Masked, plainclothes ICE agents nab Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street in Massachusetts, March 25th.
Image sourced from social mediaThe Deportation Dragnet
With universities’ collaboration, the Trump administration is targeting noncitizens on campus—and paving the way for an expansive immigration crackdown.
On March 7th, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia University doctoral student from India and the holder of an F-1 student visa, was on a Zoom call with an advisor from the university’s international students’ office when a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents knocked on her door. Srinivasan had been in a panic since she received an email from the State Department’s consulate in Chennai two days earlier informing her that her student visa had been cancelled because new information had “come to light.” A self-professed “rando” who had little relationship to Columbia’s pro-Palestinian campus protests, Srinivasan may only have appeared on ICE’s radar due to an accidental 2024 arrest where she was swept up in the police raid on the student occupation at Hamilton “Hind” Hall, resulting in charges that were quickly dropped. Yet, even as the advisor was confirming that Srinivasan was still enrolled at Columbia and in legal status in the United States—since a visa is just an entry document and its cancellation only requires the holder to apply for a new one in order to re-enter the country—ICE came to her door. Srinivasan later recounted on Instagram that the Columbia advisor was initially “frantic, calling upper level administrators,” but later “seemed amused” at the situation, providing her with a list of lawyers and asking her to call the public safety office. The officers, who would not identify themselves or present a judicial warrant, eventually left after Srinivasan’s US citizen flatmate refused to open the door. “Once I realized [Columbia] would not help me, I left my house for a safer location the same day,” Srinivasan wrote.
Agents returned the next day, March 8th, and, mistaking the flatmate for Srinivasan, insisted through the door that “we were here yesterday, we’re here today, we’re going to be here tonight and tomorrow.” The flatmate sent an email to the university administration that day about how the “harassment” by ICE was affecting her, the international students in the building, and even the building doorman—an immigrant himself. Columbia replied with an acknowledgement of the concerns, but it was not clear that it took steps to address them. Instead, on March 9th, the international office emailed Srinivasan to inform her that not only had ICE terminated her student record and officially cancelled her legal status—which meant she would need to leave the US or risk detention, deportation, and future entry bans—but also that, despite there being no legal requirement to do so, Columbia had also withdrawn her enrollment. She needed to vacate student housing or face “appropriate proceedings,” the email noted. “I was stunned,” Srinivasan told Jewish Currents. “I could not believe that Columbia would allow this to happen.” From that point onward, she said, administrators “cut contact” with her. (Columbia did not respond to a request for comment.) Scared, Srinivasan fled to Canada on March 11th.
The Trump administration’s project to target visa holders—a category relatively vulnerable to immigration enforcement—started with pro-Palestinian students at Columbia and spread from there, quickly catching those with more secure status. A night after ICE first visited Srinivasan, agents came for Yunseo Chung, a pro-Palestine student who had been arrested, given a ticket, and released after a sit-in just a few days prior. Agents first visited Chung’s parents’ house, and then texted her as “Audrey from the police” to try to get her on the phone. An attorney with the Justice Department later told her lawyer that the Secretary of State had revoked her visa, and when informed that she was a green card holder, said that he had “revoked that too.” Ultimately, Chung was not detained on March 8th because ICE agents couldn’t find her. Elsewhere on campus, another student activist, Mahmoud Khalil, was not so fortunate. Khalil, too, was approached by ICE with the news that his “visa” was cancelled, and despite being shown his green card, the agents—who refused to identify themselves in the face of repeated pleas from his 8-months-pregnant, US-citizen wife—did not back down, instead nabbing Khalil and transporting him first to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to Louisiana, without allowing him to speak with his attorney. He remains there until a motion for his release is granted by a judge.
While the never-before-seen use of existing legal authority against permanent residents has understandably set off the loudest alarm bells, it is student visa holders who are bearing the brunt of the sweeps.
As the first ICE detainee from Columbia’s campus, Khalil—who may have been targeted at the behest of the White House, according to conversations he overheard in detention—quickly became a symbol for the Trump administration’s rapidly escalating immigration crackdown against student protesters. His detention has generated national outrage, especially because of his status as a legal permanent resident without a criminal conviction or disciplinary history; the ongoing legal challenge to his detention, along with a new lawsuit filed by Chung, has thus come to be seen as the venue where larger questions about the rights of permanent residents will be adjudicated. These battles may determine the limits of the federal government’s immigration authority under an administration seeking to dramatically push them: When asked by a reporter this week, the State Department did not deny that the administration might target naturalized US citizens in the future. But while the never-before-seen use of existing legal authority against permanent residents has understandably set off the loudest alarm bells, it is student visa holders who are bearing the brunt of the sweeps.
