300 Student Visas Revoked While Immigration Detentions Escalate

Irina Park

On Thursday, March 27, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he had revoked 300 or more students’ and others’ visas because of their foreign policy views or “taking activities that are counter to our national interest or foreign policy” as part of the ongoing repression of the Palestine Solidarity Movement and of dissenters against US imperialism.

Rubio stated that visa holders charged with a crime should automatically lose their visas. He is also stripping people of their green cards, like Mahmoud Khalil, who is still being held in an ICE facility in Louisiana. The recent increase in activism is effective as evident by the measures the Trump administration is taking to repress these efforts.

At a news conference, Rubio said that he had revoked the student visa of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University Ph.D. student from Turkey, who authored an essay in a student newspaper last year calling for divestment from Israel from the university and support of the Palestinian people. Six immigration officers in plain clothes—some wearing masks as seen in this video—disappeared Rumeysa Ozturk from the street outside of her home in Massachusetts while on her way to break her Ramadan fast with friends.

Another doctoral student at the University of Alabama, Alireza Doroudi, a Ph.D. engineering student who is originally from Iran, was detained off campus by immigration officials, which has not provided justification for their actions.

More students have also been arrested and detained. Yunseo Chung, a lawful US resident from Korea, attended a sit-in this month at Barnard College at Columbia and was arrested. The Department of Homeland Security is looking to deport Chung, who has sued Trump and other government officials for attempting to do so.

A Georgetown scholar, Badar Khan Suri, from India, was arrested outside of his home by masked immigration officers and taken to a detention facility in Louisiana on allegations he spread Hamas propaganda as well as due to his wife Mapheze Saleh’s identity as a Palestinian, who is a US citizen, according to Suri’s attorney. Saleh was the target of a Zionist smear campaign prior to her husband’s arrest. A US court has blocked his deportation.

Ranjani Srinivasan, a doctoral student at Columbia from India, opted to “self-deport” and flee the U.S. after immigration officers searched her university residence. The Trump administration revoked her visa for “advocating for violence and terrorism” without providing evidence.

Earlier this month, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist who was to start work at Brown University as an assistant professor of medicine, was deported as soon as she returned to the US from Lebanon, despite having a US visa, after attending Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral. Momodou Taal, a United Kingdom and Gambian citizen, had his visa revoked after participating in campus demonstrations at Cornell University. Leqaa Kordia, a resident of Newark, New Jersey was arrested at or near Columbia during protests, accused of failing to leave the U.S. after her visa expired. Kordia is a Palestinian from the West Bank and is currently being held at a detention center in Alvardo, Texas.

On Friday, March 28, the University of Minnesota announced that a graduate student had been arrested by ICE earlier in the week. The Trump administration has claimed the reason for these acts is that the Palestine Solidarity Movement supports what the US deems as “terrorism” and threats to foreign policy, labeled as such because of the effective methods it has used to resist US imperialism.

Attacks on Intellectuals and Activists

Several other heinous acts by immigration officials occurred, including a French scientist detained for sending text messages that were critical of Trump, Becky Burke, a Welsh artist and tourist detained on February 26 and taken to a detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, a Canadian visa seeker detained and held for two weeks in San Diego while trying to legally obtain a work visa, and several Germans who were detained for up to six weeks, one of which is a permanent U.S. resident. On March 17, Jeanette Vizguerra-Ramirez was arrested by ICE and is facing deportation in Colorado. She is an immigrant rights activist and organizer. This past week on Tuesday, prominent activist Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino who helped found Familias Unidas por la Justica, a local farmworkers union in Northwest Washington, was detained by ICE and transferred to a privately run ICE facility in Tacoma as of March 25.

Image: Footage of Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest by plains-clothes ICE officers, some with concealed identity, on March 25

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