Atop a forested ridge in West Fairlee, a mile off the main road passing through the village below, Mohsen Mahdawi was back this week — for a few hours, at least — where he feels most at home.

Under a clear sky Monday evening, Mahdawi watched from the deck of his remote one-room cabin as the sun slowly sank behind the green hills on the far side of the valley.

“This is like candy to the eyes,” he said. “Fresh air, no traffic. I’m at peace here.”

Mahdawi returns to the 21-acre parcel that he bought in 2020 as often as his schedule affords.

But Mahdawi, 34, is at a stage in his life, where his time is seldom his own.

On April 30, U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered Mahdawi’s release from federal custody after he was held in a northern Vermont prison for 16 days.

His arrest, during what was supposed to be the next step in his ongoing effort to gain citizenship, drew national headlines.

Now, he spends countless hours in meetings and in conference calls with the team of two dozen New England and New York lawyers from private firms and the American Civil Liberties Union who have taken up his fight to remain in the U.S.

While his attorneys probably prefer he limit his appearances in the public spotlight — and avoid even more of the Trump administration’s wrath — Mahdawi has made himself available almost daily to state and national media that seek him out.

It’s not only his quest for freedom that has captured attention. His willingness to publicly stand up to the Trump regime, when so many of us have been cowed into silence, sets him apart.

“They can imprison me, they can try to deport me,” Mahdawi said when we met Monday in West Fairlee. “I’m not going to remain silent. It is a chance to share the Palestinian story that has not been heard.”

It was speaking out that made Mahdawi, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp, a prime target of the Trump administration’s crackdown on student protesters in the first place.

Although Mahdawi hasn’t been accused of a crime, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had “secretly issued a memorandum” in March that alleges Mahdawi’s activism “could undermine the Middle East peace process by reinforcing antisemitic sentiment,” a recently-released federal court document revealed.

Mahdawi argues he was merely exercising his constitutional rights when he helped lead pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where he was an undergraduate student, majoring in philosophy.

In an introduction to a guest essay he wrote for The New York Times earlier this month, Mahdawi, a practicing Buddhist, was described as a “Palestinian human rights advocate.”

The Trump administration views him differently, and is doing everything in its power to rescind the green card that he’s held for more than a decade. So far, judges have refused to acquiesce to the government’s demands aimed at deporting Mahdawi, a lawful permanent U.S. resident since January 2015.

Federal prosecutors, who are carrying the president’s water, argue Mahdawi’s case is not about First Amendment rights, but it “obviously is,” Brett Stokes, director of Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Justice Reform Clinic, said when I called him this week.

The government is using several high-profile student cases, including Mahdawi’s, to “strike fear” into people, and not just non-citizens, said Stokes, who specialized in immigration law at a Denver firm before joining the South Royalton law school’s faculty in 2022.

The Trump administration is “signaling that if you go against this administration and are involved in speech or nonviolent acts it disagrees with, they can potentially hold you as a political prisoner,” Stokes said.

Upper Valley ties

When I heard that Mahdawi was helping lead pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia in late 2023, I wasn’t surprised. It’s not his nature to hide in the background when he sees injustice directly in front of him.

“Israel’s relentless killing and destruction in Gaza,” he wrote in the Times’ guest essay, is a “war of madness and revenge that relies on American weapons, funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars and justified by American politicians.”

I met Mahdawi in 2020 when he was working at Dan & Whit’s General Store in Norwich. A few months later, I visited the wooded property that he had recently purchased for $51,000 from a Vershire logger and his wife.

In December 2020, I wrote a two-part series about Mahdawi’s journey from the West Bank to the Upper Valley. He was born a third-generation refugee in Al-Far’a camp, where an estimated 8,000 Palestinians are squeezed onto 63 acres.

In 2015, Mahdawi was discovered, if you could call it that, while working as a bank teller in Hanover. David Bisno, a retired ophthalmologist, struck up a conversation one day while Mahdawi waited on him.

Bisno learned that Mahdawi had moved to the Upper Valley in 2014 with an American woman who was starting medical school at Dartmouth. The two met while both were studying at a West Bank university and later married. They bought a house in Windsor, which Mahdawi fixed up while waiting for his green card.

Bisno was teaching a class at Dartmouth’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute that explored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He asked Mahdawi to speak to the class of roughly 100 people, most of them older Upper Valley residents.

“In order to understand what life is really like in Palestine, I’d like to introduce you to someone who is from there,” Bisno told the class as Mahdawi nervously made his way to the front.

“Mohsen wasn’t as proficient in English as he is now, but people were spellbound by his story,” Bisno said in an interview for the 2020 series. “You could hear a pin drop.”

Mahdawi began receiving invitations to tell his story at churches and community gatherings around the Upper Valley. Ten years later, he hasn’t stopped. Last Sunday, he spoke remotely to a group of 100 Jewish people in New York.

Having grown up in the occupied West Bank, which the Israeli military controls with an iron fist, Mahdawi speaks truth to power. “I have firsthand experience,” he said. “It’s not something that I’ve read online.”

