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TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SAYS IT HAS REVOKED AT LEAST 300 VISAS FOR
PALESTINE ADVOCACY  
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Michael Arria
April 1, 2025
Mondoweiss [[link removed]]

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_ "Rather than silence dissent, the government's actions have only
emboldened voices demanding that basic rights be respected here, in
Palestine, and beyond," says CUNY CLEAR attorney Mudassar Toppa. _

Secretary Marco Rubio attends a meeting with U.S. Middle East envoy
Steve Witkoff, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Saudi Arabia’s
Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, National Security
Advisor Mosaad bin Mohammad al-Aiban, the Russian , Official State
Department photo by Freddie Everett

 

Last week Secretary of State Marco Rubio estimated that he had already
signed about 300 letters to revoke visas from students and other
visitors to the United States.

“I don’t know actually if it’s primarily student visas,” he
told
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reporters “It’s a combination of visas. They’re visitors to the
country. If they’re taking activities that are counter to our
foreign, to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll
revoke the visa.”

He said he would not be revealing the criteria by which the
administration was selecting people for deportation.

“We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re
identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people,”
said Rubio.

“The administration is deliberately opaque about the criteria they
are using to select its targets for deportation in order to sow panic
among international students and stifle advocacy for Palestinian human
rights and liberation,” Mudassar Toppa, a staff attorney from CLEAR,
a legal nonprofit and clinic at CUNY School of Law, told _Mondoweiss._

“The administration hopes that the chaos and uncertainty behind how
this policy is being implemented will silence the voices of
non-citizen students who advocate for a free Palestine and encourage
them to voluntarily leave the country to avoid the specter of being
abducted, detained, and deported,” he continued. “As we’ve seen,
rather than silence dissent, the government’s actions have only
emboldened voices demanding that basic rights be respected here, in
Palestine, and beyond.”

We’re learning more about the details of this crackdown every day,
but here’s a rundown of some of the individuals who have already
been targeted by ICE.

MAHMOUD KHALIL

[Mahmoud Khalil (Photo courtesy of Writers Against the War on Gaza)]

Mahmoud Khalil (Photo courtesy of Writers Against the War on Gaza)

Mahmoud Khalil was detained
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by ICE agents at his home in New York on March 8 and immediately sent
to a immigration detention facility in Louisiana.

The Trump administration says it revoked Khalil’s student visa and
green card over his involvement in the Gaza protests at Columbia,
which it has tagged as antisemitic. Some officials have claimed that
he passed out literature in support of Hamas, but they have never
produced any evidence connected to this.

The deportation proceedings were temporarily blocked by Judge Jesse
Furman.  The Southern District Court of New York ruled that
Khalil’s lawsuit challenging his unlawful detention should be
transferred to New Jersey, despite the efforts of Trump’s lawyers to
have the case heard in Louisiana.

_Mondoweiss_ has covered Khalil’s ordeal and published multiple
pieces on the case.

Momodou Taal

[Momodou Taal speaking at a protest at Cornell University (Photo:
Casey Martin / The Ithaca Voice]

Momodou Taal speaking at a protest at Cornell University (Photo: Casey
Martin / The Ithaca Voice
[[link removed]])

Momodou Taal, a British Gambian Palestine activist and former PhD
student at Cornell University, has announced that he is leaving the
United States to avoid being deported by Trump.

“I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being
abducted,” he explained
[[link removed]] in a social media
post.

Taal was nearly deported during the Biden administration after Cornell
suspended him for participating in a Gaza protest.

“I think ever since October, I’ve been a visible face for the for
what’s happening on campus in terms of I’ve been speaking at
rallies, holding teach-ins, I have an online presence as well. I feel
like these have all contributed to making me a target,” Taal told
[[link removed]] _Mondoweiss_
at the time. “I keep saying that these repressive tactics cannot be
divorced from the issue itself: Palestine. It touches the heart of
university investment. It goes to the heart of the Empire.”

Taal, along with Cornell grad student Sriram Parasurama and Cornell
professor Mukoma Wa Ngugi, recently sued the Trump administration over
Executive Orders Numbers 14161
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which authorize deportation over speech that’s protected by the
First Amendment.

The day before Taal’s lawsuit hit court, the Trump administration
revoked his visa and began deportation proceedings against him.

Taal recently spoke with _Mondoweiss_ about his ordeal.

“We anticipated some serious backlash, but not to this extent,” he
said
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“We thought that in a country that prides itself on the so-called
rule of law, that claims to govern the world based on law and
democracy, the courts would intervene before ICE and the FBI started
showing up at people’s houses.”

In the social media post announcing his departure, Taal called for
further solidarity with Palestine.