Srinivasan is only the first known case among a growing number of visa holders targeted on ideological grounds. The State Department has recently said that it has revoked more than 300 visas; at least a handful of the revokees have also been apprehended by ICE. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on March 14th that a Palestinian student at Columbia whose visa had expired in January, and who was arrested in pro-Palestinian protests last year, was picked up by ICE off campus. That same day, a Brown University transplant surgeon on a work visa was turned back at Logan National Airport in Boston, despite a court order temporarily blocking her deportation. On March 17th, a scholar at Georgetown University, whose wife is Palestinian American and the daughter of a former Hamas adviser, was arrested by masked agents outside his home in Northern Virginia and whisked off to a detention center in Louisiana. On March 20th, the Justice Department contacted British Gambian Cornell University graduate student Momodou Taal, who had sued the Trump administration after Khalil’s arrest on first amendment grounds, relaying ICE’s request that Taal give himself up for deportation. (After a motion to get a court to halt the deportation failed, Taal announced that he would leave the country.) On March 25th, masked ICE agents in plain clothes arrested a Turkish Tufts doctoral student on a street off campus in Somerville, Massachusetts. On March 27th, an Iranian student from the University of Alabama was reportedly also detained. And these detentions, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, represent only the tip of the iceberg. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses,” he said at a press conference in March. “Every day I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.” (The State Department would not provide further details on the number of visas revoked when asked by Jewish Currents, and ICE declined to say how many international student records it had terminated.)
Targeted students and faculty believe it’s no coincidence that universities have become the primary battleground in the administration’s bid to curtail dissent through deportation. “The university is the site that authoritarianism has the most to be afraid of,” said a Columbia faculty member who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. At the same time, the leaders of such institutions have signaled their willingness to collaborate in silencing anti-war protests on campus, making their schools inviting terrain.
“It was Cornell that put a target on my back and those of others like me,” said Taal.
Since 2024, universities across the country have responded to the pro-Palestine student movement with a repressive juggernaut that has put noncitizen activists in particular danger. For instance, last spring, universities rushed to suspend and expel protesters, which, when they were visa holders, risked their enrollment-dependent immigration status. Universities did not shy away from this outcome: Indeed, Cornell tried to disenroll Taal last year after he disrupted a career fair with his protest—a move that set the stage for his targeting by the Trump administration. “It was Cornell that put a target on my back and those of others like me,” said Taal, whose suspension and de-enrollment were reversed after public outrage, but who remained banned from the Cornell campus this year. “Freedom of speech should not be met with the type of oppression that we have been met with, but [the university has] now put us on a list.” Universities also imperiled their noncitizen students’ safety and status by calling in police for thousands of arrests—jeopardizing their future residency prospects and potentially making it easy for ICE to find and deport them. “Something that is getting lost in the story is that Columbia called the cops on protesting students the same week that Khalil was taken,” said an international student at Columbia, a doctoral candidate from South Asia, who asked for anonymity for fear of targeting. Additionally, Columbia undergraduate Alex Bronzini-Vender said, universities have “essentially expedited” ICE’s identification of pro-Palestinian students by doing nothing to prevent Zionist actors from doxxing them. “Mahmoud Khalil was abducted shortly after his targeting by a digital harassment campaign by a small group of pro-Israel students and faculty, one of whom deliberately sought to draw Marco Rubio’s attention,” he said. Now, this infrastructure of university-based repression has become a potent weapon in the hands of an administration intent on using the full might of the US immigration system to deport noncitizens—and, ultimately, to silence dissent.
Two days after Khalil’s arrest, Trump wrote on Truth Social that ICE had “proudly” apprehended and detained the student, whom he described as “radical foreign pro-Hamas.” “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump warned. In forecasting his administration’s intention to intensify the campus immigration crackdown, Trump was doing little more than echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a plan released as part of the group’s “Project 2025” vision for a second Trump term. Project Esther was billed as a strategy to “combat antisemitism” on college campuses, with a specific focus on protests opposing Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza. “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement’ is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN) that is trying to compel the US government to abandon its long-standing support for Israel,” it said, recommending that visa-holding faculty and students who met these criteria should be found in violation of their immigration status. Shortly after Trump took office in January, he signed executive orders to make this vision a reality, including one that directed the government to go after “foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats” and a second to “combat anti-semitism.” The fact-sheet related to the second order explicitly promised to “deport Hamas sympathizers and revoke student visas.”
