A federal judge on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from deporting Mohsen Mahdawi, a pro-Palestinian protest leader who led anti-Israel demonstrations at Columbia University.

Judge Nina Froes terminated the case after saying federal authorities made a procedural error and failed to certify a document they attempted to submit as evidence.

“I am grateful to the court for honoring the rule of law and holding the line against the government’s attempts to trample on due process,” Mahdawi said in a statement.. “This decision is an important step towards upholding what fear tried to destroy: the right to speak for peace and justice.”

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin condemned the ruling on Tuesday, saying the Trump administration remains committed to removing Mahdawi’s visa.

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“No activist judge, not this one or any other, is going to stop us from doing that,” she said.

Froes’ ruling relates to a document submitted as evidence by federal attorneys. The document referenced Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying noncitizens can be expelled from the country if their presence may undermine U.S. foreign policy interests.

Froes wrote in her ruling that government attorneys submitted a photocopy of the document to the court, but they failed to certify it as required under federal law.

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Mahdawi, 34, was detained in April 2025 during a citizenship appointment in Vermont and spent more than two weeks in custody. He was later released on bail after filing a habeas corpus petition.

A federal judge ordered that he not be deported or removed from the state and was released under an order issued by U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford in Burlington.

According to the 2025 court filing, Mahdawi co-founded the Palestinian Student Union at Columbia after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack. He founded the group with Mahmoud Khalil.

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Mahdawi’s deportation case also stems in part from allegations dating back to 2015, when he was interviewed by the FBI after reportedly making antisemitic remarks at a Vermont gun store and a firearms museum.

According to court documents previously cited by Fox News Digital, the store owner said Mahdawi expressed interest in purchasing firearms, including a sniper rifle and an automatic weapon.

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The owner claimed he had experience building modified 9mm submachine guns “to kill Jews while he was in Palestine.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Imagine if a candidate for, say, the California Assembly appeared at a political event and delivered the following remarks:

“No to kosher meat. No to yarmulkes. No to celebrating Easter. No, no, no.”

He, or she, would be roundly — and rightly — criticized for their bigotry and raw prejudice.

Recently, at a candidates forum outside Dallas, Larry Brock expressed the following sentiments as part of a lengthy disquisition on the Muslim faith.

“We should ban the burqa, the hijab, the abaya, the niqab,” said the candidate for state representative, referring to the coverings worn by some Muslim women. “No to halal meat. No to celebrating Ramadan. No, no, no.”

Brock, whose comments were reported by the New York Times, is plainly a bigot. (He’s also a convicted felon, sentenced to two years in prison for invading the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. No to hand-slaughtered lamb. Yes to despoiling our seat of government.)

Brock is no outlier.

For many Texas Republicans running in the March 3 primary, Islamophobia has become a central portion of their election plank, as a longtime political lance — illegal immigration — has grown dull around its edges.

Aaron Reitz, a candidate for attorney general, aired an ad accusing politicians of importing “millions of Muslims into our country.”

“The result?” he says, with a tough-guy glower. “More terrorism, more crime. And they even want their own illegal cities in Texas to impose sharia law.” (More on that in a moment.)

One of his opponents, Republican Rep. Chip Roy — co-founder of the “Sharia-Free America Caucus” — has called for amending the Texas Constitution to protect the state’s tender soil from Islamification by “radical Marxists.”

In the fierce GOP race for U.S. Senate, incumbent John Cornyn — facing a potentially career-ending challenge from state Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton — has aired one TV spot accusing his fellow Republican of being “soft on radical Islam” and another describing radical Islam “as a bloodthirsty ideology.”

Paxton countered by calling Cornyn’s assertions a desperate attack “that can’t erase the fact that he helped radical Islamic Afghans invade Texas,” a reference to a visa program that allowed people who helped U.S. forces — in other words friends and allies — to come to America after being carefully screened.

There hasn’t been such a concentrated, sulfurous political assault on Muslims since the angst-ridden days following the Sept. 11 attacks.

In just the latest instance, Democrats are calling for the censure of Florida Republican Rep. Randy Fine after he wrote Sunday on X: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” He’s since doubled down by posting several images of dogs with the words “Don’t tread on me.”

In Texas, the venom starts at the top with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s waltzing toward reelection to an unprecedented fourth term.

In November, Abbott issued an executive order designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations — the latter a prominent civil rights group — as terrorist organizations.

Not to be out-demagogued, Bo French, a candidate for Texas Railroad Commission, called on President Trump to round up and deport every Muslim in America. (French, the former Tarrant County GOP chair, gained notoriety last year for posting an online poll asking, “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The choice: Jews or Muslims.)

Much of the Republican hysteria has focused on a proposed real estate development in a corn- and hayfield 40 miles east of Dallas.

The master-planned community of about 1,000 homes, known as EPIC City, was initiated by the East Plano Islamic Center to serve as a Muslim-centered community for the region’s growing number of worshipers. (Of course, anyone could choose to live there, regardless of their religious faith.)

Paxton said he would investigate the proposed development as a “potentially illegal ‘Sharia City.’ ” The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last week jumped in with its own investigation — a move Abbott hailed — after the Justice Department quietly closed a probe into the project, saying developers agreed to abide by federal fair housing laws. That investigation came at the behest of Cornyn.

The rampant resurgence of anti-Muslim sentiment hardly seems coincidental.

For years, Republicans capitalized on the issues of illegal immigration and lax enforcement along the U.S. -Mexico border. With illegal crossings slowed to a trickle under Trump, “Republicans can’t run on the border issue the way [they] have in the past,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

What’s more, cracking down on immigration no longer brings together Republicans the way it once did.