Before he was even 11 years old, his favorite uncle sat him down in a West Bank cemetery. “Education is your best weapon, if you want to fight for your homeland,” said his uncle.

Shortly thereafter, his uncle was killed by the Israeli military. “My uncle has been my inspiration,” Mahdawi told me. “It took me all the way to Columbia.”

The Ivy League degree he’s earned is a “message of hope,” he said. “If I can do it, other Palestinian children can.”

No financial aid

From the day of Mahdaw’s arrest, the Trump administration has endeavored to get Mahdawi into a Louisiana detention facility. The feds are desperate to have his case decided by conservative federal judges. Mahmoud Khalil, a fellow Columbia student and green card holder, was taken into ICE custody outside his New York apartment building in early March and remains imprisoned in Louisiana.

This week Mahdawi received word from his lawyers that his immigration case will be heard in Massachusetts, not Louisiana. (Vermont doesn’t have an immigration court.)

“This is a huge relief,” Mahdawi told me.

On Monday, Columbia will hold commencement for its undergraduate School of General Studies and Mahdawi plans to be there to collect his diploma.

Before he was abducted by hooded ICE agents at his naturalization interview on April 14 in Colchester, Vt., Mahdawi had been accepted at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He plans to return in the fall to begin work on a two-year master’s degree. (As he’s done for years during breaks from school, he’s stayed with a friend in Hartford since his release.)

When Mahdawi was accepted at Columbia as an undergraduate — transferring from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania — he received what amounted to a full scholarship.

Having completed his undergraduate studies with an “A” average, Mahdawi had reason to believe that Columbia would continue to make it financially feasible for him to continue his Ivy League education.

But when graduate students were notified on March 7 about scholarship awards, Mahdawi wasn’t on the list.

After his release from prison, where he didn’t have access to the internet, Mahdawi found an email from Columbia, confirming that he wouldn’t be receiving any financial aid from a university with a $15 billion endowment. To attend, he needs to come up with $70,000 in annual tuition, plus living expenses, the school said.

“They admitted me based on merit,” he said. “What changed?”

A lot.

In the Trump administration’s attack on higher education, Columbia was the first school on its hit list. Citing campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, the administration threatened to cut $400 million in federal funding if the school failed to fall in line.

On March 13, the Trump administration sent Columbia a “letter that might as well have been a ransom note,” The New Yorker magazine wrote.

Although the letter came six days after admitted graduate students were notified of scholarship awards, I find it hard to believe that denying Mahdawi any financial aid wasn’t related to his student activism.

When I asked Columbia if the Trump administration’s threats impacted Mahdawi’s financial aid package — or lack of one — I didn’t get a direct response.

The university is “unable to share information about any specific individuals’ circumstances” due to our federal privacy “obligations,” a Columbia spokesman told me via email. He added that about 30% of the graduate school’s 1,000 students receive scholarship awards.

Admitted students can appeal the financial aid office’s decisions, which Mahdawi did this week.

What happens if Columbia doesn’t change its mind?

“I won’t be able to go,” he told me. “I am already in legal debt and it’s only beginning.”

‘The power of nature’

After purchasing the West Fairlee property, Mahdawi spent the first winter building the cabin with the help of friends. He bought the land with savings, which included proceeds from the sale of the house in Windsor. Mahdawi and the medical student divorced in 2016.

While putting up exterior walls made of rough-cut hemlock and securing a metal roof, they battled high winds and blowing snow. “If you want to understand the power of nature, come here in the winter,” he said with a smile.

As winter gives way to spring, nature throws another set of challenges out of thin air. Carrying on a conversation outdoors can mean nonstop waving off swarms of black flies. After a while on Monday, we finally surrendered, and retreated to inside the cabin.

A ladder leads to a loft with barely enough space to sit up straight without smacking the ceiling. Mahdawi built the ladder out of tree limbs. Instead of discarding them as dead wood, “this is how you honor the trees,” he said.

To make room for the outdoor deck and improve the view, Mahdawi thinned a stand of small trees. He saved a slender white birch and a poplar by incorporating them into the deck’s layout. They’re now growing up through square holes that Mahdawi sawed in the planking.

“I was feeling very bad every time I cut down a tree,” he said. “This is a reminder that I’m not the owner of the land. I am its caretaker.”

There’s no running water (just an outhouse), but following a stretch of stormy weather, a cistern was filled to the brim on Monday. It stores rain water collected from the roof that Mahdawi can then use for washing up and cleaning dishes.

With darkness setting in, he opene d the sliding glass door to the deck. Black flies be damned. Back outdoors, I asked Mahdawi more about his case which could potentially end up with the U.S. Supreme Court deciding whether he can remain in the country. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me,” he said, “but I’ll be OK.”

Having gotten to know something about Mahdawi’s resiliency in the nearly five years since we met, I expect he will be.

It’s our country I’m not so sure about.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.