Above photo: Mohsen Mahdawi addressing the press and supporters outside a Vermont courthouse following his release, on April 30, 2025. Liz Crampton/Politico.
Power and Pushback.
Two students detained by the Trump administration over their Palestine activism are out on bail as courts continue to rule against the White House.
Since the last installment of this newsletter, two students detained by the Trump administration have been released on bail.
Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student who was kidnapped by agents during a citizenship interview, was released from a Vermont correctional facility on April 30.
“The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,” said U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford.
Mahdawi addressed a crowd of supporters and reporters upon his release.
“For anybody who is doubting justice, this is a light of hope and faith in the justice system in America,” Mahdawi told a crowd outside the courthouse after his release. “We are witnessing the fight for justice in America, which means a true democracy, and the fight for justice for Palestinians, which means that both liberation are interconnected, because no one of us is free unless we all are.”
He then called out the administration directly: “To President Trump and his cabinet, I am not afraid of you.”
“Today’s victory cannot be overstated. It is a victory for Mohsen who gets to walk free today out of this court,” said one of Mahdawi’s attorneys, Shezza Abboushi Dallal. “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.”
Trump officials have repeatedly claimed that student activists like Mahdawi have engaged in antisemitic acts, despite providing no evidence of this.
“When you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans, and harass Jews, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country,” said Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin last month.
“So for them to accuse me of this is not going to work, because I am a person who actually has condemned antisemitism,” Mahdawi told ABC News in an interview conducted after his release. “And I believe that the fight against antisemitism and the fight to free Palestine go hand in hand, because, as Martin Luther King said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk is back in Massachusetts after a Vermont judge ordered her release from the Louisiana detention facility where she was being held.
The Trump administration claims that Ozturk was arrested because she has engaged in pro-Hamas activities, but she was clearly targeted for co-authoring an Op-Ed calling on her school to sever its ties with Israel and acknowledge the genocide in Gaza.
In his May 9 ruling, U.S. District Court Judge William K. Sessions III said the government had introduced no evidence linking Ozturk to Hamas and that her detention could stifle free speech for “millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”
“America is the greatest democracy in the world, and I believe in those values that we share,” Ozturk told reporters after arriving at Logan Airport in Boston. “I have faith in the American system of justice. This has been a very difficult time for me, for my community, for my community at Tufts, in Turkey, but I am so grateful for all the support, kindness and care.”
Ozturk also expressed solidarity with her fellow detainees in Louisiana.
“Please don’t forget about all the wonderful women in the immigration detention system,” she said. “I was so tired of witnessing cries and pain that can all be preventable.”
On May 6, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Trump administration’s attempt to move Mahmoud Khalil’s case out of New Jersey.
“It is the fundamental job of the judiciary to stand up to this kind of government manipulation of our basic rights,” said ACLU attorney Brett Max Kaufman in a statement. “We hope the court’s order sends a strong message to other courts around the country facing government attempts to shop for favorable jurisdictions by moving people detained on unconstitutional immigration charges around and making it difficult or impossible for their lawyers to know where to seek their immediate release.”
Khalil recent wrote an open letter to his newborn son.
“Loving you is not separate from the struggle for liberation,” it reads. “It is liberation itself. I fight for you, and for every Palestinian child whose life deserves safety, tenderness and freedom. I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction. And I will spend my life making up for the moments we lost – starting with this one, writing to you with all the love in my heart.”
Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian doctoral student at the University of Alabama, is leaving the United States. He was arrested in March, with the Department of Homeland Security claiming that he posed “national security concerns.”
The visa-related charge for his initial arrest was dropped, but Doroudi’s attorney, David Rozas, said his client still faced the possibility of “prolonged detention.”
“Mr. Doroudi made the difficult decision to ask for and was granted voluntary departure and return to Iran in order to avoid prolonged and unnecessary detention. He turned and looked at me and said, ‘I love this country, but they don’t want me here so I will go home,’” told CNN.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles has ruled that Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri’s wrongful detention case will proceed in Virginia, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to move it to Texas, where he is currently detained.
Khan Suri’s legal team says he has been moved across five different facilities since he was arrested outside his Virginia home on March 17.
“In this important ruling, the court has rightfully rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to spirit Dr. Khan Suri away from Virginia to manufacture jurisdiction in whatever court it pleases,” said Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Astha Sharma Pokharel in a statement. “We will now continue fighting for Dr. Khan Suri’s freedom — his freedom to be with his family in Virginia, to continue his studies and work at Georgetown, and to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.”
A federal judge has ordered the release of former University of Massachusetts student Efe Ercelik.
Ercelik was arrested in November for allegedly assaulting a pro-Israel counter-protester. He pleaded not guilty and was released on $250 bail. He would later plead guilty to misdemeanors that required no jail time.
Over a year later, the ultra-Zionist group Betar tweeted, “We identify Efe Ercelik as one here on a visa and we have submitted his name for deportation. There’s so many of these bastards nationwide he’s an egregious one in Massachusetts, a rotten state.”
A short time later, his visa was revoked, and he was detained.
