Andrew C. McCarthy, writing in National Review on the Second Circuit’s ruling in Mahdawi’s case, has described the constitutional architecture this column has long maintained. The “zipper clause” of 8 U.S.C. §1252(b)(9) channels every question arising from a removal proceeding into the administrative tribunals and then to the courts of appeals. Congress did not write that provision as a suggestion. It wrote it as a jurisdictional bar against the district courts entertaining habeas petitions that would, in effect, second-guess the Executive Branch’s removal determinations. The Second Circuit panel — Judge Livingston writing, joined by Judges Nardini and Menashi — applied the statute as it stands. The panel’s opinion is a model of judicial economy: read the words Congress used, honor the deference the political branches are owed in matters of foreign policy and national security, decline the invitation to become a second immigration court.
The substantive ground reinforces the procedural one. Secretary Rubio, acting under 8 U.S.C. §1227(a)(4)(C)(i), made a formal finding that Mahdawi’s continued presence in the United States would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” That finding is the product of the executive’s considered judgment about a foreign-policy matter — exactly the kind of judgment the Constitution lodges in the political branches. The Secretary determined, on the record, that a lawful permanent resident who founded a campus organization documented as backing “armed resistance” by Hamas — a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization whose founding charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state — and who, by the Vermont police report, told a firearms dealer he “used to build submachine guns to kill Jews,” and who was intercepted at the border with LSD, methamphetamine, and opiates, and whose ex-wife sought the return of her shotgun after a domestic disturbance, presents a foreign-policy concern the Executive is entitled to weigh.
The First Amendment does not disable the political branches from acting on such a record. The Constitution does not convert every visa holder, every lawful permanent resident, every student visa into a sovereign entitled to litigate his presence in the federal district courts of his choosing. The statute gives the Secretary the authority he exercised. The circuit court honored that authority. The ruling is the rule of law working as designed.
Mohsen Mahdawi was twenty-nine years old when federal agents arrested him on April 14, 2025, in the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services field office in Colchester, Vermont. He had just walked out of his naturalization interview. The agents handcuffed him in the parking lot. He had lived in this country since 2014 — eleven years. He held a lawful permanent resident card. He had earned his undergraduate degree at Columbia University on a student visa, and at the time of his arrest he was enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs. He was married to an American citizen. He paid his taxes. He had no criminal conviction on the record cited by the Second Circuit panel. The Immigration and Nationality Act does not require a conviction for the Secretary of State to make a foreign-policy finding under §1227(a)(4)(C)(i); the finding itself is the operative act.
The government sought to transfer him to the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Louisiana — more than fifteen hundred miles from his wife, his lawyers, his Columbia campus, and the federal district court that had been handling his case. A United States District Judge in the District of Vermont issued a temporary restraining order barring the transfer and later ordered his release on bail. The Second Circuit vacated that order. Mahdawi remains in immigration detention. He has been held for more than fifteen months. The removal proceedings continue in Massachusetts.
The destination named in the proceedings is the West Bank — the area around Jerusalem and Bethlehem. It is a territory under documented armed conflict. A Palestinian man shot during a military raid is arrested and placed in Israeli custody. The gunshot wound goes untreated. He dies in detention. In 2024 and 2025, at least five men from the West Bank died in Israeli custody, according to the UN Human Rights Office. The military records each death as occurring during interrogation or detention. The families receive the bodies after prolonged holding. A man shot in a raid and taken alive does not remain alive long enough for anyone to demand an accounting.
In October 2025, United Nations monitors recorded 264 settler attacks across the West Bank resulting in casualties or property damage — the highest monthly total since the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs began keeping the tally in 2006. In a settler raid on a village near Nablus, a man is struck across the face with a rifle butt and his left cheekbone fractures. A fourteen-year-old boy takes a metal pipe across the forearm and the ulna breaks through the skin. Settlers fire into a house while a family is inside; a bullet enters the wall of a child’s bedroom. The Israeli military does not intervene. The settlers withdraw when they have finished.
House demolitions accounted for 42 percent of all displacement documented by OCHA in the West Bank between January 2023 and December 2024. An excavator arrives at dawn. The family is given fifteen minutes to remove what it can. A mother carries a mattress through the doorway as the front wall comes down behind her. The dust cloud enters the lungs of a child still inside the second room. Satellite imagery from the United Nations Satellite Centre confirms widespread structural damage across Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams camps — the satellite records what remains after the excavators leave: foundations stripped to bare concrete, water lines severed, sewage pooling in the open trenches where rooms used to be.
Mahdawi arrives in this territory carrying the State Department’s formal finding that his presence undermines American foreign policy — a finding that identifies him, in the language the department uses, as aligned with a designated foreign terrorist organization. Israeli security forces detain Palestinians for questioning on the basis of affiliations American officials have named in writing. Rival Palestinian factions maintain their own accounting of who collaborated, who did not, who returned from abroad under what flag. A man marked by an American foreign-policy finding — named in a file the State Department shares with intelligence counterparts — faces arrest, detention, interrogation, and at the credible endpoints of that progression, bodily harm. The State Department’s own travel advisory for the West Bank warns citizens to “reconsider travel” due to “terrorism and civil unrest.”
He is twenty-nine. His wife is an American citizen. His education ends in a detention cell. The agents who handcuffed him in the Colchester parking lot were officers of the federal government. The judges who ruled against him are judges of the United States. He has been held for more than fifteen months. He will be removed to a territory where the government’s own agencies have documented that men in his position die.
The founding charter of Hamas calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. The State Department has designated Hamas a foreign terrorist organization. The Secretary of State has determined, on the formal record, that Mahdawi’s presence in the United States has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” The Vermont police report records his statement to a firearms dealer that he “used to build submachine guns to kill Jews.” These are not the marks of a man who has placed himself within the blessing. They are the marks of a man who has placed himself outside it.
The covenant runs from Abraham through Isaac, not through Ishmael. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob set apart a people and a land. The deportation is the visible verdict of circumstances on a man who aligned himself with the enemies of God’s covenant people. Providence does not need the statute to disclose the sorting. The statute gives effect to the sorting Providence has already performed. The alien who aligned himself with Hamas cannot claim the hospitality of a sovereign whose own founding documents appeal to the laws of nature and of nature’s God. The ledger is balanced. The wall holds.
Judas I Mather is a fictional antagonist in Main Street Independent’s editorial architecture — a religious-legalist heteronym voiced from inside the machinery that fuses Scripture, constitutional doctrine, and hierarchy. The positions this column expresses are NOT the publication’s positions; they are rendered sincerely and accurately as satire so the reader can see the betrayal at work. Nothing here is an endorsement.