According to our Constitution and its interpretation by our courts, non-citizens are entitled to hold and express such views as well. As Judge Crawford noted in his decision releasing Mohsen Mahdawi, the administration’s actions were reminiscent of the McCarthy era of the 1950s, which the judge noted was “not our proudest moment.”
(The same principles should apply to the case of Columbia University student and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who continues to be detained at a facility in Louisiana because of his political activism at the university. The Trump administration has produced no evidence that he has committed any crimes, nor has it been able to support early contentions that he was an agent of Hamas.)
This issue is not theoretical or academic. Under current Trump administration policy and practice, if a green card holder living in Croton wrote a letter to The Gazette or a Guest Editorial in the Chronicle criticizing Israel—or questioning the U.S.’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, its trade relations with Canada or China, its stance towards the civil war in Sudan, or its relationship with the European Union or NATO—immigration officers could swoop into Croton and arrest that individual on the grounds that they were undermining US. foreign policy.
They could come into the Black Cow and arrest them there; they could arrest them on the street in front of Croton-Harmon High School; they could arrest them in Senasqua Park; they could arrest them while going into our municipal building to sign up for a recreation card.
Nor are U.S. citizens necessarily protected from such arbitrary arrests, once we as a society cede such authority to government authorities. The cases of U.S. citizens being swept up in such dragnets are multiplying, and will continue to do so as long as such policies are tolerated.
So yes, this is a Croton matter, and it is an issue for Croton people. And these recent actions by immigration authorities, and the government officials who have unleashed them, might help explain why many in our village are not all that keen to cooperate with ICE, nor welcome its agents into our community.
The U.S. Constitution is for everyone, or it is for no one.
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Thank you, Michael. Well-written and incisive, as usual. Happy May Day. I'll be out there in the streets in Portland.