Scott said he understood lawmakers’ desire to push back on the Trump administration’s troubling immigration enforcement actions in the state, including the detention of Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi on Monday in Colchester. Mahdawi was led away by men wearing hoods and masks and driving unmarked cars.
But Scott said he worried that canceling the contract with federal immigration agencies such as ICE and Customs and Border Protection would be unlikely to halt immigration detentions and would result in detainees being taken to other states.
“I get the frustration, but is that in the best interest of those who are detained, to just ship them off to somewhere else, Mississippi, Texas, wherever?” Scott said.
Scott said he recently reviewed the state’s memorandum of understanding with ICE, which allows federal detainees to be housed in state prisons for a payment of $180 per day. He noted that the contract requires 120 days notice before being canceled. Since it expires in August, canceling it would be a moot point, he said.
He declined to say whether he would support renewing the agreement but said he was open to discussing changes with lawmakers.
“We can discuss this further, but it shouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction,” Scott said.
Scott cited a news account indicating that Mahdawi, a resident of White River Junction, was grateful that a judge ordered him to be held in Vermont for now.
Mahdawi’s attorneys acted quickly after his detention on Monday to secure an emergency injunction against immigration officials taking him from the state, as has happened in other recent cases.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish doctoral student who was arrested last month near Boston by masked ICE agents, was driven to Vermont and put on a flight to Louisiana, where she’s now being held.
Mahmoud Khalil, who with Mahdawi cofounded the Palestinian Student Union at Columbia University in 2023, was also detained by immigration officials in New York and sent to Louisiana.
Three Senate leaders, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth (D/P-Chittenden-Central), Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (D-Chittenden-Southeast), and Sen. Becca White (D-Windsor), called on Scott on Tuesday to immediately cancel the detention agreement. The student roundups have eroded trust in immigration officials and spread fear among Vermonters that they could be detained anywhere, anytime, the lawmakers said.
But not all lawmakers are on board with pressuring Scott to scrap the deal. House Speaker Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington) issued a statement that was far less forceful than the Senate leadership’s. While she asserted the “detention by masked individuals is alarming and completely unacceptable,” Krowinski also stressed that lawmakers must make sure that “any and all action we take does not unintentionally impact the individuals we are trying to protect.”
Scott said it’s incumbent on federal officials to prove to a judge that detainees have committed a crime and, if they can’t, to release them.
U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) said on Wednesday that she and 67 House colleagues had written to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security “to demand answers on the illegal abduction and arrest of Mohsen Mahdawi.”
“Without due process and the right to free speech, this is not the America we thought we lived in,” she wrote. “And it should terrify us all. It’s critical we stand up loudly for the U.S. Constitution in the face of the authoritarian rule from the White House.”