Portside

Last week Secretary of State Marco Rubio estimated that he had already signed about 300 letters to revoke visas from students and other visitors to the United States.

“I don’t know actually if it’s primarily student visas,” he told reporters “It’s a combination of visas. They’re visitors to the country. If they’re taking activities that are counter to our foreign, to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa.”

He said he would not be revealing the criteria by which the administration was selecting people for deportation.

“We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people,” said Rubio.

“The administration is deliberately opaque about the criteria they are using to select its targets for deportation in order to sow panic among international students and stifle advocacy for Palestinian human rights and liberation,” Mudassar Toppa, a staff attorney from CLEAR, a legal nonprofit and clinic at CUNY School of Law, told Mondoweiss.

“The administration hopes that the chaos and uncertainty behind how this policy is being implemented will silence the voices of non-citizen students who advocate for a free Palestine and encourage them to voluntarily leave the country to avoid the specter of being abducted, detained, and deported,” he continued. “As we’ve seen, rather than silence dissent, the government’s actions have only emboldened voices demanding that basic rights be respected here, in Palestine, and beyond.”

We’re learning more about the details of this crackdown every day, but here’s a rundown of some of the individuals who have already been targeted by ICE.

Mahmoud Khalil

Mahmoud Khalil (Photo courtesy of Writers Against the War on Gaza)

Mahmoud Khalil was detained by ICE agents at his home in New York on March 8 and immediately sent to a immigration detention facility in Louisiana.

The Trump administration says it revoked Khalil’s student visa and green card over his involvement in the Gaza protests at Columbia, which it has tagged as antisemitic. Some officials have claimed that he passed out literature in support of Hamas, but they have never produced any evidence connected to this.

The deportation proceedings were temporarily blocked by Judge Jesse Furman.  The Southern District Court of New York ruled that Khalil’s lawsuit challenging his unlawful detention should be transferred to New Jersey, despite the efforts of Trump’s lawyers to have the case heard in Louisiana.

Mondoweiss has covered Khalil’s ordeal and published multiple pieces on the case.

Momodou Taal

Momodou Taal speaking at a protest at Cornell University (Photo: Casey Martin / The Ithaca Voice)

Momodou Taal, a British Gambian Palestine activist and former PhD student at Cornell University, has announced that he is leaving the United States to avoid being deported by Trump.

“I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted,” he explained in a social media post.

Taal was nearly deported during the Biden administration after Cornell suspended him for participating in a Gaza protest.

“I think ever since October, I’ve been a visible face for the for what’s happening on campus in terms of I’ve been speaking at rallies, holding teach-ins, I have an online presence as well. I feel like these have all contributed to making me a target,” Taal told Mondoweiss at the time. “I keep saying that these repressive tactics cannot be divorced from the issue itself: Palestine. It touches the heart of university investment. It goes to the heart of the Empire.”

Taal, along with Cornell grad student Sriram Parasurama and Cornell professor Mukoma Wa Ngugi, recently sued the Trump administration over Executive Orders Numbers 14161 and 14188, which authorize deportation over speech that’s protected by the First Amendment.

The day before Taal’s lawsuit hit court, the Trump administration revoked his visa and began deportation proceedings against him.

Taal recently spoke with Mondoweiss about his ordeal.

“We anticipated some serious backlash, but not to this extent,” he said. “We thought that in a country that prides itself on the so-called rule of law, that claims to govern the world based on law and democracy, the courts would intervene before ICE and the FBI started showing up at people’s houses.”

In the social media post announcing his departure, Taal called for further solidarity with Palestine.

“A world where genocidal violence can be waged with impunity is a world built on hatred and cowardice. Such a world will, over time, destroy itself entirely. The only future, the only world, we can accept is one that will have a liberated and reconstructed Gaza at its heart,” he wrote.

“As sad as I feel right now, I do not despair,” he continued. “I have never been more confident and sure that we will win and that Palestine will be free within our lifetime. History will absolve us.”

