The instability that commands the lives of international students in the United States cannot be underestimated.
I remember my maiden journey from Kolkata to an international student in upstate New York and an international student to earn a bachelor’s degree from a small liberal arts college. This was when the so-called “war on terrorism” led by the US began to seriously enter the country in 2003. The United States had invaded Iraq several months before its arrival in New York.
It was the “eye of evil” that left most room for a critical assessment of US foreign policy in the classroom, the on-campus jingoism inspired by the fight against the “eyeful axis” in America, which quickly looked like I was looking at.
Since then, things have hardly gotten better as international students headed towards America. They remained unreliable and unwelcome outsiders in the eyes of many Americans, and the instability surrounding their lives continued.
However, with Trump 2.0, this sense of instability has reached an unprecedented level. In fact, the US these days is not only unwelcome, but it is also a blatantly unsafe destination for international students.
Trump has made life for international students much more difficult than before. This was not a surprise as he had promised to do it on the campaign path over a year ago. In addition to claiming that universities and various accredited bodies are dominated by Marxists and the radical left, he has created a special hatred of Palestinian solidarity activists on his well-known campus. He declared that if re-elected, he would cancel his student visa for “radical, anti-American, anti-Semitic foreigners” who were taking part in pro-Palestinian protests on US university campuses in October 2023.
After returning to the White House, he targeted priorities to pro-Palestinian international students and faculty.
One of his best targets was Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of Columbia University. Halil, who was at the forefront of Colombia’s pro-Palestinian protests as a negotiator between student protesters and university leadership, is a green card holder. However, the Trump administration has pushed him to be deported, claiming he is engaged in pro-am and non-American activities. Halil was accused of Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) from his New York home in front of his pregnant American wife in early March and has been detained in a Louisiana detention facility for more than a month.
In a similar case, doctoral students at Tufts University and Turkish citizen Le Mesa Ozruk were accused of masked, mediocre officers in Boston. She was also transferred to a Louisiana detention facility. Her crime? She co-authors daily with operations at Tufts to call her university to sell from Israel.
Indian citizens and Georgetown University postdoctoral scholar Badal Khan Suri are also targeted for deportation, facing an uncertain future in ice detention facilities in Texas. Sri didn’t even take part in the Palestinian solidarity protests. His crime appears to be that he is the son-in-law of former adviser to Ahmed Youssef of the Hamas government in Gaza. However, Youssef left Hamas’ political wing more than a decade ago, calling the group’s attack on Israel “a horrifying mistake” on October 7, 2023.
Then there is the case of Momodou Taal, a doctoral candidate from Cornell University, a dual citizen of the UK and Gambia. He joined the Palestinian solidarity protests and was asked by immigration authorities to surrender. After hiding for two and a half weeks, fearing his personal safety, Tar decides to leave the United States.
Some of these well-known cases are just the tip of the iceberg. The Trump administration has revoked visas for hundreds of international students due to Palestinian activities and social media posts. As of April 10th, more than 600 international students from over 100 universities across the country are believed to have been affected. And it doesn’t seem to be over. The Department of Homeland Security has launched a screening of non-citizen social media accounts, denying visas and green cards to all individuals who believe they have participated in Palestinian activism, or the Trump administration sees it as “anti-Semitic activity.”
Meanwhile, major American universities seem to be sensitive to Trump’s demands, throwing international students at wolves, staying in good administration books and throwing international students at them to maintain federal funds.
Columbia University, for example, quickly fell into the spot when the Trump administration decided to withhold federal funds to $400 million due to the apparent university omission during the Palestinian solidarity protests. Despite sitting on a donation of just under $15 billion, Columbia leaders responded to the threat of Trump’s funding by overhauling university protest policies and introducing new security measures that would quickly crack down on the defense of Palestinian solidarity on campus and the possibility of protests.
The Trump administration also called for five years to serve in academic acceptance positions in Colombia’s Middle East, South Asia and Africa. Academic receivers typically include internal processes and measures implemented by university leadership, resulting in a dysfunctional department or program “back-on-track.” Apparently agreeing to Trump’s demands, the university appointed a new senior vice provost to oversee the department.
Harvard University – another agency with large donations – faced similar demands from the Trump administration in return for federal fundraising. Specifically, its leadership was called for “necessary changes” to “address bias, improve perspective diversity, and end ideological capture.” Unlike in Colombia, no particular program or department was mentioned.
However, Harvard’s leadership seems to have known what Trump means. David M Cutler, interim dean of Harvard’s social sciences, rejected the leadership of the Middle East Research Center. He justified his decision by arguing that “the Centre’s programming on Palestine has a lack of balance and multiple perspectives.” Harvard also cut ties with the Palestinian University of Billzeit on the occupied West Bank.
The way that leaders of elite American universities addressed Trump’s demands clearly demonstrate that these institutions no longer view the intelligence and vision of future generations as their primary objectives. In fact, they have proven that these universities are no longer independent institutions of higher education committed to improving the collective future of humanity, but simply businesses that provide products (i.e. university degrees) to paid clients (i.e. students). It is therefore not at all surprising that university leaders decided to throw international students into their fate when they calculated that these students were spending more of their “business” (with federal funds) than they personally contributed to tuition fees.
The attacks on foreign students through the Trump administration’s pro-Palestinian activities came along with a simultaneous crackdown on diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Taken together, these policies have quickly transformed American campuses into a hostile environment for foreign students, especially for people from the global South.
With all this in mind, it seems that the lives of international students in the United States are simply insecure. There is no guarantee that the Trump administration’s crackdown will remain limited to pro-Palestinian speeches and protests. A precedent has been set. All international students in America today must accept that they can be accused of, detained, and deported at any time by attending protests, writing articles, and expressing views that elevate the White House and its allies. They may even be detained and threatened with deportation due to past employment of relatives. There is no significance of legal measures or political rest. So future international students will wonder: Is higher education in the United States worth the risk?
The views expressed in this article are the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.