In her ruling US District Court Judge Angel Kelley, noted the alleged physical assault but said Ercelik’s detention was clearly motivated by his support for Gaza. Here part of her 31-page ruling:
None of Petitioner’s conduct is protected, as his alleged physical altercation with another protestor falls within an unprotected category; however, this fails to acknowledge Petitioner’s other conduct, which certainly falls within the penumbras of protected speech. This protected speech includes engaging in a counter protest, waving of a Palestinian flag, the showing of his middle fingers, and his political, albeit sometimes crude, speech, all in the name of advocating for the Palestinian people. See, e.g., Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, 404-05 (1989) (“Especially pertinent to this case are our decisions recognizing the communicative nature of conduct relating to flags. Attaching a peace sign to the flag; refusing to salute the flag; and displaying a red flag, we have held, all may find shelter under the First Amendment.” (citation omitted)); Cantrell v. Brunswick Me. Police, No. 23-CV-00283-NT, 2024 WL 1859800, at *7 (D. Me. Apr. 29, 2024) (“Any reasonable officer would know that a citizen who raises [his] middle finger – an all-too-familiar gesture – engages in speech protected by the First Amendment.” … As a result, Petitioner was engaged in protected speech. …
Petitioner remained free on bail until the resolution of his criminal matter on May 7. ICE took no interest in Petitioner until March of 2025, a period of at least 16 months. During that 16-month period, Petitioner complied with his conditions of release and even traveled out of the country on multiple occasions, interacting with immigration authorities at the airport. Instead, Respondents’ pursuit of detention seems to have been almost exclusively triggered by Betar Worldwide. On April 8, 2025, Betar Worldwide tweeted the profile of Petitioner hosted on the website for Canary Mission. Canary Mission and Betar Worldwide commonly identify pro-Palestinian students, professors, and professionals as targets for removal proceedings. The tweet from Betar Worldwide read: “We identify Efe Ercelik as one here on a visa and we have submitted his name for deportation. There’s so many of these bastards nationwide he’s an egregious one in Massachusetts, a rotten state.” On April 9, just the day after the Betar Worldwide tweet, the State Department issued a memo stating that Petitioner had been submitted by DHS/ICE for review on March 31, 2025 and revoking his visa, effective immediately. The memo itself identifies Petitioner’s protected conduct as a basis for the revocation, namely his “activities” and “rhetoric.
Hunger Strikes
Amid the draconian crackdown on campus activism, a number of students are engaging in hunger strikes in solidarity with Palestinians.
Roughly two dozen California students began a fast on May 5, calling attention to the developing famine in Palestine.
“We, the students of San Francisco, Sacramento, Long Beach, and San Jose State Universities, are beginning a united hunger strike in solidarity with the two million Palestinians at risk of starvation in Gaza,” said Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in a statement.
On May 11, six Yale students joined the strike. They are all connected to Yalies4Palestine, the SJP group that recently had its student organization status revoked after protesting Itamar Ben-Gvir’s recent visit to New Haven.
Yalies4Palestine released a statement on the strike, detailing their demands:
Following in the spirit of our peers at the California State Universities, we will be joining the hunger strike for Gaza.
Yale has watched 19 months of genocide go by and said nothing, SHAME. Yale has allowed over 61 days of zero food or aid to enter Gaza, allowing people to starve, SHAME. Yale has allowed the revoking of student visas and the suppression of free speech, SHAME.
As students we reject our university and government’s complicity. We must divest financially and ideologically NOW.
We demand that Yale:
1. Adopt Human Rights Screening for Investment Policy
2. Financially Divest
3. Ideologically Divest
4. Repeal Restrictive Free Speech Policies
5. Protect Student Protesters and strikers
By Monday, the protest spread to Stanford University, where at least 10 students and 3 faculty members began a hunger strike.
“We know what a hunger strike does to the body, and we have felt pressured after so much repression and lack of movement, or even listening from the administration, to take such a drastic measure,” one of the strikers told NPR. “We’re here because the people of Gaza have been starving, and we recognize our privilege as students in a very wealthy and elite institution, taking on this tactic.”
The Stanford hunger strikers released a statement that was first published at Mondoweiss.
“Yesterday we began our hunger strike. In every slowed minute we remember the children of Gaza, now surviving on boiled weeds and muddy water,” it reads. “It is now day 584 of the genocide in Gaza, and more than 60,000 Palestinians have been murdered by the Zionist entity. Just last week, at least four separate massacres have occurred in Gaza, leaving hundreds murdered and wounded. Two months have passed since Israel’s total siege of the strip on March 2nd, completely blocking all food and aid from entering Gaza. Israel has completely weaponized food; aid convoys remain blocked, grain silos stand empty and parents barter wedding rings for flour that never arrives. A generation is being starved in full view of the world.”
The strikes are already delivering some results. Shortly before this newsletter went out, San Francisco State University (SFSU) students ended their strike after reaching an agreement with the administration.
According to the General Union of Palestine Students at SFSU, the school “has committed to expanding implementation of our divestment policy” and agreed to work toward partnerships with Palestinian universities.
Be sure to follow our site and newsletters for further updates on these developments and the wider student protest movement.