Donald Trump’s second term in office has brought unprecedented levels of political repression against the historic pro-Palestine student movement of 2024, escalating the brutal attacks of the Democratic Biden administration. Shortly after assuming office in January, Trump signed an executive order threatening to deport pro-Palestine international students with F-1 visas. This visa type grants foreign nationals the ability to complete their higher education in the United States and has historically provided students with certain protections.. Trump also signed many other executive orders in quick succession that target the rights of immigrants. He has made expedited removals, or deportations without court hearings, legal nationwide. This expands the policy beyond the previous limit of the 100-mile radius along the border.
Within the first three months of assuming power, Trump’s administration has tortured and handcuffed thousands of immigrants using wartime policies and deported them to places they have never been. He has threatened to impose tariffs on and discontinue visa applications for countries who refuse to accept deportees. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has unequivocally supported Trump in his attacks on immigrants and Palestine, showing clearly how our struggles against xenophobia and zionism must remain united. Rubio sent $4 billion to Israel this month for the resumption of the genocide in Gaza and is simultaneously escalating attacks on pro-Palestine international students in the United States. Rubio recently boasted about canceling over 300 student visas. He said to reporters, “We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics.”
Last month, plainclothes DHS officials arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil from his Columbia University student housing complex and informed him that his student visa had been revoked. Upon learning that he is a green card holder, they revoked that too. Khalil remains in ICE custody at the time of writing this article. Khalil’s arrest is an attack on the pro-Palestine movement and the rights of immigrants, regardless of his immigration status; however, his detention is a clear escalation of repression that has now set a dangerous precedent, targeting immigrants who are supposed to be “protected” from deportation with a green card. This case has paved the way for widespread repression and over 300 student visa revocations. Most attacks are being done specifically on doctoral and postdoctoral students who are also workers, transforming this moment into an attack not just on immigrants or students or the Palestine movement, but also on the labor movement.
Surveillance footage of one such case revealing the heinous abduction of Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk by plainclothes ICE agents in masks has generated widespread outrage. Ozturk was on her way to break her Ramadan fast with friends when she was detained outside her off-campus housing. She was attacked for writing an op-ed in support of Palestine and is now being held at an ICE processing center in Louisiana. Mahmoud Khalil was also held at the same center in the hopes of finding a judge who would be more willing to rule in favor of the administration’s xenophobic agenda. Cornell University student Momodou Taal also had his student visa revoked recently due to pro-Palestine activism. University of Alabama student Alireza Doroudi was arrested from home on March 25 and remains in ICE custody. Another F-1 visa holder, Badar Khan Suri, a researcher and educator at Georgetown University, was recently arrested by masked agents outside his house in Arlington, Virginia. Not an activist himself, he is assumed to have been targeted because his wife is Palestinian.
This comes mere days after Columbia University escalated its own repressive measures, targeting 22 students, including Khalil and F-1 visa scholar Ranjani Srinivasan, as well as firing the president of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) Grant Miner one day before contract negotiations. Srinivasan was not a political activist but was still forced to discontinue their PhD education weeks before graduation and flee to Canada. This repression of students is going hand in hand with attacks on other visa holders. Rasha Alawieh, a surgeon and medical professor at Brown University living on an H1-B visa, was deported last month despite a federal court order blocking her deportation. She was not openly part of pro-Palestine protests, but rather was targeted for allegedly attending the public funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon.
A visa revocation not only denies someone the ability to re-enter the United States after international travel, but it also revokes their legal immigration status within the country, turning their existence in the United States into a crime. Many of these students have not realized that their visas and statuses have been revoked until confronted by ICE agents. F-1 visa holders have historically had very few rights to begin with. Visa holders can face detention and deportation for participating in protests.
Visa revocations are a part of the broader capitalist attacks on the university and on the Palestine movement which began under a Democratic Party administration and are being continued by the Republican administration. In 2024, Democratic Party lawmakers passed a resolution conflating anti-zionism with antisemitism as the student movement was gaining momentum. Democratic governors and mayors facilitated the brutal repression of pro-Palestine encampments nationwide, from New York to California. Democratic and Republican senators, as well as “independents” like Senator Bernie Sanders unanimously voted yes to confirm the nomination of Marco Rubio to his current position.
College presidents bent over backwards to submit to the bipartisan zionist attacks on students to gain nothing in return. Columbia University obliged with Trump’s list of demands to repress students but still failed to regain the $400 million of funding it lost. Union leaders such as Shawn Fain of the UAW shamelessly “applaud the Trump administration” even as their own student workers are having their visas and even their green cards tentatively revoked by the Trump administration. This complicity has allowed repression to reach heights rarely seen before. It is clear that only self-organization among the working-class, with strong student-worker solidarity independent of capitalist parties, is capable of protecting our democratic rights and fighting back against Trump’s authoritarian attacks.
Student-worker solidarity only makes us safer, while collaboration with the capitalist class puts a target on our backs. The thousands of people who are protesting against the detention and persecution of activists and immigrants have the power to fight back against these attacks. The outrage in support of Khalil stopped his deportation and moved the hearing to New Jersey, rather than having secretive proceedings in front of a Trump-friendly judge in Louisiana. The protests in support of Ozturk in Massachusetts send a clear message that the abduction of students off the streets will not pass without a fight. But to win their freedom requires the broader participation and coordination of the worker and student movements.
Last year at the University of California, Santa Cruz, university workers stood in solidarity with students and protested the attacks on those involved in the encampment for Gaza. Subsequently, when the workers went on strike to demand better working conditions, students showed up to the picket lines and demonstrations in solidarity. In New York City, public transportation workers refused to carry detained pro-Palestine activists to police stations. During the recent national strike by Amazon warehouse workers, students in New York City showed up to the picket lines in solidarity in the middle of frigid winter nights at the isolated JFK8 location in Staten Island. The anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist awakening of college students nationwide in the face of bipartisan support for the genocide is a threat to capitalists, and it should be. Our fight against these attacks must be the seeds of the fight to demand full political and economic rights for students and immigrants. Students, when stubbornly militant against capitalism and supported by workers, are capable of fighting for a transformative new world built and run by us independent of our capitalist oppressors.