Supporters of Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi swarmed the Vermont Statehouse on Tuesday to demand his release from custody.
More than 300 people packed the Cedar Creek Room and surrounding hallways to hear lawmakers denounce the 34-year-old White River Junction resident’s widely publicized arrest last week in Colchester.
Mahdawi was taken into custody by hood- and mask-wearing plainclothes officers who whisked him away in an unmarked vehicle. The circumstances outraged many residents and lawmakers, some of whom vowed to take action.
Mahdawi grew up in a refugee camp in the West Bank, moved to the U.S. in 2014 and received his green card in 2015. He was a student at Columbia University and was planning to graduate next month before starting a master’s degree in the fall, according to legal filings.
Supporters say he was a vocal but peaceful advocate for Palestinian rights on campus in 2023 before he stepped away from those activities in 2024. He was arrested in a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office after going there for an interview as part of the process for getting citizenship.
He was being held at Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.
“This is not a partisan issue. This is a moment for Vermont to stand up,” Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (D-Chittenden-Southeast) said. “What we are asking for is due process, not disappearance!”
Ram Hinsdale praised the people who have stood up for Mahdawi during and since his arrest, including Sen. Becca White (D-Windsor), who posted videos online of Mahdawi being led away in cuffs. The videos helped serve as a call to action that helped slow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as they tried to swiftly to remove Mahdawi from the state, Ram Hinsdale said.
“That brought visibility to a situation that the federal government would like to render invisible,” she said. “That is what it is going to take — slowing ICE down and coming extremely close, if not beginning to interfere, with their illegal disappearances.”
Ram Hinsdale also praised Vermont’s Congressional delegation for speaking out strongly against Mahdawi’s arrest, particularly U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) who met with Mahdawi in prison and posted a video.
In it, Mahdawi, tells the senator that his advocacy has always been for a peaceful solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
“My work has been centered on peacemaking,” he told the senator. “I’m being a human. My empathy … extends beyond the Palestinian people, and my empathy extends to the Jews and the Israelis.”
White praised Mahdawi as a peaceful person, a “bridge builder” who has established friendships in the Upper Valley. Watching him get arrested was deeply frightening; the following morning in the Senate cloakroom, she found herself suddenly sobbing, she said. She asked attendees to take an oath to nonviolence and to protect the vulnerable.
“We have to hold each other accountable to this commitment. And it will be tested,” she said.
Senate leaders last week called on Gov. Phil Scott to stop letting immigration officials hold people in Vermont prisons. He has declined to do so, saying they’d be moved to distant prisons.
On Tuesday morning, the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring that it “strongly objects to the manner and circumstances under which U.S. immigration authorities arrested and detained Mohsen Mahdawi” and called for him to be “released immediately from detention.”
After the press conference, hundreds of people joined Vermont Interfaith Action to march around downtown Montpelier.
A U.S. District Court judge last week ordered that Mahdawi was not to be removed from the state. The next hearing in his case is scheduled for Wednesday, April 23, in Burlington.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2025.
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