Mahdawi v. Trump: The Second Circuit Closes the District-Court Door It Had Opened
- Citation
- Mahdawi v. Trump, No. 25-1113 (2d Cir. July 21, 2026), vacating Mahdawi v. Trump, 781 F. Supp. 3d 214 (D. Vt. 2025)
- Court
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
- Decided
- July 21, 2026
- Statute
- 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(9); 28 U.S.C. § 2241; INA § 237(a)(4)(C)(i) (8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(4)(C)(i)); First Amendment
- Holding
- Section 1252(b)(9) deprived the district court of subject-matter jurisdiction over a habeas petition attacking the basis for ongoing removal proceedings. The release order is vacated and the petition must be dismissed.
This archive has covered Mohsen Mahdawi’s case from the day of his arrest, and the entry that preceded this one described a district court doing what district courts are supposed to do when the executive detains someone for what he said. That account is now overtaken. On July 21, 2026, the Second Circuit vacated the release order and sent the case back with instructions to dismiss the petition for want of jurisdiction.
What happened
Mahdawi is a lawful permanent resident who was born and raised in the West Bank and has lived in the United States since 2014. He entered on a B-1/B-2 visa, became a conditional permanent resident in January 2015 through an I-130 filed by his then-wife, a U.S. citizen, and an unconditional permanent resident in 2018. He enrolled at Columbia in 2021 and is a master’s student at its School of International and Public Affairs. After October 7, 2023, he became a vocal opponent of the war in Gaza and took part in student demonstrations.
On April 14, 2025, Homeland Security Investigations agents arrested him at a USCIS facility in Colchester, Vermont, at the end of his naturalization interview. They moved him to another USCIS facility and put a Notice to Appear in his jacket. The NTA charged him as removable under INA § 237(a)(4)(C)(i) on the strength of a determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that his “presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” He was ordered to appear before an immigration judge at a Louisiana detention facility on May 1. Agents drove him to the Burlington airport to fly him to Louisiana and missed the flight.
His attorney filed a habeas petition the same day, asking the district court to vacate the Rubio Determination, to set aside what the petition called a policy of targeting noncitizens for speech advocating Palestinian rights, and to order his release. Judge Sessions granted an emergency TRO barring removal from Vermont and, on April 30, 2025, ordered release pending review, finding Mahdawi likely to succeed on the claim that the government had targeted him for protected activity.
The jurisdictional holding
Judge Livingston, writing for a panel that also included Judges Nardini and Menashi, never reached that question. Section 1252(b)(9) provides that judicial review of “all questions of law and fact … arising from any action taken or proceeding brought to remove an alien from the United States” is available “only in judicial review of a final order” — and that no court has jurisdiction “by habeas corpus under section 2241 of title 28 or any other habeas corpus provision” to review such questions.
Mahdawi’s claims, the court held, arise from a proceeding brought to remove him. They are therefore channelled: first through the immigration court, then to a court of appeals on a petition for review of a final order of removal. The panel framed its decision as implementing the scheme Congress enacted, one that “affords Petitioner-Appellee Mahdawi the opportunity to raise his claims before a federal circuit court in a petition for review of a final order of removal, but which prohibits this collateral attack on ongoing removal proceedings.” Judge Menashi joined the opinion and wrote separately.
What it does and does not decide
It does not decide that the Rubio Determination is lawful, that the First Amendment claim is weak, or that detaining a lawful permanent resident over political speech is permissible. It decides a forum question, and the forum it identifies is real: the court of appeals on a petition for review, after a final order.
What that forum cannot easily do is order someone released next week. The distance between “you may raise this eventually, on a petition for review” and “you may raise this now, before a district judge who can order release tomorrow” is the entire practical value of the habeas route in these cases, and this decision removes it for claims that attack the basis of a pending removal proceeding.
Significance
The speech-detention docket of 2025 was built largely in district courts, on petitions filed within hours of arrest, in the district where the person happened to be. The reasoning in this opinion reaches a great many of those petitions, because they characteristically do what Mahdawi’s did: they ask a district judge to invalidate the charge that makes the person removable.
A petition confined to the fact and conditions of custody — the classic core of § 2241 — sits differently from one that asks a district court to set aside a Secretary’s removability determination, and the line between the two has become the thing worth pleading around. Practitioners in the Second Circuit should now assume that a petition framed as an attack on the removal charge will be met with § 1252(b)(9), and should expect to defend the framing before the merits.
Filed under First Amendment Detentions. Published July 21, 2026.