On November 9, 2023, a little over a month into Israel’s war in Gaza, two student groups at Columbia University, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), held a protest on campus. Now, seventeen months later, the protest and its aftermath are the subject of national scrutiny as the Trump administration goes after pro-Palestine demonstrators with little pushback from the university itself. In fact, the Trump administration drew on Columbia University’s own mischaracterization of the protest in its effort to arrest and potentially deport U.S. legal resident Mohsen Mahdawi—a characterization that former university President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik privately acknowledged was inaccurate, according to audio obtained by Drop Site News.
Mahdawi, a green card holder since 2015, was arrested in Vermont on Monday after being called in by immigration authorities for what he thought was a naturalization interview as part of the process to gain U.S. citizenship. He is the third green-card holder at Columbia that the Trump administration is moving to deport under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that alleges their activism has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”—after Palestinian and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and fellow demonstrator Yunseo Chung.