Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk and Kseniia Petrova are foreign graduate students in their early 30s. All were in the US legally to study at Ivy League universities. Since February, they have been detained and threatened with deportation. Three are held in detention centres in Louisiana. Mahdawi’s whereabouts are uncertain.
The Trump administration considers the three who criticised Israel’s war on Gaza anti-Semites and terrorist supporters. The fourth, a brilliant Russian scientist, opposes Vladimir Putin.
In Donald Trump’s America, criticising the president’s friends can be as dangerous as criticising Trump himself.
The administration has rescinded the legal status of close to 1,000 international university students since mid-March, according to the Association of International Educators. Most have had their visas revoked without notice and have not been told what they have done wrong. Many prefer to “self-deport” – the administration’s term – rather than be expelled by force. Secretary of state Marco Rubio told a press conference last month that he had personally revoked more than 300 student visas, including those of Khalil and Ozturk, under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act which permits the deportation of noncitizens judged to be “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the US.
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“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses,” Rubio said when asked about Ozturk’s case. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
Ozturk’s “crime” was to have co-authored an opinion piece in the Tufts University newspaper calling on the university to cut financial ties with Israel and denounce genocide in Gaza.
Khalil is a Palestinian born in a refugee camp in Syria. He earned a degree in computer science at the American University of Beirut and once managed a scholarship programme in Lebanon for the British Embassy. He was to have received his master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University next month. His wife, Noor Abdalla, a dentist and US citizen, was about to give birth to their first child, a son, when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) seized him in the lobby of their building on March 8th. Khalil had led protests at Columbia against Israel’s destruction of the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, 2023.
Mahdawi helped Khalil organise the Columbia protests but renounced activism in the spring of 2024. A refugee from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Mahdawi is a practising Buddhist. He had a premonition about the citizenship interview where he was instead arrested on April 14th, and met Senator Bernie Sanders and two other lawmakers beforehand. Jewish and Israeli-American students whom Mahdawi befriended at Columbia have spoken out on his behalf.
Ozturk, who is Turkish, was a doctoral candidate in child development at Tufts University. She became alarmed when she learned in early March that a pro-Israel group called Canary Mission had “doxed” her – posted her photograph and resumé and denounced her for “anti-Israeli activism”.
[ US immigration judge rules Palestinian Columbia student Khalil can be deportedOpens in new window ]
A shocking security camera video shows black-clad plainclothes officers with faces hidden swarming Ozturk on a Massachusetts street and bundling her into a waiting SUV on March 25th. She suffered asthma attacks during the overnight journey to New Hampshire and Vermont, from where she was flown to an Ice facility in Louisiana. The administration usually transfers those selected for deportation to states where judges support Maga ideology.
Canary Mission is a far-right Jewish group whose self-proclaimed mission is to pursue those who promote “hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses”. The source of its financing and location are unknown, leading The New York Times to call it “shadowy”.
Khalil was also “doxed” by Canary Mission. Immigration lawyers believe that Ice uses blacklists established by Canary Mission and another extreme pro-Israel group, Betar, to target critics of Israel. Betar has boasted openly of distributing a “deport list” of 3,000 immigrants.
Petrova was part of a team researching ageing at Harvard Medical School. She was stopped at Boston’s Logan Airport on February 16th, ostensibly for carrying petri-dishes containing frog embryos donated by the Curie Institute to her lab at Harvard, an offence that would normally carry a small fine. She had refused to hide her opposition to Putin and fled Russia days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ice has rejected Petrova’s lawyer’s petitions for parole, saying she is a flight risk and a threat to US security.
[ Harvard sues Trump administration to stop the freeze of €1.9 billion in grantsOpens in new window ]
EU staffers bound for the IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington this week were provided with burner phones and basic laptops containing no record of their political opinions. The Committee to Protect Journalists this month urged journalists travelling to the US to leave personal phones or laptops at home. Before Trump, such precautions were taken only for travel to totalitarian countries.
Americans, too, are fearful of Trump’s assault on freedom of speech and opinion. “We are all afraid,” the veteran Republican senator Lisa Murkowski said in Anchorage this month. “I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.”
