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A second Columbia University student is in custody, arrested by ICE and facing possible deportation as the Trump administration declared him to be one of the influential leaders behind the pro-Palestinian protests that ripped the campus apart last year. A federal judge, however, ordered Mohsen Mahdawi not be removed from Vermont, pending appeal of the case. While Mahdawi sits in jail in Vermont, Mahmoud Khalil has been languishing in a Louisiana jail cell for a month on similar charges. Defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman is the host of the podcast “Beyond the Legal Limit”, which can be found on the iHeart Radio app. He feels the federal judge in Mahdawi’s case is missing one key fact: he has been a student for an unusually long amount of time.
“What’s happening is, these are students that are pro-Hamas,” Lichtman told host Larry Mendte. “These are students that are fomenting terrorism on campus, they’re causing violence, and with regards to the latest student who was grabbed in Vermont… this is a student that has been a college student since 2008. He has been a college student now for 17 years, and the reason (is because) that’s the way you get a green card. You just continue to be a student forever.”
Lichtman says these students are only interested in spreading anti-Semitic hatred, which means there’s only one way for students studying in the United States to act if they really want to stay here: “Simply, if you’re a non-citizen, you can’t destroy the campus, you can’t harass students, you can’t disrupt classes, or else you’ve got to go back to whatever dump that you’re from.”
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