Joseph Howley, an Associate Professor of Classics at Columbia University, says, “I’ve spoken to students who have considered joining the protest movement or coming to the encampment and are afraid to because they’re on visas.”
“While I don’t want to listen to my parents, I also understand where they’re coming from,” says Harshita.
A spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told Fox News, “If a student were to be suspended, DHS would need reason to believe that the student would not be able to make normal progress in his/her course of study.”
They added, “And if it believed a suspension merited that type of decision, it would have to initiate removal proceedings, which would be done on a case-by-case basis in conjunction with US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA).”
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“They can just deport me, they can (make me) pack my bags and send me back to India,” says Aman (name changed), a 22-year-old Indian student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who had been frequenting the encampment at the university.
Howley is worried about the university administration placing international students in a position where the DHS might get involved.
Howley explains, “I was a college student when DHS was created, and it was created in the wake of 9/11 in one of the worst climates of institutionalised Islamophobia, I think, in our country’s history. And, I simply have no trust in an institution like DHS to protect students.”
For example, on 29 April, after Columbia University told protesters that anyone who stayed at the encampment beyond 2 pm that day would be suspended, protest organisers announced, “If you are here on an F-1 or J-1 visa, if you’re an international student, we just want to make sure that you are highly considering and have the information to decide whether you want to stay (at the encampment) or not – because there are different implications if you are suspended because of that.”
Students have also been wary of the comments coming in from a section of politicians in the US.
Priyanka (name changed), an Indian citizen and a graduate student at Harvard University who has been going to the protests on her campus, says,
Indeed, Republican presidential candidate Trump has warned that if he comes back to power, he “will revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities.”
And three days after the first round of mass arrests at Columbia, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, “Immediately deport all foreign students studying in the US that support Hamas.”
“I feel the surveillance is making me very anxious,” says Aman. He had studied the work of the noted Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said while doing his undergraduate studies in Delhi.
Around a month after Aman joined Columbia University, the institution where Said taught for four decades, the ongoing war in Israel and Palestine broke out. Soon, he would start attending protests demanding rights for Palestinians and calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
On one of the nights that student protesters at Columbia were especially worried that law enforcement would be called into campus to sweep the encampment, Aman says several of his friends texted him and advised him to leave the campus. “I had a very bad breakdown that night,” he says. “I felt so unsafe. I felt I wasn’t doing enough.”
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