Trump Is Trying to Deport Hundreds of Students for ‘Criminal Records’—Including a Domestic Violence Victim
“I wonder what else is to come. Are they going to be coming after naturalized citizens eventually?” said one student whose visa was revoked for unspecified reasons.
Pro-Palestinian protesters walk from Columbia University to Hunter College on May 06, 2024, in New York City. Photo: Getty Images
One month ago, plain-clothes ICE agents confronted and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate. The incident was quickly followed by the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Fulbright scholar studying at Tufts University. Both were singled out for their criticisms of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza; Khalil for organizing peaceful anti-genocide protests at Columbia, while Ozturk was targeted by the Trump administration because she wrote an op-ed advocating for peace.
Since Khalil and Ozturk’s arrests, several more international students and academics with legal status have been detained by ICE, also because of their real or perceived advocacy for Palestinian human rights. Those arrests are, apparently, the deeply alarming tip of the iceberg. Zeteo News reports that hundreds more international students and academics have had their visas arbitrarily revoked with no reason given—many are being informed by university officials rather than the government.
Some of these students and their attorneys say they’ve received nebulous reasons from immigration authorities citing their “criminal records”—but the “criminal records” in question involve minor traffic violations that have since been expunged, parking tickets, and, in one student’s case, being the victim of domestic violence. One student had a misdemeanor DUI five years ago. The domestic violence victim was part of a dual arrest, a common situation in which both parties in an abusive situation are brought in to speak to cops. Now, the victim could be forced to leave the country.
Yet, for non-immigrants with legal status to have their status revoked for “criminal activity,” the threshold is much higher than a DUI or being brought into a police station. Under federal law, someone must be convicted “for a crime of violence for which a sentence of more than one-year imprisonment may be imposed constitutes a failure to maintain status.”
The State Department has justified its targeting of pro-Palestine legal residents in academia by claiming they hold “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” But in many of the cases reviewed by Zeteo, students aren’t even being told what they did to justify having their visas revoked. One immigration attorney representing several students told the outlet that the entire process “really feels AI or computer-driven, like someone wrote a program, like, if A, then B” to identify any international student with any “criminal” record, without even reviewing what that record is before revoking their visa. “It doesn’t feel like there’s a human element to this.”
Nonetheless, the allegedly AI-driven witch hunt has caused disparate harm to students of color. Over the weekend, a California student filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its broad targeting of non-citizen students, “designed to coerce students… into abandoning their studies and ‘self-deporting’ despite not violating their status.” The lawsuit accuses the administration of “primarily targeting” African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Asian students.
In January, President Trump threatened to revoke the student visas of anyone his administration determines to be aligned with Hamas. His administration also threatened to withhold federal funding from universities that don’t sufficiently quash anti-genocide student protesters. Hours before Khalil’s arrest in March, the administration cut $400 million in grants to Columbia, accusing the university of failing to combat antisemitism, which it appears to define as protesting genocide.
New ACLU video shows the moment ICE arrested Georgetown Scholar Dr. Badar Khan Siri.
Masked agents accosted him on his way home from an iftar.
In just 4 days, he was transferred among 5 different facilities across 3 states. Multiple refused him food or water to break his fast. pic.twitter.com/c7zxhISluR
In addition to Khalil and Ozturk, ICE agents at Georgetown University arrested Leqaa Kordia in March, a Palestinian woman who participated in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia and allegedly overstayed her student visa. ICE also began hunting a 21-year-old Columbia senior who’s lived in the U.S. since she was seven over her participation in anti-genocide protests last year, prompting the student to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration to protect herself. This persecution has led several students, including at least one Fulbright scholar, to self-deport and leave the country rather than be rounded up and held in ICE detention centers notorious for their human rights abuses.
At the end of last month, ICE arrested Georgetown researcher Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national and postdoctoral fellow, outside his home in Arlington, Virginia. Suri says he is being targeted because his wife is Palestinian. This week, Suri’s legal team revealed that for the last two weeks, he’s been held in a room without a bed, given used underwear, and marked as a “high-security” detainee. He hasn’t been permitted to leave his dorm for more than two hours over the course of two weeks. His family says his disappearance has traumatized his young son.
One of the attorneys speaking to the outlet stressed that his clients are losing student visas without even being convicted, or while they “still have live cases, they could still be found innocent” and “some people were found innocent, or the case was dismissed.” But “since they were arrested,” they “fall under whatever criteria” to be denied any due process. Unfortunately, there were clear signs that this is precisely where we were headed; for example, when Congress sweepingly passed the Laken Riley Act in February, a bill to allow any immigrant to be indefinitely detained for any crime, no matter how small, and even if they were wrongly arrested. It passed with broad Democratic support. Now, that bill’s logic seems to be a guiding force in this administration’s treatment of not just undocumented people, but possibly everyone.
One student who had their visa revoked for unclear reasons told Zeteo, “I wonder what else is to come. Are they going to be coming after naturalized citizens eventually?”
