The Trump administration is targeting immigrant students. We must call it what it is: political persecution.
I’ve been called emotional. Dramatic. Paranoid.
That’s what people say when you warn them that a democracy is crumbling. When you tell them it doesn’t take a dictatorship to silence dissent — just enough fear, repeated often enough, until even the boldest voices begin to shake.
On March 26, a student — Rumeysa Ozturk — was detained by President Donald J. Trump administration.
Her “offense”? Being one of several authors of a March 2024 opinion piece in The Tufts Daily, calling on the university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from companies tied to Israel.
She did what every student is taught to do: question power. Speak out. Use her words. And for that, she now faces deportation.
She is not the exception.
Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident and student activist at Columbia, is also in removal proceedings after organizing pro-Palestine demonstrations on campus. Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national and peacebuilding scholar at Georgetown, was arrested in his Virginia home in mid-March after his J-1 visa was revoked.
Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin accused Khan Suri via X of spreading “Hamas propaganda” and claimed ties to a Hamas advisor — yet no charges have been made public. He now sits in a detention center in Louisiana, stripped of his freedom for expressing an idea.
These aren’t isolated incidents. This is a calculated crackdown. A targeted campaign against immigrant students, especially those who speak the name Palestine out loud.
This isn’t happening on the other side of the country. It’s happening right here in California. College officials have confirmed that federal authorities have revoked at least 83 foreign student visas within the UC and CSU systems and private schools like Stanford within the past week.
“The federal government has not detailed the reasons behind these terminations,” said a campus notice from UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia Larive. “We have notified the three students and are in direct contact with them to provide support.”
These are our classmates, our friends, our partners. They came here to contribute, to learn, to grow. This wave of repression is local and personal.
When you’re undocumented, international or here on a temporary visa, your voice is a gamble. Your body is policed. Your existence is conditional. And when you dare to speak — they come for you.
I know this because I live it.
Every time I publish a piece like this. Every time I click “submit” and see my byline on the screen, I pause. I breathe. I wonder:
Is this the one? Will I be next?
The students being detained aren’t threats. They’re reminders. Reminders that this country’s promise of “free speech” was never built to include all of us. And that when we challenge that — when we refuse to be silent — we are treated like enemies.
So let’s be clear: if we don’t raise hell about students being deported for publishing op-eds and speaking up, then we’ve already accepted a future where protest is punished and truth is criminal.
This column isn’t just about Khalil, or Ozturk, or Suri. It’s about how fascism grows quietly, not with tanks in the streets, but with the quiet compliance of those who think “it’s not that serious.”
Because here’s the truth: they don’t need to deport everyone. Just enough of us to scare the rest into silence.
And that’s how democracy dies. Not with a bang, but with an inbox full of warnings, with visa revocations, with ICE at your door, and no one left to care.
That’s why I will keep writing.
I believe in the power of student media. I believe in using my voice while I still have it. And I believe that silence — especially now — is complicity.
So no. I won’t be silent.