Rumeysa Ozturk

Rumeysa Ozturk (Photo: Courtesy of the Ozturk family)

Rumeysa Ozturk is a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University who was disappeared in a broad daylight by masked ICE agents in Somerville, Massahcusetts.

Like Khalil, Ozturk was sent to a facility in Louisiana. A federal judge in Boston has issued an order to stop Ozturk from being deported.

Last spring, Ozturk co-wrote an Op-Ed in the student newspaper criticizing Tufts for disregarding a series of student resolutions that called on the school to denounce the genocide in Gaza and reveal their economic ties to Israel.

“This collective student voice is not without precedent. Today, the University may remember with pride its decision in February 1989 to divest from South Africa under apartheid and end its complicity with the then-racist regime,” noted the Op-Ed. “However, we must remember that the University divested up to 11 years after some of its peers. For instance, the Michigan State University Board of Regents passed resolutions to end its complicity with Apartheid South Africa as early as 1978. Had Tufts heeded the call of the student movement in the late 1970s, the University could have been on the right side of history sooner.”

In his comments celebrating the visa revocations, Rubio referenced the article.

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write Op-Eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa,” said Rubio.

In the days leading up to her kidnapping, Ozturk told a friend that she was growing fearful about being targeted by the group Canary Mission.

Dr. Rasha Alawieh

Dr. Rasha Alawieh (Photo: Social Media)

Dr. Rasha Alawieh is a kidney transplant specialist and was a Brown University professor with a valid visa. She was deported from Logan Airport in Boston after border officers found “sympathetic photos and videos” of the slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on her phone.

According to government documents, Alawieh had been in Lebanon to attend a commemoration for Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, 2024. She had pictures of Nasrallah and Iranian cleric Ali Khamenei on her phone, but had deleted them days prior.

“I’m a Shia Muslim,” she allegedly told the officials. “It has nothing to do with politics. It’s all religious, spiritual things.”

There was a federal court order that was supposed to temporarily halt her deportation, but Trump officials claim they weren’t aware of it.

“Last month, Rasha Alawieh traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, to attend the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah— a brutal terrorist who led Hezbollah, responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade terror spree,” tweeted the Department of Homeland Security. “Alawieh openly admitted to this to CBP officers, as well as her support of Nasrallah. A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security.”

As we have seen with all of these cases, the Trump administration is not even bothering to pretend that Alawieh is actually connected to terrorism or any crime whatsoever.

“There are so many government departments that would have had to screen her as she went through the rigorous process to get the visa in the first place,” Mary Holper, director of the Immigration Clinic and a professor at Boston College Law School told the Providence Journal, “And then it gets stripped away by a person who sees things on her phone. That’s what’s really frightening about it.”

Badar Khan Suri

Badar Khan Suri (Photo: Georgetown University)

Badar Khan Suri is an Indian national and Georgetown University fellow who was arrested at his Virginia home after his J-1 visa was revoked.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson claimed that Suri was “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media” and that he has connections to a “senior advisor to Hamas.”

Suri’s attorney says that his detention may have occurred because his wife is a Palestinian who used to work for Al Jazeera.

Last week Democracy Now interviewed Nader Hashemi about the case. Hashemi is a professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at Georgetown University and the director of the center where Badar Khan Suri was hired as a postdoctoral fellow.

“The family here has been devastated,” said Hashemi. “They’ve been shocked. The children are traumatized. I do believe the target here was not my colleague, Badar Khan Suri, but it was his wife, who’s a Palestinian from Gaza. They couldn’t arrest her, because she’s a U.S. citizen, so they went after a much easier target, her husband, who, of course, you know, has committed no crime. He was just doing his work. He’s not a political activist. And I think that that’s an important part of the story.”

“The other important part of the story here is that the origins of this begins on the right-wing social media sphere, where these, you know, extreme pro-Israel fanatics find a target, and they start tweeting about it, tagging the Israeli Embassy, tagging Marco Rubio,” he continued. “And then, within a few days, Rubio sends in the shock troops. That’s the background. So, the family is traumatized, the children, as well.”

