Elite universities feel targeted as Trump administration expands immigration crackdown

By Andy Rose, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration’s attempt this month to deport a Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian campus activist due to his alleged “activities aligned to Hamas” was the first case of its kind to grab headlines.

Since then, two foreign–born academics with visas to work at other prominent US universities – Georgetown and Brown – have been detained or deported over homeland security concerns.

Another Columbia student and Fulbright scholar left the country after she was told she faced immigration action as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on international students who participated in protests against the Israel-Hamas war, which flared again this week as a ceasefire that Trump’s envoy had been working to extend fell apart.

At least two of the recent high-profile cases involve an obscure federal statute that gives the secretary of state authority to act upon the belief a non-citizen “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” the Department of Homeland Security has said. The Trump administration also is using the agency’s intelligence to identify international students at dozens of US campuses who participated in last year’s war demonstrations.

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump posted March 10 about Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil’s case. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Trump’s Department of Education also is investigating 60 universities – including six of eight in the Ivy League – for “antisemitic harassment and discrimination.”

The administration’s effort to delegitimize the role of universities is not a new idea. It follows decades of private and public talk among conservatives about weakening the institutions.

And the pressure now focused on higher education in particular has a familiar ring to Steven Levitsky, a professor of government and Latin American studies at Harvard University and a coauthor of “How Democracies Die.”

“It is really common for authoritarian governments – both those on the left and those on the right – to go after universities,” said Levitsky. “It’s difficult to find an autocrat from Hugo Chávez (in Venezuela) to Viktor Orbán (in Hungary) to (Recep Tayyip) Erdoğan in Turkey that has not sought to attack, weaken and essentially control universities.”

The faculty and students facing immigration actions

Mahmoud Khalil is a prominent Palestinian activist who played a central role last year in campus protests at Columbia against the Israel-Hamas war. A legal permanent US resident and spouse of a US citizen, he was arrested by immigration officers in early March outside his apartment on Columbia’s New York campus.

The Trump administration has accused the Syrian-born Palestinian refugee – without providing evidence – of being a terrorist sympathizer, supporting Hamas and promoting the organization on campus, which Khalil denies. White House officials have also said Khalil distributed flyers promoting Hamas, a claim his lawyers deny.

Khalil’s attorneys argue the Trump administration targeted him for his pro-Gaza views and participating in demonstrations in support of Palestinians, violating his First and Fifth Amendment protections.

He remains detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana after a judge this week ordered his case transferred to New Jersey from New York.

Dr. Rasha Alawieh is a kidney transplant physician and a teacher at Brown in Rhode Island. She was detained for more than a day last week at Boston Logan International Airport upon her return from a visit to her native Lebanon.

Federal agents found photos of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s supreme leader that had been deleted in a folder on Alawieh’s cell phone, a source familiar with the case told CNN. “Dr. Alawieh stated that she did not want to give authorities the perception that she supports Hezbollah and the Ayatollah politically or militarily,” a court filing obtained by CNN affiliate WCVB reads.

Alawieh, 34, acknowledged to federal agents she had attended Nasrallah’s funeral – a public event attended by thousands – during her visit in Beirut and told them Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, according to the source. The group is a designated terror organization in the US and many other Western countries.

“I think if you listen to one of his sermons, you would know what I mean,” Alawieh allegedly told the agents, according to WCVB’s copy of the filing. “He is a religious, spiritual person. As I said, he has very high value. His teachings are about spirituality and morality.”

“Our client is in Lebanon, and we’re not going to stop fighting to get her back in the US to see her patients, and we’re also going to make sure that the government follows the rule of law,” an attorney representing Alawieh’s family in a federal complaint fighting the deportation, Stephanie Marzouk, told reporters in mid-March outside a Boston courthouse.

Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow and an Indian citizen doing “research on peace building in Iraq and Afghanistan,” faces expulsion from the US, Georgetown University in Washington, DC, announced this week.

Khan Suri was detained by the Department of Homeland Security, which accuses him of “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” an agency spokesperson said on X, adding: “Khan Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas.”

“[Khan] Suri’s activities and presence in the United State[s] rendered him deportable” under the statute that empowers the top UP diplomat to act if he believes a non-citizen could have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” the spokesperson said.

