A US immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration's efforts to deport Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student who was arrested last year after participating in anti-Israel protests, Reuters reported.
The decision was detailed by Mahdawi’s legal team in a court filing on Tuesday with a federal appeals court in New York. The court had been reviewing a previous ruling that led to his release from immigration custody in April.
This case is the latest instance in which an immigration judge has rejected a move brought as part of a broader effort by the administration to detain and deport non-citizen students who hold anti-Israel views and engaged in campus activism.
Immigration Judge Nina Froes, based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, wrote in a February 13 decision that the US Department of Homeland Security failed to meet its burden of proving that Mahdawi was removable. The department had sought to justify the deportation using an unauthenticated document signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The administration retains the option of challenging the judge's decision before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the US Department of Justice.
Mahdawi was arrested in April 2025 upon arriving for an interview regarding his US citizenship petition. At that time, a judge swiftly ordered the administration not to deport him from the US or remove him from the state of Vermont.
After two weeks in detention, Mahdawi was released from the federal courthouse in Burlington, Vermont, following an order by US District Judge Geoffrey Crawford.
In a similar case on January 29, an immigration judge terminated removal proceedings against Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk. She had been targeted after co-authoring an editorial that criticized her school's response to the war in Gaza.
Last month, a federal judge in Boston ruled that the administration had adopted an unlawful policy of detaining and deporting scholars like Ozturk and Mahdawi, noting that the policy chilled the free speech of non-citizen academics at universities. The Justice Department is currently appealing that decision.