“A world where genocidal violence can be waged with impunity is a
world built on hatred and cowardice. Such a world will, over time,
destroy itself entirely. The only future, the only world, we can
accept is one that will have a liberated and reconstructed Gaza at its
heart,” he wrote.

“As sad as I feel right now, I do not despair,” he continued. “I
have never been more confident and sure that we will win and that
Palestine will be free within our lifetime. History will absolve
us.”

Rumeysa Ozturk

[Rumeysa Ozturk (Photo: Courtesy of the Ozturk family)]

Rumeysa Ozturk (Photo: Courtesy of the Ozturk family)

Rumeysa Ozturk is a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University who
was disappeared in a broad daylight by masked ICE agents in
Somerville, Massahcusetts.

Like Khalil, Ozturk was sent to a facility in Louisiana. A federal
judge in Boston has issued an order to stop Ozturk from being
deported.

Last spring, Ozturk co-wrote an Op-Ed
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student newspaper criticizing Tufts for disregarding a series of
student resolutions that called on the school to denounce the genocide
in Gaza and reveal their economic ties to Israel.

“This collective student voice is not without precedent. Today, the
University may remember
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pride its decision in February 1989 to divest from South Africa
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apartheid and end its complicity with the then-racist regime,” noted
the Op-Ed. “However, we must remember that the University divested
up to 11 years after some of its peers. For instance, the Michigan
State University Board of Regents passed resolutions to end its
complicity with Apartheid South Africa as early as 1978. Had Tufts
heeded the call of the student movement in the late 1970s
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the University could have been on the right side of history sooner.”

In his comments celebrating the visa revocations, Rubio referenced the
article.

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a
student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the
United States is not just because you want to write Op-Eds, but
because you want to participate in movements that are involved in
doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking
over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a
visa,” said Rubio.

In the days leading up to her kidnapping, Ozturk told a friend that
she was growing fearful about being targeted by the group Canary
Mission
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Dr. Rasha Alawieh

[Dr. Rasha Alawieh (Photo: Social Media)]

Dr. Rasha Alawieh (Photo: Social Media)

Dr. Rasha Alawieh is a kidney transplant specialist and was a Brown
University professor with a valid visa. She was deported from Logan
Airport in Boston after border officers found “sympathetic photos
and videos” of the slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on her
phone.

According to government documents, Alawieh had been in Lebanon to
attend a commemoration for Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli
airstrike on September 27, 2024. She had pictures of Nasrallah and
Iranian cleric Ali Khamenei on her phone, but had deleted them days
prior.

“I’m a Shia Muslim,” she allegedly told the officials. “It has
nothing to do with politics. It’s all religious, spiritual
things.”

There was a federal court order
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that was supposed to temporarily halt her deportation, but Trump
officials claim they weren’t aware of it.

“Last month, Rasha Alawieh traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, to attend
the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah— a brutal terrorist who led
Hezbollah, responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a
four-decade terror spree,” tweeted the Department of Homeland
Security. “Alawieh openly admitted to this to CBP officers, as well
as her support of Nasrallah. A visa is a privilege not a
right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is
grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense
security.”

As we have seen with all of these cases, the Trump administration is
not even bothering to pretend that Alawieh is actually _connected_ to
terrorism or any crime whatsoever.

“There are so many government departments that would have had to
screen her as she went through the rigorous process to get the visa in
the first place,” Mary Holper, director of the Immigration Clinic
and a professor at Boston College Law School told
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the _Providence Journal_, “And then it gets stripped away by a
person who sees things on her phone. That’s what’s really
frightening about it.”

Badar Khan Suri

[Badar Khan Suri (Photo: Georgetown University)]

Badar Khan Suri (Photo: Georgetown University)

Badar Khan Suri is an Indian national and Georgetown University fellow
who was arrested [[link removed]] at his
Virginia home after his J-1 visa was revoked.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson claimed that Suri was
“actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on
social media” and that he has connections to a “senior advisor to
Hamas.”

Suri’s attorney says
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that his detention may have occurred because his wife is a Palestinian
who used to work for Al Jazeera.

Last week _Democracy Now_ interviewed Nader Hashemi about the case.
Hashemi is a professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at
Georgetown University and the director of the center where Badar Khan
Suri was hired as a postdoctoral fellow.

“The family here has been devastated,” said Hashemi. “They’ve
been shocked. The children are traumatized. I do believe the target
here was not my colleague, Badar Khan Suri, but it was his wife,
who’s a Palestinian from Gaza. They couldn’t arrest her, because
she’s a U.S. citizen, so they went after a much easier target, her
husband, who, of course, you know, has committed no crime. He was just
doing his work. He’s not a political activist. And I think that
that’s an important part of the story.”

