Condemnation of Trump targeting noncitizen Students, Researchers for Constitutionally protected Speech

MESA Board Joint Statement with the TFCHR regarding deportations

The MESA Board of Directors and the MESA Task Force on Civil and Human Rights condemn in the strongest terms the Trump administration’s targeting of noncitizen students and researchers for their constitutionally protected speech and advocacy. As part of an expansive anti-immigrant agenda, President Donald Trump has revoked visas and ordered the detention and deportation of non-citizens, including lawful permanent residents, for their advocacy of Palestinian rights and human dignity. The pretextual use of federal laws and executive orders to penalize political advocacy, speech, and protest is a direct assault on the foundations of democracy. It is a brazen attempt to deter individuals and institutions from expressing and hearing dissenting viewpoints. It is also a direct attack on the academic freedom of US universities, threatening the viability of these institutions as sites of free research, debate, and knowledge production.

On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order No. 14,161 stating that it is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from noncitizens “who espouse hateful ideology,” directing the Secretary of State and other cabinet officials to “vet and screen” all noncitizens who are already in the United States “to the maximum degree possible.” On January 29, 2025, the president issued Executive Order No. 14,188 stating that it is the policy of the United States “to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.” The White House released a fact sheet about the order vowing “to investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.” The fact sheet characterizes the order as demanding “the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws.”

The Executive Orders laid the groundwork for a disturbing series of arrests and deportation proceedings of noncitizen academics who participated in pro-Palestine protests or other related expression and association. MESA and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) have challenged in court this “ideological deportation policy” as patently unconstitutional. In March 2025 alone, the following arrests were carried out or attempted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency:

• On March 8, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and U.S. permanent resident. The agents ambushed Khalil in the lobby of his university-owned apartment building, separating him from his wife (a U.S. citizen) and whisking him away to an ICE facility in Louisiana.
• On the same day, ICE signed a detention order for Yunseo Chung, a Columbia University student and permanent resident who has lived in the United States since she was seven. A federal judge temporarily stopped ICE from detaining Chung while attorneys litigate the case.
• On March 11, Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and doctoral student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, fled the United States for Canada after receiving notice that her visa had been revoked, and experiencing two warrantless visits from ICE agents at her Columbia University-owned housing.
• On March 13, Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese citizen on an H-1B visa, was detained for 36 hours at Boston’s Logan Airport and then deported back to Lebanon. A kidney transplant specialist who was to start a position at Brown University’s medical school, Dr. Alawieh was deported despite a court order temporarily blocking her expulsion.
• On March 17, ICE arrested Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national and postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Suri was surrounded by masked agents, separated from his wife (a U.S. citizen) and three children, told that his visa was revoked, and detained in an ICE facility in Louisiana.
• On March 21, the Justice Department wrote to attorneys for Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian national and doctoral student in Africana Studies at Cornell University, requesting that Taal voluntarily “surrender to ICE custody.” Taal had filed a preemptive lawsuit to block his detention, but the court has denied his motion seeking a halt to the administration’s deportation efforts.
• On March 25, masked ICE agents surrounded Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and doctoral student in Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, outside her home and transported her to a facility in Louisiana. In his defense of the arrest, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters, “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campus. We’ve given you a visa and you decide to do that we’re going to take it away.” Rubio did not specify what actions led to Ozturk’s arrest, beyond her co-authoring of an Op-Ed urging Tufts to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

As the ostensible legal basis of the arrests, the government has invoked a little-used provision that was introduced into the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1990 that empowers the government to deport noncitizens if the secretary of state determines that their activities “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” This provision, which purports to vest extraordinary discretion in a single government official, is of dubious validity. It was ruled as unconstitutionally vague by a federal judge – the sister of President Trump, no less – in 1996, although the decision was overturned on unrelated procedural grounds.

The arrests evince a clear pattern of penalizing Palestine solidarity, by redefining it as hateful, anti-Semitic terrorism, with universities as alleged incubators. President Trump reinforced this framing in a post on Truth Social on March 10, after Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest:

This is the first arrest of many to come. 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. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.

In addition to these arrests, hundreds of international undergraduate and graduate student visas have been revoked without notice. The government has also taken the unprecedented step of terminating hundreds of individuals’ records in the federal database regulating the stay of international students, threatening them with potential deportation proceedings. We do not yet know how many of these moves have been prompted by Palestine-related political alignments and/or impact members of the MESA community but they have created a climate of fear among international students and faculty, and, when related to advocacy, are a clear infringement of first amendment rights. The administration’s attempt to stigmatize noncitizens and punish them for their protected speech flies in the face of a broad legal consensus that the First Amendment applies to all persons residing in the U.S., regardless of citizenship status.

As the MESA Board emphasized on March 13, “Palestine-related scholarship and advocacy have now become focal points of a frontal assault on universities as centers of critical thinking and knowledge production in a battle to destroy the autonomy of institutions of higher education in the US.”

The MESA Board of Directors and Task Force on Civil and Human Rights demand first and foremost that the U.S. government desist from actions designed to repress pro-Palestine speech and expressive conduct and to punish those who have engaged in such constitutionally-protected speech and conduct, especially noncitizens who are being threatened with the pretextual and punitive use of immigration laws for expressing views with which the government disagrees.

At a time when the government is abusing immigration laws in this way, and also possibly threatening to expand repression of speech to citizens through criminal laws, universities and colleges owe heightened protections to members of their campus communities, particularly noncitizens. There are a series of minimal steps that universities and colleges should take to ensure they are protecting their campus communities. The MESA Board of Directors and Task Force on Civil and Human Rights call on our members and colleagues to ask their university and college administrations to:

1. Refuse to turn over personal student information in response to Title VI investigations;
2. Make a clear commitment to avoid voluntary cooperation or information sharing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agencies charged with facilitating deportation or other forms of immigration enforcement;
3. Make a clear commitment to not comply with Section 3 of the expanded Executive Order 13899, which calls for universities to “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens;”
4. Maintain the enrollment of international students in the event of visa revocation, legal status termination, detention, and/or deportation;
5. Allow impacted international students and scholars to continue their studies and research remotely, if necessary;
6. Ensure that graduate students and workers whose enrollment is contingent upon funding through graduate teaching appointments or fellowships can continue their coursework, research, and teaching appointments;
7. Communicate reliable, timely information to international students and scholars, including immediate notification of changes in their legal status;
8. Provide and pay for legal counsel for those students and scholars whose visas have been revoked;
9. Work swiftly and affirmatively—through lawsuits, if necessary—to stop the termination of legal status of students and scholars without any due process.

Finally, in this climate of escalating fear, we reiterate our commitment to our membership to continue to act as a resource in their defense, and in defense of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and constitutional rights.