The administration of President Donald Trump has arrested a second scholar protester and set a deadline for Columbia College, one of the prestigious campuses in the US, to cede management of considered one of its educational departments.
In a news release on Friday, the Division of Homeland Safety accused Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian scholar at Columbia, of overstaying her F-1 scholar visa.
The assertion defined that brokers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained her for deportation. One other overseas scholar, Ranjani Srinivasan of India, had her scholar visa revoked for taking part “in actions supporting Hammas”, a misspelling of the Palestinian armed group Hamas.
The Trump administration has repeatedly conflated participation in protests in opposition to Israel’s struggle in Gaza with help for Hamas. It has additionally accused demonstrators of supporting “terrorists”.
Kordia’s arrest marks the second time in lower than every week {that a} Palestinian scholar at Columbia College has been taken into ICE custody for deportation. On Saturday, protest spokesperson Mahmoud Khalil likewise was arrested and positioned in immigration detention, first in New Jersey and later in Louisiana.
Civil liberty advocates say the arrests are supposed to stifle free speech rights, and Khalil’s lawyer this week argued he has not been in a position to contact his consumer privately, in violation of his proper to authorized counsel.
Khalil is a everlasting resident of the US, with a inexperienced card, and his American spouse is eight months pregnant. The Trump administration, nonetheless, says it plans to strip him of his inexperienced card.
“It’s a privilege to be granted a visa to reside and research in the US of America. While you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege needs to be revoked, and also you shouldn’t be on this nation,” Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem mentioned within the information launch.
However the arrests and scholar visa revocation weren’t the one strong-armed actions the Trump administration took in opposition to Columbia within the final 24 hours.
In a letter issued late on Thursday evening, the administration demanded that Columbia’s Division of Center Japanese, South Asian and African Research (MESAAS) be positioned in an “educational receivership” whereby an out of doors authority takes management, usually as punishment for mismanagement.
The letter specified that the college should provide you with a plan to create the educational receivership function no later than March 20.
Failure to conform, the letter warned, would negatively have an effect on “Columbia College’s continued monetary relationship with the US authorities”.
Organising a receivership was only one in an inventory of calls for, which included abolishing the college’s judicial board for listening to disciplinary issues, banning masks on campus and adopting a controversial definition of anti-Semitism that some concern might restrict professional criticisms of Israel.
Columbia College is a non-public college, considered one of eight campuses that makes up the much-vaunted Ivy League within the northeast area.
However Trump and different Republicans have repeatedly attacked the college because it grew to become the epicentre of pro-Palestinian protests in 2023 and 2024 as college students rallied in opposition to the devastation wrought by Israel’s struggle, which United Nations consultants in comparison with a genocide.
How did we get right here?
The protests hit a peak final April, after a contentious listening to on Capitol Hill. The college president on the time, Minouche Shafik, appeared earlier than a congressional panel to face scrutiny over allegations that Columbia and different colleges had failed to deal with anti-Semitism on campus.
The very subsequent day, Shafik authorised New York Metropolis police to enter an encampment that scholar protesters had arrange on Columbia’s East Garden, resulting in mass arrests.
Tensions escalated from there. Pupil protesters argued that their free speech rights had been being curtailed, and that officers had been conflating criticisms of Israel’s struggle with anti-Semitism. Some occupied a faculty constructing, Hamilton Corridor, to point out defiance in opposition to makes an attempt to dismantle the protest motion.
However what occurred at Columbia kicked off a collection of comparable measures throughout the nation, as police had been referred to as onto campuses to arrest peaceable protesters. Greater than 3,000 protesters are estimated to have been arrested between April and July.
Trump campaigned for re-election on the platform that he would search out and deport overseas college students who participated within the protests.
His allies even codified the threats into final yr’s Republican Occasion platform, making it considered one of 20 pledges: to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our school campuses secure and patriotic once more”.
Upon taking workplace for a second time period on January 20, Trump instantly issued an executive order calling for the elimination of foreigners who bear “hostile attitudes” to US “residents, tradition, authorities, establishments, or founding ideas” or who help “threats to our nationwide safety”.
The US has lengthy been an ally of Israel and has supported its marketing campaign in Gaza, which has killed no less than 48,524 Palestinians.
Within the months since taking workplace, Trump has directed the Justice Division to “examine and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American faculties and universities”.
And on social media this month, he warned he would take heavy-handed motion in opposition to any campus that hosts what he referred to as “unlawful protests” — though he didn’t outline what that class would possibly entail.
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any Faculty, Faculty, or College that permits unlawful protests,” Trump wrote. “Agitators will likely be imprisoned/or completely despatched again to the nation from which they got here. American college students will likely be completely expelled or, relying on on [sic] the crime, arrested.”
Already, on March 7, the Trump administration introduced the immediate cancellation of $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia College, in what was thought-about a warning shot in opposition to all establishments of upper training to adapt with the president’s calls for.
Secretary of Schooling Linda McMahon pointed to will increase in reported acts of anti-Semitism after the Hamas-led assaults on southern Israel in October 2023 as a motive for the cancellation.
“Since October 7, Jewish college students have confronted relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses — solely to be ignored by those that are supposed to guard them,” McMahon mentioned in an accompanying news release.
“Universities should adjust to all federal antidiscrimination legal guidelines if they’re going to obtain federal funding.”
In line with the Division of Schooling, Columbia presently receives roughly $5bn in federal grants and contracts. Earlier this week, the varsity moved to expel or suspend college students concerned within the antiwar protests.
Trump efforts face backlash
However some activists have questioned whether or not the Trump administration is actually motivated to fight hate crimes — or whether or not anti-Semitism is getting used as a smokescreen to additional different political goals.
On Thursday, activists with Jewish Voice for Peace and different teams gathered in Trump Tower in New York Metropolis to protest Khalil’s arrest, wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Not in our identify”.
As stories emerge of Homeland Safety officers looking Columbia College dorm rooms, critics concern college students’ civil rights could also be violated.
“We do imagine that in case you are right here, you shouldn’t get arrested, dragged away, and deported for partaking in protests that your whole classmates had been completely inside their rights to interact in,” Greg Lukianoff, the CEO of the Basis for Particular person Rights and Expression (FIRE), wrote on social media on Friday.
The Trump administration has cited a little-used part of the Immigration and Nationality Act as justification for the deliberate deportations.
It says the secretary of state has the appropriate to exclude, “beneath sure circumstances”, overseas nationals whose entry into the US “would have probably severe hostile overseas coverage penalties for the US”.
However attorneys and advocates level out that the Supreme Courtroom has repeatedly upheld the constitutional proper to free speech for immigrants within the US.
“What occurred to Mahmoud is nothing wanting extraordinary, stunning, and outrageous,” Khalil’s lawyer Ramzi Kassem mentioned in a latest assertion with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “It ought to outrage anybody who believes that speech needs to be free in the US of America.”
