Columbia University student and Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi has spoken out from a Vermont prison where he’s been detained since his arrest earlier this month. In an interview with Vermont Public Radio, Mahdawi quoted Dr. Martin Luther King’s admonition that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Mohsen Mahdawi : “And the injustice that I am facing here and the injustice that the antiwar movement is facing, is also connected to the injustice that the Palestinian people are going through. We’re talking about 55,000 people who have been killed. We see children being killed, amputated, losing their parents, no homes. This is what’s moving us.”

A hearing in Mahdawi’s case is scheduled for today, where a judge could decide whether to release him from Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans Town, Vermont. Mahdawi is a green card holder from Palestine who was born and raised in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. He was arrested in Vermont when he appeared for what he was told would be a naturalization test. He came to the U.S. over a decade ago and began attending Columbia University in 2021, where he became a key organizer in peaceful, pro-Palestine campus protests.