Mohsen Mahdawi, who helped lead the protests at Columbia before stepping away from them over a year ago, finally had his day in court. It did not go well for the Administration.
www.mynbc5.com/...
Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi was released from federal custody on Wednesday morning following a hearing at the federal courthouse in Burlington.
Mahdawi will be allowed to keep permanent resident in Vermont and will still be allowed to go to New York City to attend school and graduate from Columbia University. He will also be allowed to meet with his legal team…
The judge compared the recent period of migrants and immigrants being detained to the era of McCarthyism and the infamous "Red Scare," saying that those periods in American history are not ones we should be proud of.
One huge thing in Mohsen’s favor was that his defense team was very quickly able to prevent him from being transferred out of Vermont — though it was close:
Mahdawi walked out of the courtroom minutes after the judge announced his decision from the bench to a raucous crowd of several hundred supporters, whom he led in several anti-war chants. Mahdawi said that when he was arrested earlier this month, he was immediately driven to the airport to be sent to an out-of-state holding facility — but missed the flight by nine minutes.
The other high profile cases have not been so fortunate. Nonetheless, we now have a precedent for release at the federal level, which I’m hoping has an effect on the others.
Another thing in Mohsen’s favor was the ridiculousness of the Administration’s claims:
The government cited two reports filed in Vermont years ago — including a police report from the Windsor Police Department in 2015 in which a local gun shop owner described Mahdawi as suspicious and alleged he made violent comments about Jewish people, as well as a report from a 2019 border crossing that said Mahdawi was caught with illegally possessed drugs on his way back from Canada.
In a response filed Tuesday, Mahdawi’s lawyers said both incidents were “unsubstantiated allegations that have long been dismissed.”
In particular, Mahdawi wrote under penalty of perjury that he never said the statements attributed to him by the gun shop owner in 2015, and said he believes the allegations may have been motivated by racial stereotypes. He said he met with the Windsor Police Department and the FBI afterwards, and that the FBI agent similarly suspected the report was motivated by racial bias and notified Mahdawi that the investigation had “cleared” him a few months later. (Judge Geoffrey Crawford has requested that the FBI agent provide testimony about that investigation at the hearing Wednesday morning.)
Regarding the 2019 border incident, Mahdawi said he had only prescription medication and vitamins in the car, and that he believes subsequent testing confirmed this. He said he accepted court diversion in that case even though he did nothing wrong, and that the matter was later expunged.
Profiling, perhaps? /s
In the meantime, though, his deportation case continues:
U.S. District Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford ruled from the bench, allowing Mahdawi to walk free after more than two weeks in a Vermont prison while his deportation case continues in immigration court. A remote hearing in that case is scheduled for tomorrow.
Still, from his lawyers’ point of view, release is a big deal. From the Grey Lady:
“Today’s victory cannot be overstated. It is a victory for Mohsen who gets to walk free today out of this court,” said Shezza Abboushi Dallal, a member of Mr. Mahdawi’s legal team. “And it is also a victory for everyone else in this country invested in the very ability to dissent, who want to be able to speak out for the causes that they feel a moral imperative to lend their voices to and want to do that without fear that they will be abducted by masked men.”
Here is a video of Mohsen, so you can get a solid feel for how wrong ICE and Marco Rubio are about Mohsen, who as a Palestinian raised in the West Bank is nonetheless a pacifist, Buddhist and a Unitarian.