Khan Suri is innocent, his lawyer Hassan Ahmad said.

A federal judge on Thursday ruled the Trump administration could not deport Khan Suri. US District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles said that while she reviews his petition, the administration is not to remove him from the country unless she issues another ruling to the contrary, according to the order.

“We are not aware of him engaging in any illegal activity and we have not received a reason for his detention,” the university’s Interim President Robert Groves told its Board of Directors in a letter obtained by CNN.

Khan Suri’s family has not been given any information about his detention, his sister, Khushnuma Khan, told CNN. That includes their parents who live in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

“We are currently confused about how and why this is happening to him,” she said.

“If an accomplished scholar who focuses on conflict resolution is whom the government decides is bad for foreign policy,” Ahmad said, “then perhaps the problem is with the government, not the scholar.”

Ranjani Srinivasan, the architect and Fulbright scholar at Columbia who also taught at Barnard College, left the country last week after the US Consulate in India informed her in early March her student visa had been revoked. She had been in the US since 2016, when she enrolled at Harvard.

Immigration officers later showed up at her apartment door without a warrant, saying they would come back until she made contact with them, her attorneys said.
Department of Homeland Security officials have identified Srinivasan, an Indian national, as among students who participated in protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

The agency confirmed Srinivasan’s visa was revoked in line with the statute related to “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Srinivasan attended a handful of protests last year but not one in which students occupied Hamilton Hall, her attorneys said. The night of that protest, Srinivasan found streets barricaded when she returned to her Columbia apartment after a night out with friends. In the confusion, she was detained, then charged with failure to disperse and blocking the sidewalk. Both charges were dismissed, and she has not faced disciplinary action, her attorneys said.

Her social media activity, meanwhile, was limited to sharing or liking posts highlighting human rights violations in the war in Gaza, and in December 2023, she signed an open letter published by the Society of Architectural Historians in support of “Palestinian liberation,” they said.

Srinivasan this month flew to Canada to comply with immigration law but did not voluntarily “self-deport,” as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on social media, she said.

“Having my visa revoked and then losing my student status has upended my life and future — not because of any wrongdoing but because I exercised my right to free speech,” Srinivasan told CNN.

Columbia faced another immigration investigation last week when two agents executed a search warrant on two on-campus residences, Interim President Katrina Armstrong said in a letter to students and faculty. They were investigating whether Columbia was “harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed in a Justice Department speech, the Associated Press reported.

Attacks on universities building in strength and scope

While a full-frontal attack on academia has been brewing in conservative circles for decades, officials in the new Trump administration increasingly have said the quiet part out loud.

“We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” Vice President JD Vance, an alumnus of Yale Law School, said three years ago in a speech to the National Conservatism Conference.

“The professors are the enemy,” he added, quoting a statement President Richard Nixon made to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that was secretly recorded by the White House.

Painting colleges and universities as elitist and out of touch is a common move that can help a hostile government undermine their educational mission, said Levitsky.

“Universities are difficult to control,” he said. “Universities are, by definition, places of dissent. Places of diverging, often alternative, viewpoints.”

But universities themselves opened the door to criticism by having expressed hostility to the views of many conservatives, former UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks said.

“In the context of crises and protests around controversial speakers, along with the growing preoccupation on campuses with offensive speech and so-called microaggressions, Trump and his allies contorted the idea of free speech to build a narrative that the university, rather than the political right, was the chief threat to the First Amendment,” Dirks wrote this month in The Atlantic.

Universities have assumed too long that most Americans automatically believe academic work is important, Dirks wrote: “In fact, they need to be far more proactive in communicating the enormous contributions they make to the public good.”

Speaking outside a court hearing for Khalil last week, Columbia Associate Professor Joseph Howley argued academics would only be the first targets.

“Where exactly are we in the poem that begins, ‘When they came for the communists, I did not speak out?’ Well, they’ve already come for the asylum-seekers. They’ve come for the migrant families. Now they’ve come for Mahmoud Khalil,” said Howley. “It’s not a very long poem. So, how far down the list do you think you are?”

CNN’s Kaanita Iyer, Evan Pérez, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn and Chris Boyette contributed to this report.

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