Columbia University professors hold protest against the university's capitulation to the demands of the Trump administration in front of the school's Manhattan campus in New York City, March 24, 2025. Photo credit: New York Times.
The detention of Mahmoud Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on March 8 marked a significant turning point for the state of academic freedom within the United States. In the past two weeks since his detention, the Trump administration has intensified its targeting of pro-Palestinian students and professors, weaponizing ICE against individuals from institutions such as Columbia, Brown, and Georgetown University. The government also seems adamant about fulfilling the attacks they promised against higher education before the November 2024 election. With universities demonstrating a lack of motivation fighting back against these attacks, the state of academic freedom in the US is deeply concerning.
Mahmoud Khalil was detained on Saturday, March 8, by ICE officers at the entrance of his apartment building who notified him that his student visa had been revoked. Upon learning that Khalil is not on a student visa but is a permanent resident with a green card, they said that that had been revoked too. He is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs who had been highly active during encampments and campus protests of 2024, often acting as part of a team of negotiators between the students and the Columbia administration.
He was initially sent to a detention facility in New Jersey before being transferred to Louisiana. In the initial days of his arrest, Khalil was effectively disappeared as his wife was told that he was at the New Jersey facility but upon arriving at the facility, she was told that he was not there and that his whereabouts were unknown. More than 24 hours later, he was located in Louisiana. This pattern of events is consistent with enforced disappearances, which are frequently used by authoritarian governments worldwide to eliminate or silence critics by preventing them from even taking legal action against their governments as they lose contact with families and lawyers. According to the vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, Heidi Altman, ICE regularly moves detainees away from their homes and families in order to make it harder for them to contest their deportation in court.[1]
Since his detention on March 8, Khalil has still not been charged with committing any crime. The government has resorted to a rarely used part of the US Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the Secretary of State the authority to order the removal of individuals whose presence in the country would severely undermine US foreign policy. In other words, the government is arguing that Khalil’s presence in the country is a serious threat to the current administration’s goal of “combating antisemitism”.
A New York federal judge temporarily blocked his deportation on March 12. The same judge then transferred his case from Louisiana back to New Jersey on March 19. Meanwhile, Khalil alongside several other students sued Columbia University to prevent it from sharing their records with the House education and workforce committee. Columbia and Barnard College have been instructed by a federal judge on March 20 to temporarily halt sharing student disciplinary records with the committee and a hearing is scheduled for March 25.
Khalil is not the only Columbia University community member to be targeted. On March 13, the Columbia University Judicial Board (UJB) announced that it had issued sanctions against students that were involved in the April 2024 occupation of Hamilton Hall. While the UJB did not disclose the number of students penalized, Columbia University Apartheid Divest stated that 22 Columbia students were suspended, expelled, or had their degrees revoked.[2] According to a recent social media post among those expelled is the president of the Student Workers of Columbia union, UAW Local 2710. The union said that their president was expelled two days prior to the start of negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement. Later, 2 hours before their scheduled meeting on bargaining day, Columbia University administration cancelled bargaining too.
These actions by Columbia University constitute a submission to the threats and demands of the Trump administration. One day before the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, on March 7, the government had cancelled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University, claiming the institution had failed to adequately combat antisemitism on campus. One week later, Columbia received a list of demands from the Trump administration with threats of further funding cuts. Demands from Columbia include “expulsion or multi-year suspension” for all students that participated in encampments and the Hamilton Hall occupation, the centralization of all disciplinary procedures in the office of the president while removing students’ ability to appeal to a different university body, further restrictions on masks and protests, and more. The letter also demanded Columbia place the “Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies [MESAAS] department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years.” Under “academic receivership”, the administration would appoint someone from outside of the department to serve as chair. In a recent statement, The Middle East Studies Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom called for Columbia to stand up against these demands, noting that the demand for receivership over the MESAAS department was only prompted by the administration’s opposition to the views of faculty within the department.
