Portside

The Palestinian activist discusses the Columbia protests, ICE detention and free speech in the U.S. The government wanted others like him to fear them. It wanted noncitizens and immigrants to stop speaking out. If they could do this to Khalil...

A federal judge freed Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student leader at Columbia University, who was part of the pro-Palestine protests. “The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,”

He is widely known in the upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, where he has been based since moving to the United States more than a decade ago, as a spiritual man who grew up Muslim, a practicing Buddhist, and whose closest friends are Jewish.