When federal officials led a handcuffed Mohsen Mahdawi out of an office building in northern Vermont on Monday, he became the latest international student whom the Trump administration had apparently targeted for speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza.
But those who know Mahdawi say it’s absurd to suggest he “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” as the president has said of protesters at Columbia University where he was a student. Rather, they describe him as a peaceful 34-year-old Palestinian who had a remarkable journey from a refugee camp in the West Bank to a cabin in rural Vermont to an Ivy League institution in New York City.
He is widely known in the upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire, where he has been based since moving to the United States more than a decade ago, as a spiritual man who grew up Muslim, is a practicing Buddhist, and whose closest friends are Jewish.
Palestinian student Mohsen Madawi was arrested during a visit to the immigration office in Colchester.
“He is such an advocate for peace. He is such an opponent of any kind of violence,” said Rabbi Dov Taylor, who leads Chavurat Ki-tov, a Jewish cultural and educational organization in Woodstock, Vt. “His love just comes out in what he says.”
Simon Dennis, a carpenter and a former selectboard member in nearby Hartford, described Mahdawi as “a person of great gracefulness and dignity and gravitas” who is “destined to go forward and do great things in the world.”
Mahdawi, who was set to graduate this spring, was being held Tuesday in Vermont’s Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.
On Wednesday evening, some 200 supporters gathered in a windswept field several hundred yards from the prison. They hoisted Palestinian flags and signs calling for his release. An organizer, Jesse Lubin of Burlington, encouraged the crowd “to be loud enough so that he might be able to hear us” from inside the prison.
Crystal Cole of St. Albans told fellow protesters that she was there to demonstrate that even residents of this rural county on the Canadian border were outraged about Mahdawi’s detention.
“People up here in Franklin County know just as well as everyone else across the state, across the country, and across the world that free speech is a right, kidnapping is a wrong, and we refuse to stand for it,” she said.
By all accounts, Mahdawi has assiduously accumulated friends in the Upper Valley since moving from the West Bank in 2014. He’s done so while working as a bank teller, joining faith events, speaking at lectures and protests on the Middle East, and serving as a jack-of-all-trades at Dan & Whit’s, a popular general store in Norwich.
“Everyone loved him,” said Dan Fraser, a former owner and manager. “The town loved him. The town knows him.”
Mahdawi has lived for years in Fraser’s home in Hartford. He attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania before transferring to Columbia in 2021. He was expecting to enter graduate school there in the fall for international affairs.
Mahdawi has been a permanent resident, or green card holder, since 2015, according to his attorneys, and appeared on track to attain citizenship. He had been in hiding after a friend and fellow Columbia student organizer, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained on March 8, according to friends.
In recent weeks, he was summoned to a US Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, purportedly to take a civics test, the final step in the process. He feared the test was a ruse, friends said, but he felt he had no choice but to show up.
“He knew this was a setup and was prepared for what was happening,” said Michael Denmeade, a retired therapist who befriended Mahdawi but has since moved to Missouri. “I think he also trusted that he didn’t want to be on the run.”
Sure enough, Mahdawi was detained after appearing for the test Monday and led by men in hoods into an unmarked vehicle.
Mahdawi’s support network sprang into action. Friends had previously established a group chat, called “Just in case -Mohsen,” to strategize, and some had accompanied him to the test. One, Christopher Helali, quickly posted video of Mahdawi making peace signs with both hands as he was taken away.
His lawyers had prepared in advance a habeas petition seeking his immediate release and calling for the courts to keep him in Vermont. Soon after it was filed, a federal judge, William K. Sessions III, barred the government from whisking Mahdawi away to another jurisdiction, as has happened recently in similar cases.
All three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation weighed in to support him Monday, and the state’s Republican governor, Phil Scott, followed suit Tuesday in a statement criticizing the shadowy nature of Mahdawi’s detention.
Luna Droubi, one of Mahdawi’s attorneys, said his legal team had not received “any information or basis for his detention,” but that it appeared to be “based on defamatory statements by non-governmental actors and opponents of Palestinian human rights.”
In a court filing Monday, the attorneys pointed to social media posts in which Betar US, a militant Zionist organization, called for Mahdawi’s deportation.
“Jihadi bastard got nailed during an immigration interview,” the group wrote Monday afternoon, employing emojis depicting tearful laughter. “We confirm we provided info on him and many others.”
Liz Blum, a Norwich resident and cofounder of Jewish Voice for Peace Vermont and New Hampshire, spoke alongside Mahdawi at protests in the Upper Valley. She described accusations of antisemitism leveled at him as “gaslighting,” saying he simply fought for equality.
Mahdawi was born and raised in Far’a, a Palestinian refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank — part of the third generation of his family to live there. In interviews, he has described sharing two rooms with nearly a dozen relatives and said his brother died at 8 after Israeli forces prevented him from getting medical care. He’s said he witnessed Israeli soldiers killing his best friend when he was 12 and said he was shot in the leg at 15.
“I saw the Israelis as the reason for my misery,” he told the Valley News in a 2020 profile.
While studying at Birzeit University in the West Bank, he met an American and followed her to the Upper Valley, where she was attending the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. They married and later divorced, but he remained in the area.
David Bisno, a retired eye surgeon, met Mahdawi when he was working as a teller at Ledyard National Bank in Hanover, N.H.
“I was making a deposit and was just taken with him,” Bisno said.
When Mahdawi shared his story, Bisno invited him to speak to a class he was teaching on the Middle East.
“He said, ‘I’ve never spoken to a group before in English, but I’d be happy to try,’” Bisno recalled. “People were spellbound. You could’ve heard a pin drop as he spoke to this group of 100.”
Denmeade, the retired therapist, met Mahdawi at a Unitarian Universalist service in Hartland and later invited him to live with his family, saying that he had become “like a son.”
“He had a lot of night terrors,” Denmeade recalled. “He saw a lot of horrible things as a young child.”
Over time, friends say, Mahdawi’s views evolved, and he came to draw a distinction between Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and American Jews he’d befriended here.
“Despite his family having suffered irrevocably from the Israeli Defense Forces, he is as warm and compassionate and friendly with Jews as with everybody else,” said Bismo, who is Jewish. “He wants to try to find a path to peace for these two peoples.”
Friends say that’s why Mahdawi stepped back from the protests at Columbia in March 2024 as they grew more heated.
“He was getting a lot of grief from Palestinians because he wants a peaceful process for his people, and he knows you have to get the Jewish people at the table as well,” Denmeade said. “It’s hard to be hated by both sides — at least, the extremism on both sides.”
In recent years, Mahdawi has been working on a 21-acre plot of land he bought in rural West Fairlee. He’s built roads, dug a pond, and constructed a small cabin. Friends say this is the most cherished place in Mahdawi’s world — and where he sees his future.
“His dream is to establish a retreat center there where Palestinian and Israeli kids can come and meet each other and get to know one another and listen to each other and become a force for peace,” said Taylor, the rabbi from Woodstock. “That’s who he is.”
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
