NEW YORK — Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian activist with a green card at Columbia University, was detained by federal immigration authorities on Monday when he went in for a U.S. citizenship test in Vermont, his lawyers said.

Mahdawi co-founded the official Palestinian student club on Columbia’s campus, known as “DAR,” with Mahmoud Khalil — another legal permanent resident targeted by ICE over his student activism.

Mahdawi’s lawyer Luna Droubi told the Daily News he planned to return for a master’s degree at Columbia.

“People ask me why I would want to become a citizen of a country committing genocide,” Mahdawi told The Intercept of the possibility of becoming a U.S. citizen in an interview just prior to his arrest.

“I have faith in the people living in this country. The government is not the people.”

Mahdawi, who has lived in the country for the past decade, sat for a lengthy interview with reporter Akela Lacy on Sunday night, saying he feared his naturalization interview the next day could be a trap. The Intercept, which was first to report Mahdawi’s arrest, said he sheltered in place for more than three weeks after Khalil was arrested on March 8.

Mahdawi has not been accused of any specific crimes. Instead, the federal government has relied on a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act to deport individuals who allegedly harm U.S. foreign policy interests. The same clause was used against Khalil, who was found by an immigration judge to be removable from the country on Friday.

Attorneys for Mahdawi will challenge his detention in Vermont federal court, filing a habeas corpus petition shortly after his arrest that accused the Trump administration of violating his free speech rights. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return a request for comment.

Mahdawi was born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, where his family still lives, according to court documents obtained by The News. He enrolled in Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, then transferred to Columbia in 2021.

There, he helped organized student protests at Columbia until March 2024, before activists launched a tent demonstration on the campus lawns and occupied an academic building, the petition said. He gave speeches at the rallies and appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes, where he said that as a child he witnessed an Israeli soldier fatally shoot his best friend.

At a campus demonstrations at the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Mahdawi had to get personally involved when another protester shouted antisemitic and racist profanities: “Shame on the person who called (for) ‘death to Jews,'” Mahdawi said through a megaphone, according to student newspaper Columbia Spectator.

The Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were later suspended in connection with the Nov. 9, 2023 protest.

He finished his philosophy credits last year and was expected to graduate next month, before starting in the fall at Columbia’s international affairs school. Columbia declined to comment, citing federal student privacy laws.

Mahdawi had been repeatedly targeted on social media by the militant Zionist group Betar, which has claimed to have a “deport list” of pro-Palestinian student activists that it shares with the Trump administration.

With his arrest, Mahdawi became at least the third Columbia student with a green card to face arrest or be detained for their pro-Palestinian activism, including Khalil and undergraduate Yunseo Chung. Several more have had their student visas revoked for reasons that as of Monday remained unclear.

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