However, such calls proved ineffective in the face of Columbia’s capitulation. Its President Katrina Armstrong announced a series of decisions to be implemented in response to the earlier letter from the federal government. Under the new policies, Columbia University students risk being detained by one of the school’s 36 newly trained and authorized “public safety personnel” for wearing masks in public or holding protests in “academic buildings, and other places necessary for the conduct of University activities”. The Trump administration’s demands and Columbia University’s swift capitulation threaten faculty and students’ right to engage in protests and express their views freely, undermine already weakened rules of democratic governance of the university, and significantly damage the university’s institutional autonomy.
Attacks are not limited to student leaders or those engaging in occupation-type protests. Recently, a PhD student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Ranjani Srinivasan, had her student visa revoked on the grounds that she was previously detained in April 2024 and “involved in activities supporting Hamas”. Upon learning that her visa had been revoked and she was at risk of being detained indefinitely, Srinivasan “self-deported”. According to CBS News, Srinivasan’s lawyers stated that she was “mistakenly detained while trying to get into her apartment near last year's Hamilton Hall takeover”. The Student Workers of Columbia, which Srinivasan was a member of, stated on the social media platform X that ICE officers showed up at her house without a warrant and shortly afterwards, Columbia University notified her over email that her enrollment had been terminated. This conflicts Columbia’s public statements that the institution will only allow ICE on campus on the condition that they have warrants.
Another Columbia University student, Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student from the West Bank, who was also detained in April 2024 over campus protests, was detained by ICE on March 13, 2025. According to the statement of the Department of Homeland Security, Kordia’s student visa had been terminated in January 2022, and she was detained by ICE for overstaying her student visa.
However, the targeted repression of students goes beyond Columbia University. Momodou Taal, a PhD student at Cornell University who had recently filed a lawsuit against a series of executive orders issued by the Trump administration, is also facing the threat of deportation. In the Fall of 2024 Cornell University suspended him for campus protest activity. The current threats seem to stem from his legal actions against the government. On his X account, Taal shared a message in which he stated that law enforcement from an unidentified agency approached his home. Two eyewitnesses confirmed that law enforcement officers were stalking Taal’s house. He has since filed for a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration, arguing that the government is trying to intimidate him, but he is now facing deportation once again after lawyers from the Justice Department emailed him, requesting that he appear at the homeland security investigations Office in Syracuse, New York.
It is not only students that are under attack. Rasha Alawieh, a professor at Brown University, was deported shortly after she returned from her home country of Lebanon. Customs and Border Protection deported Alawieh in defiance of a court order requiring 48-hour notice before her deportation. The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Alawieh attended the funeral of former Hezbollah leader Nasrallah without providing any evidence for this claim.
The most recent detention to occur in relation to Israel/Palestine conflict is the case of Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University. Suri was detained by ICE on March 17, 2025 based on the same legal logic employed during the detention of Mahmoud Khalil. His deportation has also been temporarily blocked by a judge. Suri has no criminal record and has not been charged with a crime. His deportation is instead based on “harming U.S. foreign policy”.[3]
Attacks against scholars have seemingly expanded beyond the Israel/Palestine issue. On March 9, after a “random search”, a French scholar coming to Texas for a conference was deported back to his country after Customs and Border Protection found “messages criticizing the Trump administration’s treatment of scientists”. The agency has argued that the messages “conveyed hatred of Trump and could be qualified as terrorism.”
Endangered Scholars Worldwide is deeply concerned by the intensified and targeted repression of individual students and scholars, as well as universities in general. The measures taken by the Trump administration constitute weaponization of legal provisions and administrative measures, often in defiance of contrary court orders. The detention, deportation and intimidation of students and faculty for expressing their views and engaging in protests is a gross violation of academic freedom. We call on universities in the US to protect and defend their members’ academic freedom without caving into administrative demands that undermine their institutional autonomy. We invite the members of the global community dedicated to upholding academic freedom to join our call.
Sources and further reading:
Comments