Yunseo Chung

Yunseo Chung (Photo courtesy of Cuny CLEAR)

Yunseo Chung is a 21-year-old Columbia University student and permanent U.S. resident from South Korea who is facing deportation over her involvement in Palestine protests.

The government revoked her green card, but Chung sued The White House over the move and a federal judge has ordered Trump to halt deportation proceedings.

“Yunseo no longer has to fear that ICE will spirit her away to a distant prison simply because she spoke up for Palestinian human rights,” one of Chung’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassemin, told The Guardian. “The court’s temporary restraining order is both sensible and fair, to preserve the status quo as we litigate the serious constitutional issues at stake not just for Yunseo, but for our society as a whole.”

Ranjani Srinivasan

Ranjani Srinivasan (Screenshot: CNN)

Ranjani Srinivasan is an Indian scholar and Columbia student, who fled to Canada to escape arrest after she became aware of the fact ICE was targeting her.

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America,” Secretary Noem wrote on X. “When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.”

“She has basically been a private person, pursuing her studies and pursuing her career,” her lawyer, Nathan Yaffe, told CNN. “She’s been a student, and they not only took that away from her in the sense of forcing her out of the country … but they also took away her privacy, obviously, and made her the huge public face of this campaign of repression that they’re undertaking with the deliberate desire, as the administration has said, to send a message to other students.”

Srinivasan has criticized her school for allowing the situation to develop.

“I do think that Columbia should have protected me against this. I think that that’s part of their mandate,” Srinivasan said. “When you’re attracting these international students to come and study at Columbia, when you go and do outreach all across the world to attract the best and the brightest, you have a mandate to protect them.”

“I want my PhD. I want my name cleared.”

Leqaa Kordia

Leqaa Kordia was detained in Newark, New Jersey and over her allegedly having an expired student visa.

Very little of Kordia’s case has been made public. She is from the West Bank and government officials say she was connected to Gaza protests. According to a government database, she is currently being at a detention in Alvarado, Texas.

Zooming Out

In the last issue of this newsletter, we covered Columbia’s complicity with the Trump administration. We are continually seeing other universities bend to the desires of the Trump regime.

Harvard

This week the administration threatened to hold up funding to Harvard, in the same way that it did with Columbia. A press release from Department of Education, the General Services Administration and the Health and Human Services Department declared that $255.6 million in Harvard contracts and $8.7 billion in multi-year grants would be examined over Harvard’s alleged inability to crack down on antisemitism.

“Harvard has served as a symbol of the American Dream for generations,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a statement. “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination — all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry — has put its reputation in serious jeopardy.”

Rather than stand up for the First Amendment or his students protesting genocide, Harvard President Alan Garber quickly put out a statement promising to play ball with Trump.

“We still have much work to do,” it reads. “We will engage with members of the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism. We resolve to take the measures that will move Harvard and its vital mission forward while protecting our community and its academic freedom. By doing so, we combat bias and intolerance as we create the conditions that foster the excellence in teaching and research that is at the core of our mission.”

New York University

Last week, Dr. Joanne Liu, an associate professor at McGill and a pediatric emergency medicine physician who formerly served as the head of Doctors Without Borders, told CTV News that New York University (NYU) canceled a scheduled talk she was set to give at the school because she planned to show slides about casualties in Gaza.

The night before her speech, Liu got a call from NYU’s vice-chair of the education department expressing concern that her slides could be seen as “anti-governmental” and antisemitic.

Liu agreed to make some edits, but the school eventually told her the talk would be canceled either way.

Columbia University

Amid student deportations and Trump’s threats to cut funding, Columbia University president Katrina Armstrong scampered away from her position.

Claire Shipman, who had been the co-chair of the university’s board of trustees, was named as acting president.

It’s a short-lived gig these days, as Armstrong’s predecessor Minouche Shafik left the post amid similar protest and controversy in 2023.

The Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism put out a statement calling Armstrong’s departure an “important step toward advancing negotiations” between the government and the school.

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