When fascism hits home: My student fought for peace and justice — then ICE took him

There’s an old adage regarding dangerous behavior: It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. One could say the same thing about fascism denial, particularly when it comes to privileged individuals in the United States who have — until very nearly this point — wished away warnings about rising fascism in their country as fanciful thinking.

But it seems increasingly difficult to characterize what’s happening in American politics in 2025 through fascism-denial goggles when the nation’s president laments, using eugenics-style rhetoric, that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country” – particularly as the federal government brutally cracks down on immigrants through legally dubious and politically motivated revocations of visas and deportations. Nowhere is this clearer than in the targeting of international students who have been involved in protests of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza.

This issue has hit home for me personally, after numerous media reports that a student activist at Columbia University, Mohsen Mahdawi, was “arrested by immigration officials as he attended an interview as part of his application for US citizenship.” Mahdawi holds a green card as a legal U.S. resident, and was in the final stages of the legal process for obtaining citizenship. He is also legally protected under the First Amendment, like every other citizen or legal resident, when it comes to expressing his views in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (or pretty much anything else), whether or not this administration likes what he says.

Mahdawi’s lawyer declared that his client had been detained “in direct retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and because of his identity as a Palestinian.” This arrest is one of many (at least 300) ordered by an administration that is using the rhetoric of fighting antisemitism to target particular groups – Muslim students and Palestinians in particular – for detainment and deportation.

I know Mohsen Mahdawi because he was my student at Lehigh University before he transferred to Columbia. He took several of my classes, including a course on American political institution, and my course on social movements, prior to and during the COVID pandemic. In all my time at Lehigh, Mohsen was one of my most gifted, committed, thoughtful and engaging students. I knew he would do great things after transferring to Columbia and beyond. While I was sad to see him leave Lehigh, I was also happy to lobby for him, writing a letter of recommendation and meeting with him to strategize about his transfer application.

Students like Mohsen, in fact, are why I do what I do as an educator. In our many conversations inside the class and out, we spoke about countless political and social issues. I remember his deep passion for politics and his commitment to nonviolence, particularly in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was a dedicated campus activist who worked to educate fellow students, both about politics more broadly and about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular.

Mohsen is a Palestinian refugee who grew up in the occupied West Bank, and moved to the U.S. during the 2010s. I remember when he told me about his aspirations to play a pivotal role in the future, working toward impacting American political discourse in a way that would help broker a long-term peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. Like other peace activists, he wanted a solution that was conducive to the creation of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state. I also remember thinking that his activism, although based on nonviolent, pacifist principles, was likely to make him a political target in a country that has become notorious for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitic bigotry. Sadly, these concerns have become reality following his arrest.

Mohsen’s future remains very much uncertain. His attorney has applied for a federal court order to temporarily restrain the government from deporting him. But his fate, like those of many other Palestinian activists, hangs in the balance depending on how the courts respond when it comes to protecting essential free speech rights.

As a U.S. citizen, I’m fortunate not to have been targeted (at least not yet) in the Trump administration’s war on dissent and in its dark turn toward authoritarian and fascistic politics, which is especially directed against immigrants working on behalf of Palestine. I don’t know how much longer that good fortunewill continue. We see this president declaring an all-out war on higher education, and universities like my own targeted by the federal government for alleged antisemitism, even though our students, faculty and administration have made efforts to create an environment on campus where antisemitism is not tolerated. Ultimately, such efforts don’t seem to matter to the Trump administration, which has promised to “root out” “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within our country” – fascist rhetoric targeting colleges and universities for alleged leftist-radical bias.

American intellectual culture has never had a good track record when it comes to protecting critics of Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. I remember a mentor of mine – a Palestinian professor who taught me for years during my undergraduate and graduate years – warning that I should avoid any academic and scholarly work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because the U.S. has never respected that sort of work as legitimate scholarly analysis and discourse. My mentor was obviously speaking from experience: He had been attacked for decades as enabling “terrorism” for his criticisms of Israel, despite his longstanding commitment to nonviolence and a peaceful two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, and despite his unequivocal rejection of antisemitic ideology.

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Americans are at a crossroads when it comes to the rise of fascism. We can choose to look the other way as political activists are targeted, detained, repressed and deported for their ethnic backgrounds and political views. We can do nothing as the Trump administration sends up trial balloons meant to destroy what is left of academic and intellectual freedom and the First Amendment right to express one’s opinions – independent of how controversial those opinions may be. But a choice to do nothing is in fact an abdication of our basic freedoms, and only enables an administration that is set on destroying individual rights and political dissent. By remaining silent, we implicitly embrace rising fascist politics. But a nation cannot survive, democratically speaking, when an administration spits in the face of due process, legal rights and the rule of law.

Alternatively, Americans can choose to fight back against the assault on our democracy. That will likely require mass protest against the Trump administration. It may indeed require a national, nonviolent strike action in which citizens utilize protest to make the country ungovernable, as well as the impeachment and removal of a president who has made clear that he’s dedicated to dismantling the remnants of American democracy and the rule of law. Time is quickly running out for the people of this country to take a stand. If we don’t act soon, there will be little left to defend.