The Deportation Doctrine
How the Trump administration is using foreign policy loopholes to silence student protesters, and why Mohsen Mahdawi's case should alarm us all
Mohsen Mahdawi walked into a routine citizenship interview in Vermont on Monday expecting the next step toward becoming an American citizen. Instead, he was detained by federal agents and disappeared into a legal black hole. His attorneys say they still don’t know exactly where he is. The only certainty is that Mahdawi, a Palestinian man, U.S. resident, and Columbia University graduate, is now the latest student protester to be targeted by the Trump administration for deportation, not because of any crime, but because of who he is and what he believes.
His case is as chilling as it is emblematic. For more than a decade, Mahdawi has lived in the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident. He was born in a refugee camp in the West Bank, completed his philosophy degree at Columbia last year, and had been planning to begin a master’s program at the university this fall. But in the eyes of the Trump administration, none of that matters. What matters is that Mahdawi co-founded Columbia’s Palestinian Student Union and has been a visible voice in protests against the war in Gaza. His attorney, Luna Droubi, alleges that Mahdawi’s detention is a political act, “an attempt to silence those who speak out against the atrocities in Gaza,” she said. “It is also unconstitutional.”
This is not an isolated incident. Mahdawi’s co-founder, Mahmoud Khalil, is also in detention. So is Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested after co-authoring an op-ed in a student paper. In all three cases, there is no public evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Instead, the administration is invoking an obscure and virtually unchecked authority, a provision of immigration law that allows the Secretary of State to order someone deported if they are deemed to pose an “adverse foreign policy consequence” for the United States. Under this Kafkaesque doctrine, it doesn’t matter what you did. It only matters that someone in Washington finds your presence inconvenient.
That someone is Marco Rubio.
As Secretary of State, Rubio has invoked the foreign policy clause to claim that student protesters like Khalil are undermining U.S. interests by speaking out against Israeli policy conflating criticism of a government with terrorism, dissent with treason. In Mahdawi’s case, there is no allegation of violence or support for violence. In fact, during a 2023 interview on 60 Minutes, he went out of his way to condemn antisemitic rhetoric at a protest, telling CBS’s Bill Whitaker, “You don’t represent us.” Yet that hasn’t stopped extremist pro-Israel organizations like Betar USA from circulating Mahdawi’s image online with the words “deport list” stamped beneath it, and it hasn’t stopped the federal government from acting on that list.
The word for this is retaliation. And if we are honest, there is another word too, fascism.
The same administration that forcibly removed Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the U.S. in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling is now holding students like Mahdawi in undisclosed locations, citing memos instead of evidence and targeting protest instead of crime. They are using immigration status not as a matter of law, but as a tool of punishment. Say the wrong thing, stand with the wrong people, protest the wrong war and your green card might as well be printed on tissue paper.
It’s worth asking how an administration that claims to be trimming federal waste has the time and staffing to orchestrate extrajudicial detentions of student protesters. Even as State Department offices face deep staffing cuts, career diplomats are pushed out, and international programs are slashed, there seems to be no shortage of attention for memos targeting college activists who challenge the president’s worldview. The mission has changed, from diplomacy to retribution.
That should terrify all of us. Because if this government can silence a philosophy student from Columbia, it can silence anyone. The Constitution doesn’t stop at the gates of a refugee camp. It doesn’t end with a visa stamp. And if it does, if we allow it to, then the problem isn’t Mahdawi. The problem is us.