“The other important part of the story here is that the origins of
this begins on the right-wing social media sphere, where these, you
know, extreme pro-Israel fanatics find a target, and they start
tweeting about it, tagging the Israeli Embassy, tagging Marco
Rubio,” he continued. “And then, within a few days, Rubio sends in
the shock troops. That’s the background. So, the family is
traumatized, the children, as well.”

Yunseo Chung

[Yunseo Chung (Photo courtesy of Cuny CLEAR) ]

Yunseo Chung (Photo courtesy of Cuny CLEAR)

Yunseo Chung is a 21-year-old Columbia University student and
permanent U.S. resident from South Korea who is facing deportation
over her involvement in Palestine protests.

The government revoked her green card, but Chung sued The White House
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over the move and a federal judge has ordered Trump to halt
deportation proceedings.

“Yunseo no longer has to fear that ICE will spirit her away to a
distant prison simply because she spoke up for Palestinian human
rights,” one of Chung’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassemin, told _The
Guardian
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“The court’s temporary restraining order is both sensible and
fair, to preserve the status quo as we litigate the serious
constitutional issues at stake not just for Yunseo, but for our
society as a whole.”

Ranjani Srinivasan

[Ranjani Srinivasan (Screenshot: CNN)]

Ranjani Srinivasan (Screenshot: CNN)

Ranjani Srinivasan is an Indian scholar and Columbia student, who fled
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to Canada to escape arrest after she became aware of the fact ICE was
targeting her.

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the
United States of America,” Secretary Noem wrote on X. “When you
advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked
and you should not be in this country.”

“She has basically been a private person, pursuing her studies and
pursuing her career,” her lawyer, Nathan Yaffe, told
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been a student, and they not only took that away from her in the sense
of forcing her out of the country … but they also took away her
privacy, obviously, and made her the huge public face of this campaign
of repression that they’re undertaking with the deliberate desire,
as the administration has said, to send a message to other
students.”

Srinivasan has criticized her school for allowing the situation to
develop.

“I do think that Columbia should have protected me against this. I
think that that’s part of their mandate,” Srinivasan said. “When
you’re attracting these international students to come and study at
Columbia, when you go and do outreach all across the world to attract
the best and the brightest, you have a mandate to protect them.”

“I want my PhD. I want my name cleared.”

Leqaa Kordia

Leqaa Kordia was detained in Newark, New Jersey and over her allegedly
having an expired student visa.

Very little of Kordia’s case has been made public. She is from the
West Bank and government officials say she was connected to Gaza
protests. According to a government database, she is currently being
at a detention in Alvarado, Texas.

ZOOMING OUT

In the last issue of this newsletter, we covered
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Columbia’s complicity with the Trump administration. We are
continually seeing other universities bend to the desires of the Trump
regime.

Harvard

This week the administration threatened to hold up funding to Harvard,
in the same way that it did with Columbia. A press release
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from Department of Education, the General Services Administration and
the Health and Human Services Department declared that $255.6 million
in Harvard contracts and $8.7 billion in multi-year grants would be
examined over Harvard’s alleged inability to crack down on
antisemitism.

“Harvard has served as a symbol of the American Dream for
generations,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a
statement. “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from
anti-Semitic discrimination — all while promoting divisive
ideologies over free inquiry — has put its reputation in serious
jeopardy.”

Rather than stand up for the First Amendment or his students
protesting genocide, Harvard President Alan Garber quickly put out a
statement promising to play ball with Trump.

“We still have much work to do,” it reads
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engage with members of the federal government’s task force to combat
antisemitism to ensure that they have a full account of the work we
have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat
antisemitism. We resolve to take the measures that will move Harvard
and its vital mission forward while protecting our community and its
academic freedom. By doing so, we combat bias and intolerance as we
create the conditions that foster the excellence in teaching and
research that is at the core of our mission.”

New York University

Last week, Dr. Joanne Liu, an associate professor at McGill and a
pediatric emergency medicine physician who formerly served as the head
of Doctors Without Borders, told CTV
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News that New York University (NYU) canceled a scheduled talk she was
set to give at the school because she planned to show slides about
casualties in Gaza.

The night before her speech, Liu got a call from NYU’s vice-chair of
the education department expressing concern that her slides could be
seen as “anti-governmental” and antisemitic.

Liu agreed to make some edits, but the school eventually told her the
talk would be canceled either way.

Columbia University

Amid student deportations and Trump’s threats to cut funding,
Columbia University president Katrina Armstrong scampered away from
her position.

Claire Shipman, who had been the co-chair of the university’s board
of trustees, was named as acting president.

It’s a short-lived gig these days, as Armstrong’s predecessor
Minouche Shafik left the post amid similar protest and controversy in
2023.

The Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism
put out a statement
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calling Armstrong’s departure an “important step toward advancing
negotiations” between the government and the school.

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* US Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Student Deportations; US
Universities;
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