General support for Trump’s get-tough policies surpasses 80% among Texas Republicans, said Henson, who’s spent nearly two decades sampling public opinion in the state. But support falls dramatically, into roughly the high-40s to mid-50s, when it comes to specifics such as arresting people at church, or seizing them when they make required court appearances.

“Republicans need to find something else that taps into those cultural-identity issues” and unifies and animates the GOP base, said Henson.

In short, the fearmongers need a new scapegoat.

Muslims are about 2% of the adult population in Texas, according to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, completed in 2024. That works out to estimates ranging from 300,000 to 500,000 residents in a state of nearly 32 million residents.

Not a huge number.

But enough for heedless politicians hell-bent on getting themselves elected, even if it means tearing down a whole group of people in the process.

FIRST ON FOX: One of the world’s largest and most influential scientific societies held its annual conference last weekend, which a Fox News Digital review found was littered with examples of progressive messaging, criticisms of the Trump administration, and “woke” workshops.

Attendees who showed up at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) event, held at the Phoenix Convention Center from Feb. 12-14, were immediately greeted at registration with identifier stickers that used gender pronouns such as “they/them,” “xi/xer,” “xe/xem,” and other descriptors that critics have alleged have little to do with science and biology.

During the meeting’s opening night, shortly after a 10-minute hoop dance routine from traditional Native American dancers, AAAS CEO Dr. Sudip Parikh told the audience that it’s been a “hard” and “tough year for science and scientists in this country.”

Parikh went on to blame DOGE for the “devastation” of “some of our science agencies” and the “president’s budget request” that “cut science by half” and, in his opinion, amounted to “forfeiting the future.”

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“What happened over the course of the last year is a rupture. We’re not going back, it’s not possible, too much damage has been done, too much has changed. There’s an entire generation of scientists that have a scar, a scar that is not going to go away,” Parikh explained, adding that scars can “make us tougher” and “become almost shields” that “build resilience.”

Parikh told the crowd that he warned last year that Robert F. Kennedy Jr was the “wrong person” for Health and Human Services secretary and said, “I still feel that way,” which prompted laughter and applause from the crowd.

“It’s going to take protests, it’s going to take politics, it’s going to take the ability to not speak gibberish, all of that has got to come together if we’re going to fight for the inheritance of the enlightenment to continue to make this world a better place,” Parikh said.

Workshops at the event, which provided gender-neutral washrooms, included a session titled “Mao-Mei Liu: Nurturing Diversity in Science is Resistance,” and another called “Investigating the Role of Race in Clinical Decision-Making.”

“Who Gets to Belong? Disability, Power, and Participation in Higher Education,” another workshop was called. 

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Dr. Theresa A. Maldonado, a world-renowned expert in electrical engineering, delivered the president’s address at the conference and also lamented what a difficult year 2025 was for science and suggested climate change was responsible for the devastating southern California wildfires last year.

AAAS, the publisher of the highly respected Science magazine, posted several more videos over the course of the next few days, many including speakers who criticized the Trump administration and injected politics into discussions. 

“Colonial Legacies, Climate Crises, and the Erosion of Mobility Choice” was another workshop that scientists at the conference were offered and in an interview with “climate justice scholar” Jola Ajibade, she explained how climate change has benefited a “few wealthy people” while “low-income communities are displaced.”

“At the center of my work is giving a voice but also bringing to the attention of everyone the impact of a slew of climate solutions, the impact of those solutions on low-income communities, on Black communities, on indigenous, on Latino communities as well,” Ajibade explained, adding that she is focused on finding a “decolonial” approach. 

Listed sponsors of the event included the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a group tied to the progressive consulting behemoth Arabella Advisors through the New Venture Fund, a nonprofit that pushes a variety of progressive causes. 

“The whole thing that is sad for me is that when I attended these conferences in the first Trump administration there was plenty of liberal nonsense, but it still was a celebration of science and the achievements of the year, and you left excited,” an event attendee told Fox News Digital.

“This year felt like a funeral, with nothing but griping and moaning. Why would people want to keep coming back year after year with something like that? I suspect that is why their attendance greatly suffered this year compared to the pre-COVID years. Their constant pleas to keep politics out of science are completely undercut by their perpetual whining and endorsing utter craziness. They’re happy for science to be political, as long as it’s leftist.”

Additionally, as lawmakers in the United States continue to warn about the growing threat posed by China and what they believe is the CCP’s infiltration of top institutions in the United States — particularly in the medical and science fields — the AAAS conference opted to allow the Beijing-based research institute Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to operate a booth at the event. 

The state-run Chinese academy, which has faced controversy over its ties to China’s government and military, has collaborated with a Chinese medical technology firm linked to a 2013 U.S. bribery case involving NIH-funded research. The company has also installed equipment in leading American research labs.

“The AAAS says that their organization wants to ‘inspire’ future scientists and engineers, but session topics and material from their meeting actually discourage participants from relying on their effort and merit and turns the focus to race and ethnicity,” Johnathan Butcher, acting director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital. 

“These are the very same kind of racist ideas inspired by DEI that have been prohibited in universities, state governments, and the federal government, because the ideas violate state and federal civil rights laws,” Butcher added. “Policymakers should be aware of what this organization is doing and make sure the association is not promoting racial preferences in hiring, promotion or research awards in academia or anywhere else.”

In a statement to Fox News Digital, an AAAS spokesperson said, “A broad spectrum of the scientific enterprise attends the meeting. The topics covered were wide-ranging across scientific disciplines and are proposed by scientists. AAAS respects their First Amendment right to free speech.”