The executive orders laid the foundation for a series of policy shifts. On March 6th, Axios reported that the State Department had launched a “catch and revoke” program, which would use a mix of tactics—deploying artificial intelligence to scour students’ social media, matching visa databases and arrest records, and sifting through “Jewish students’ lawsuits”—to single out and revoke the visas of international students deemed to be “pro-Hamas.” (When asked by reporters, the State Department spokesperson did not confirm or deny that lists made by external organizations were being used to revoke visas.) According to government disclosures in Taal’s court case, some of the agents doing such enforcement work include members of the ICE department typically tasked with digging into transnational crime, who are now “proactively” scouring “open-source” information (like social media and news articles) to identify possible targets; as a result, it was ICE that first approached the State Department regarding the Cornell student activist’s legal status. The issuance of new visas is also informed by these executive orders, according to recently leaked internal memos, which show that Rubio making it “mandatory” for his consular officers to screen visa applicants with “extra vigilance” for potential grounds for denial—including for “public advocacy for terrorist activity or a terrorist organization,” and, most strikingly, “conduct that bears a hostile attitude toward US citizens or US culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).”
“People who have done nothing—no activism, no public speech, maybe an Instagram—are getting searched, detained, and deported at airports because every CBP agent . . . has been told that what DC wants to see is ‘Hamas supporters’ refused entry.”
In pursuing these moves, the Trump administration is strategically using the broad legal powers of the State Department on the one hand, and the enforcement capacity of the DHS, and its sub-agencies ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), on the other. The former has long possessed enormous discretion with respect to visas in particular. “The standards for revoking a visa have always been largely arbitrary, as long as the Secretary of State says so,” said Josef Burton, a former consular officer and board member of the Consular Accountability Project, a group seeking to protect the rights of visa holders. Consular decisions aren’t open to appeal or review, and other agencies can use a State Department decision as a basis for taking further action. On the other hand, if the person is already inside the country, or at its gates, the State Department doesn’t have the authority to remove them—which is where the DHS comes in. “The State Department is laundering essentially unlimited executive authority through [the DHS],” said Burton, referring to how CBP agents can revoke valid visas and turn people back at airports and other ports of entry, while ICE can trigger removal proceedings inside the country by arresting, detaining, and deporting people. After 9/11, DHS agents used these powers, as well as the “ideological exclusion” provision of the Patriot Act, to block a broad range of visa holders, including scholars. In recent months, these agencies have started reprising that role amid pressure from the administration to ramp up detentions and deportations, at and inside the border. “People who have done nothing—no activism, no public speech, maybe an Instagram—are getting searched, detained, and deported at airports because every CBP agent, frothing Trump supporter or not, has been told that what DC wants to see is ‘Hamas supporters’ refused entry,” Burton said.
These two angles of attack—the Project Esther promise to deport “HSN” activists, and the more diffuse Trump administration pressure to speed up removals and denials—have now dovetailed in a handful of widely-publicized cases, both on campuses and at the border, that seem designed to strike terror into immigrant and activist communities. This tactic was clearly at play when, after the Brown University doctor Rasha Alawieh was denied entry, the White House tweeted “Bye-bye Rasha” from its official account with a photo of Trump waving through the window of a McDonalds. After Srinivasan fled to Canada, the DHS likewise put out a press release that included footage showing her departing LaGuardia Airport, a move her lawyer Nathan Yaffe said was designed to chill observers’ speech. “By taking someone so quiet and uncontroversial and smearing them as a terrorism supporter, the DHS is sendings the message that any expression of disfavored political views is enough to trigger repressive punishment,” Yaffe said. The DHS further boasted that Srinivasan had “self-deported using the CBP Home App” and encouraged others like her to follow suit. Srinivasan said she had never even heard of the app before reading the press release, a fact that, according to Yaffe, “underscores [the DHS’s] willingness to fabricate whatever narrative serves their purposes.”
The shock-and-awe tactics have had their intended effect. “I have never received so many inquiries from people who you would usually think are safe from this type of immigration targeting, asking for consultations—just wanting to know what they need to do to keep themselves and their families safe,” said Samah Sisay, a lawyer from the Center for Constitutional Rights and part of Khalil’s legal team, during a press call. In particular, these spectacles of arrest and deportation have sent shock waves among international students around the country—not least at Columbia, the epicenter of the crackdown. “It feels like anything could happen,” said the doctoral student from South Asia. “I am now genuinely worried that I won’t be able to leave the country, and at the same time, I’m not particularly feeling safe being on campus or in campus housing either.”
