Signs in support of detained graduate student Mahmoud Khalil are readied during the nationwide Hands Off! protest against President Donald Trump and his advisor, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in Washington, on April 5.AMID FARAHI/AFP/Getty Images
Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student in the international affairs program at Columbia University and an important organizer of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Manhattan campus last year, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last month. The White House later confirmed that his detention was justified by President Donald Trump’s executive order combatting antisemitism, which authorizes the administration to revoke visas and deport international students – even legal permanent residents like Mr. Khalil – if they are deemed to be “Hamas sympathizers” or to have joined the “pro-jihadist protests.”
Mr. Khalil is being held in an immigrant detention centre in Louisiana, alongside Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was abducted off the street by plainclothed ICE officers. Ms. Öztürk had written a pro-Palestinian op-ed in her school’s newspaper. Another Columbia University graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, fled to Canada before ICE agents could detain her – she had been mistaken for a protester and arrested while trying to return to her apartment (her case was later dismissed).
Nearly 300 international students attending universities across the United States have had their visas revoked over the past few weeks. Some have been targeted for participating in pro-Palestinian protests and encampments over the past year; others, for entirely unclear reasons. The revocation of their visas means that students are foreign nationals legally in the United States one moment, and undocumented and subject to detention and deportation proceedings the next.
Targeting international students for deportation because they exercise their right to protest or freedom of speech is likely unconstitutional and certainly morally reprehensible. The First Amendment rights in the U.S. Constitution protect all people residing in the country, not just American citizens. That means that temporary residents and other non-citizens – such as visa holders – have the right to free speech, freedom of religion and peaceful assembly. The government cannot revoke a visa or green card for political speech alone.
The intersection of immigration and constitutional law, however, is a legal grey area. While visa holders’ freedom of speech is protected, their immigration status is not. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims authority to deport by citing the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows deportation of non-citizens when there is reasonable grounds that the person “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
By any stretch of the imagination, it’s hard to see international students at American universities as singularly bringing about adverse foreign policy consequences. Especially not when Mr. Trump singlehandedly caused markets to plummet and plunged the global economy into a trade war.
Conservatives claim that Mr. Trump’s actions over the past two and a half months are necessary to combat the radical left-wing ideological capture of key American political institutions. However, the radical, parallel shifts in immigration policy, higher education and other arenas are part of a long-term strategy to foment and entrench a conservative counterrevolution that will change the landscape of American politics for a generation.
Recent reporting has noted that the crackdown on universities and pro-Palestinian protesters follows closely to the blueprint laid out in Project Esther, which, like Project 2025, was developed by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. But it’s not just pro-Palestinian student protesters that are being disappeared. ICE’s targets in the international student population are inconsistent and unsuspecting. That some of the highest profile visa revocations are students who have voiced pro-Palestinian opinions is a convenient cover for the Trump administration to achieve its underlying goals of instilling fear in institutions of higher education, reducing both legal and undocumented immigration, and making the immigration and deportation regime seem threatening and omnipresent.
This is not a hidden agenda; it’s clear, articulated and unabashed. In a recent interview with the New York Times, conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who designed the Trump administration’s anti-DEI crusade, said that a medium and long-term goal is to “adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in existential terror.” The long-term goal of Mr. Trump’s immigration strategy is to enable the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to agree to the broad discretionary power of the government to revoke visas and deport non-citizens as a first step. On the near horizon are efforts to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans and deport them, as well.
In the end, this escalating crackdown on international students is not merely about suppressing controversial political dissent on college campuses – it’s about sending a chilling message to all citizens and non-citizens alike, cultivating a culture of fear and submission, and reshaping the very nature of American society. This erosion of democratic freedoms will not stop at the borders of immigration policy – it will ultimately rewrite what it means to live and speak freely in the United States.