Long before he arrived at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in a Colchester, Vt., office park Monday morning, Mohsen Mahdawi pretty much knew it was a setup. The chances of him leaving his scheduled meeting with an immigration officer as a free man were slim, at best.

But that’s today’s America.

Under Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime, no one who is a lawful permanent U.S. resident, or green card holder, is safe from the threat of deportation for exercising their First Amendment rights.

Mahdawi, who became a permanent U.S. resident in 2015 after moving to the Upper Valley, is one of the most recent victims. Shortly before noon on Monday, Mahdawi lost his freedom in an encounter that was nothing short of a government-sponsored abduction. (I don’t know what else to call it when armed plainclothes federal agents wearing hoods whisked a handcuffed Mahdawi away in an unmarked black SUV.)

Mahdawi, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, hasn’t been accused of a crime. All he did was help lead protests on the campus of Columbia University, where he’s been a student since 2021, to bring attention to the suffering in the Israel-Hamas war.

In a federal court filing, Mahdawi’s attorneys argued that their client was exercising his First Amendment rights. He was an “outspoken critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza,” they wrote. “The (U.S.) government has made clear that it intends to retaliate and punish individuals such as Mr. Mahdawi who advocated for ceasefire and ending the bloodshed in Gaza.”

As the lawyers pointed out, Mahdawi “took a step back” from student organizing at Columbia in March 2024 — before the takeover of a campus building.

In interviews at the time, Mahdawi said his decision to play a lesser role was partly due to his Buddhist beliefs, along with not wanting to put his application for U.S. citizenship in jeopardy.

For several years, he’s been navigating the road to citizenship, which requires a person to have held a green card for at least five years.

As the next step in the naturalization process, Mahdawi expected to be called for an in-person interview late last year, but he only recently received written notification that it was finally a go. The interview was scheduled for Monday at 11 a.m. in Colchester.

Mahdawi was fully aware that it could be a dirty trick. It was more than likely that agents from the Department of Homeland Security would be standing by to nab him. But it was a gamble he had to take. If he was a no-show, immigration officials would have an excuse to toss his citizenship application.

As a precaution, he left his cellphone with a friend, wary that once he was in custody, federal authorities would go on a fishing expedition for text messages and other personal information.

In the days leading up to the appointment, he couldn’t help but wonder: “Is this my ticket to a detention center in Louisiana?”

In early March, Mahmoud Khalil, a fellow Columbia student and green card holder, was taken into custody outside his apartment building. Khalil remains imprisoned at a federal detention facility in Jena, La.

For 23 days, Mahdawi didn’t leave his apartment. Friends brought him food. He paced back and forth in his small quarters, reaching 10,000 steps a day.

In the weeks leading up to Monday’s trip to Colchester, he moved from place to place outside New York. “This was the underground railroad for me,” he said.

On Monday morning, I met up with Mahdawi in the lobby of a nearby Hampton Inn, where he was chatting with a half dozen supporters.

I asked if he had considered heading 40 miles to the north. In mid-March, a Columbia graduate student from India who was in the Trump administration’s cross hairs fled to safety in Canada.

“The idea crossed my mind,” Mahdawi said, “but I’m not going to run away.”

He wants to continue his studies at Columbia, where he’s scheduled to earn a bachelor’s degree in philosophy next month. He’s been accepted into a Columbia graduate school program in international relations. “Universities are the beating heart of a democracy,” he said.

In the process of obtaining and renewing his green card, Mahdawi underwent multiple immigration background checks with no red flags. He’s also traveled abroad, most recently last summer to Greece, without any difficulty getting back into the U.S. “They know for sure that I’m a safe person,” he said.

Mahdawi was an easy target for the Trump administration. In December 2024, he sat down for an interview with “60 Minutes.” His photograph at a large Columbia rally appeared in The New York Times.

Under Trump, Homeland Security has deemed pro-Palestinian protests as “anti-semitic.” As The New York Times reported Monday, several hard-line pro-Israel groups have been pushing online for Mahdawi’s detention and deportation since Trump returned to power.

On Tuesday, I called Rabbi Dov Taylor, of Woodstock, to hear what he had to make of the campaign to brand Mahdawi as a promoter of antisemitism. Taylor and his wife, Judith, have known Mahdawi since 2017.

“There’s not an ounce of antisemitism in him,” Taylor told me. “He’s very open to talking with people who have different points of view. He speaks from the heart.”

In 2018, Mahdawi joined the Taylors on a visit to a synagogue in Highland Park, Ill., where Dov Taylor is rabbi emeritus. “Everyone loved him,” Taylor said. “He was so welcome because of his calm, measured way of speaking.”

Since Mahdawi’s capture became national news, Taylor has heard from friends in Illinois. They can’t believe what the government is doing to the Palestinian they found so “sincere and peaceful,” Taylor said.

It is hard to believe. Until we remember that we now live in Donald Trump’s America.

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