These fears are widespread. “International students, undocumented students, students who have tenuous immigration status are extremely scared,” said Elora Mukherjee, a professor of law and the director of the Columbia immigration clinic. As they try to protect themselves, such students are stepping back from certain academic work and censoring their own political speech. “They are concerned about whether or not to post on social media,” Mukherjee said. “They are asking, ‘Should I attend a demonstration or not?’” An international student who asked to be anonymous for fear of reprisal told me that the recent arrests had sowed particular confusion and fear among campus activists. “The organizers, who are a small but committed crowd—they have been very severely affected by all that has happened,” the student said. They are “pretty worried about the repercussions of doing anything right now—even of having a meeting that is going to discuss what the best course of action now would be.” According to Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian and the author of Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States, this is the way that silencing via immigration enforcement has historically worked: While the share of people banned or deported for their views may be small, she said, those numbers “do not capture the ‘chilling effect,’ the fear and intimidation resulting in self-censorship.”
Students “are concerned about whether or not to post on social media . . . They are asking, ‘Should I attend a demonstration or not?’”
Some noncitizen faculty are also worried about becoming targets, and reported being afraid to keep studying and teaching subjects that relate in any way to histories of colonization and decolonization—even if their work is not about Palestine. One told Jewish Currents of canceling an event lest it be construed as pro-Palestinian, though the material concerned another part of the world. A March 25th First Amendment lawsuit filed by a group of unions representing university professors listed many such examples of its noncitizen members self-censoring on social media, canceling plans to attend academic conferences abroad, withdrawing from organizing with public-facing forums, and not attending protests out of “fear that their lawful advocacy will lead to arrest and deportation.” The Trump administration’s policies, the suit argued, are “terrorizing students and faculty,” an observation confirmed by campus affiliates who spoke to Jewish Currents about being afraid to be in their classes, offices, and on-campus homes because ICE could come looking for them there. This climate of fear had such a marked impact that, as per emails reviewed by Jewish Currents, Columbia’s provost, dean, and department chairs had to order students and faculty to attend classes in-person in the days after Khalil’s arrest, communications that only heightened many students’ and faculty’s sense of being abandoned at their most vulnerable. A faculty member who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation told Jewish Currents that because the university is not just a site of study but also an employer and landlord, it “has multiple vectors through which it can make us vulnerable”—vulnerabilities that it was doing little to mitigate, and in fact appeared to be exacerbating.
Such anxieties are becoming even more acute as universities like Columbia signal an ongoing openness to collaborating with the Trump administration, regardless of the cost to their communities or mission. On March 21st, Columbia recently agreed to a litany of Trump administration demands, including issuing new suspensions, expulsions, and temporary degree revocations against students involved in last year’s protests; hiring “special officers” with powers to arrest and remove students from campus; redoubling protest restrictions whose violation could lead to disciplinary measures; and placing the independent panel that currently makes disciplinary decisions under the discretion of the provost—all of which will serve to further jeopardize visa holders. The moves also signal that the university may later accede to other anti-immigrant demands from the administration, such as its unprecedented call to hand over a list of pro-Palestinian protestors’ names and nationalities to the Justice Department as part of civil rights investigations. Students and faculty who come from—and study—other countries that don’t guarantee basic freedoms see these patterns with a familiar dread. “We know what authoritarianism does. We know how it operates, and we know its costs,” said the Columbia faculty member. “That’s the reason we came here, to have the academic freedom to pursue the topics that we want to pursue.” To be in the same position again here in America is “another kind of distress,” they said. “You’re like, ‘Oh, I know how this film is going to end.’”
In this context, Taal told Jewish Currents before ICE came to arrest him, lawsuits like his were functioning as a last resort “stress test” for the values the US claims as its bedrock, not only those pertaining to immigrants but also those enshrined in the First Amendment more broadly. But for Taal, at least, the stress test has failed. On March 31st, the day he announced his departure from the United States, the activist wrote that while his legal team was keenly preparing a second petition to halt his deportation, he was no longer certain that a favorable ruling would guarantee his personal safety and freedom to express his beliefs: “I have lost faith that I can walk the streets without being abducted.” As Taal left the US, he sounded a warning note for those who remained. What began as an assault on Palestine activism is “being used to wage a wholesale attack on any form of expression that challenges the oppressive and exploitative relations in the US,” he wrote, warning: “For every person who has remained silent, just know you are not safe either . . . If you have been led to think that your safety is only guaranteed by state kidnap, repression, deportation, the slaughter of children, and the suppression of the global majority, then let Gaza’s shards of glass be your mirror.”
Tanvi Misra is a writer and investigative journalist covering migration and justice issues whose work has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Politico Magazine, and The Baffler among other publications.
