The Trump administration appears to be ramping up efforts to deport foreign-born students who are in the United States legally but whomauthorities accuse of opposing U.S. foreign policy—without offering any evidence.
As of Friday morning, U.S. officials have now moved to deport two such individuals. On March 8, immigration agentsarrested Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States who is ofPalestinian descent and was a graduate student at Columbia University until December and a prominent figure in the school’s student protests against the war in Gaza.
Then on Monday, immigration officials arrested Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow and Indian national who is in the United States on astudent visa. In apost on X, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson accused Suri of promoting Hamas propaganda and having ties to a senior Hamas advisor. However, his lawyer has said that Suri was targeted because of his wife’sPalestinian heritage, and Georgetown has said it hasnot received a reason for his detention and is not aware of any illegal activity.
NeitherKhalil norSuri has been charged with a crime, according to their respectivelawyers. Instead, in both cases Trump administration officials have cited anobscure andrarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act thatempowers the secretary of state to deport any noncitizen whose continued presence in the United States, they believe, “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
The moves have set the stage forfierce legal battles and roiled universities, some of which are already wrestling with the Trump administration’spush tobind hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to its own vision for American universities. Trump’s deportation moves have also sparked outrage and alarm over free speech, particularly in universities and over Israel and Gaza, as the administration appears to betargeting individuals who have expressed criticism of the Israeli government or support for the Palestinian cause.
“Trump has made no effort to disguise the fact that the arrests of academics like Suri and Mahmoud Khalil is intended to have a chilling effect and discourage the free expression of political views which Trump dislikes,” Democratic Virginia Rep. Don Beyer said in astatement.
“In both cases, the administration has punished speech with frightening, extreme measures that, if it happened in another country, most of us would not hesitate to call ‘authoritarianism,’” said Beyer, who added that the arrest of Suri—Beyer’s constituent—“is a clear violation of his constitutional rights.”
Yet even with these legal challenges, Khalil and Suri’s arrests may be just the start of abroader deportation crackdown against foreign-born students or academics who express or are tied topro-Palestinian activism—even if those people are in the country legally. Campus protests that swept the country last year sparked a national debate over U.S. support for Israel, free speech on university campuses, andantisemitism—issues that Trumpseized upon in his presidential campaign.
“We are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all,” Trumpsaid in one campaign video, adding that he would reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.” “We are going to have real education in America,” he declared.
Now in office, Trump has vowed to move full-speed ahead with his deportations. After Khalil’s arrest, Trump labeled him a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” in a post onTruth Social and declared that “this is the first arrest of many to come.”
Many of the student arrests so far have been tied to the Columbia University protests. Also in March, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia graduate student,fled to Canada after her student visa was revoked and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents showed up at her apartment. Srinivasan had shared social media posts about human rights violations in Gaza and attended a handful of protests, according to her lawyers, and wasbriefly detained at another protest that she said she was not participating in. U.S. officials have also arrested Leqaa Kordia—a Palestinian from the West Bank who waspreviously arrested during the Columbia University protests—foroverstaying a student visa.
“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 declared in his post on Truth Social. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.”
That pledge was echoed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” he said in apost on X.
In an interview withNPR last week, DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar accused Khalil of “promoting this antisemitism activity” and claimed that his visa was revoked “for supporting a terrorist type organization.” But when asked, Edgar did not explain exactly what conduct Khalil engaged in to warrant his arrest.
“I think you can see it on TV, right?” Edgarsaid. “We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the Secretary of State can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.”
“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” Khalil said in aletter published in theGuardian, which was dictated to family and friends from a detention facility in Louisiana. “Visa holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”
In Suri’s case, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin hasaccused the Georgetown researcher of “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media” and having “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas,” without offering any evidence.
Suri has no criminal record and denies McLaughlin’s allegations,according to his lawyer. Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is a master’s student at Georgetown University and aU.S. citizen. Saleh’s father, Ahmed Yousef—Suri’s father-in-law—is a former advisor to Hamas’s assassinated top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh,according to theNew York Times. After leaving his post in the Hamas-run government more than a decade ago, theTimes reported, Yousef haspublicly questioned Hamas’s rationale for its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Yousef has said that Suri has not engaged in any“political activism.”
“It’s good that there is a prisoner deal, but it did not require all this bloodshed and destruction,” Yousefsaid in a phone interview with theTimes. “Oct. 7, in my opinion, was a terrible error.”
In a petition for Suri’s release filed by his wife, shesaid Yousef, her father, had previously served as a political advisor to the prime minister of Gaza and as the deputy of foreign affairs in Gaza. After leaving the Gaza government in 2010, she wrote, in 2011 he started the House of Wisdom “to encourage peace and conflict resolution in Gaza.” He is still at the House of Wisdom and is an international relations professor at the Islamic University of Gaza.
Saleh also noted in her petition that she herself had previously worked as a translator in the Hamas-run Foreign Ministry of Gaza around 2011. She also wrote that prior to the war in Gaza, she “often worked as a freelance journalist for Middle Eastern newspapers and media outlets, reporting on politics in Palestine and India.”
After Saleh began sharing social media posts on what was unfolding in Gaza in the wake of Oct. 7, the couple was accused of having “ties to Hamas,” faced online attacks, and received threatening social media messages, she wrote in her petition.
“I learned that certain websites online had targeted me personally because of my father’s former role in the Gaza government, and because of my social media posts,” she wrote. “Multiple articles were published about me and my family, and eventually about my husband.”
After Suri’s arrest, she added, “I feel completely unsafe and can’t stop looking at the door, terrified that someone else will come and take me and the children away as well.”