Since ICE agents arrested Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil in early March, Maryam, a student at Cornell University, doesn’t leave the house unless they need to. They started getting groceries delivered and rarely go out to the shops. While they still help support and organize local demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza, they no longer attend in person. When they do go out to class or to work, they write an employment lawyer’s phone number on their body and carry all their documentation. As a person of Arab descent who is in the U.S. on a student visa, Maryam worries that they could be swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine activists. Recently, they installed security cameras outside their off-campus apartment. “It felt like a way I could protect myself,” they say, if immigration agents were to show up at the door.
On top of all this, Maryam’s sister is pregnant and they are now unsure of when they will be able to visit family. If they leave the country, they fear they won’t be allowed to return. They try their best to calm down their parents, who are scared of ICE detaining their child. Maryam’s mother texts that she loves them more frequently, while their father, who normally talks a lot, now trails off and becomes quiet on the phone. “He understands that it is not in me to be bullied or cowed,” they say.
International students across the country like Maryam are spooked by the arrests of Khalil, a U.S. permanent resident, and Georgetown University researcher Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national. (Maryam’s name and that of other students in this story have been changed, as they fear the federal government may target them for deportation.) Trump’s campaign-trail rhetoric about throwing student protesters out of the country has since become a real threat. The administration rescinded a longstanding policy that protected universities and other vulnerable locations from immigration enforcement; the State Department is launching an AI-driven program to help deport foreign nationals perceived as supporting Hamas; sweeping executive orders threaten deportation or criminal prosecution over actions the administration views as antisemitic or expressing a “hostile attitude” toward the U.S.; and Trump is pressuring universities to impose stricter protest rules or else lose their federal funding.
This all leaves international students wrestling with how to criticize the U.S.’s continued military support of Israel without jeopardizing their visa status. Several students I spoke with worried that identifying their country of origin or which university they attend, let alone talking about their protest activity, would put a target on their backs. Some are doubling down by engaging more publicly, including by protesting without a mask, while others are paring back their social-media activity and taking more precautions at protests. James, who attends New York University on a student visa, has continued to go to demonstrations and wears a shiesty to obscure his face and cover his eyebrows — “all this stuff we know can stop facial recognition,” he explains. Stopping his activism was not an option. “I don’t see myself disengaging completely,” he says. “It’s just a matter of picking different ways of engagement and supporting people who can be more visible.” Still, he’s nervous that authorities seem to be casting a wide net in their pursuit of pro-Palestine activists. “It’s not just lead organizers, it’s people who were at protests or signed letters,” he says. “That makes me afraid, because how much more can they expand it? How much leeway do they have that I don’t know about? Where do I fall?”
Salman, an Arab graduate student at NYU, had briefly met Khalil at a friend’s birthday party last year. They didn’t speak much, but the interaction was enough to make the news of the Columbia graduate’s detention feel less abstract. If they’re deporting someone with a green card, then what protection does my F-1 student visa offer me? Salman thought. He also saw parallels between his situation and the argument the Trump administration made for detaining Khalil: While he is not an organizer, Salman has frequently posted on social media about protests and policy demands, like calling for a cease-fire and arms embargo. “I don’t think I post more or less than your average pro-Palestinian advocate,” he says, but he fears that “people can read into what you post in whatever way.” He’s started to pull back from sharing his personal political opinions on social media. He did go to a protest earlier this month to demand Khalil’s release, however, and then to another demonstration to protest Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. He wore a mask after friends and family urged him to take steps to conceal his identity. “I’m not taking a step back on this,” he says.
Salman says his parents want him to be safe and finish his degree. “They also understand that I’m at a point in my life right now where even if they were to tell me ‘Don’t do this’ or ‘Don’t do that,’ they know me too well to think that I’m going to become silent all of a sudden out of fear,” he says. Salman currently plans to fly to attend his sibling’s engagement outside of the U.S., which he knows involves risk, but he plans to have a lawyer or emergency contact on standby in case he runs into issues reentering the United States.
NYU is one of several universities, including Brown and UC Berkeley, that are urging international students to reconsider traveling out of the country. (Cornell had advised international students to return to campus before Trump took office in anticipation of changing immigration policies.) The U.S. government wields more power and discretion at the border than it does within its borders, and “severe consequences can emerge very quickly,” says Golnaz Fakhimi, legal director of the civil-rights organization Muslim Advocates. In the span of a few hours, one interaction with a border agent could lead to a person’s removal from the country and a ban on seeking reentry for years. Muslim Advocates is helping students prepare for all scenarios, including ICE detention; that means figuring out a care plan for any dependents and putting a process in place to notify emergency contacts.
Both Muslim Advocates and the advocacy group Palestine Legal tell me they’ve received an uptick in inquiries recently from non-citizen students who are trying to gauge the risks involved in traveling, living in on-campus housing, protesting, and posting pro-Palestine content on social media. Some students who’ve reached out to them have a more public profile, but many of them don’t and are still worried they may be on the government’s radar. Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath says there has been a subtle shift in the group’s approach to providing Know Your Rights training for students, given that “we have an administration in place that does not respect the law.” “There’s more of a focus on different scenarios and what people might expect given what they said, or who they are, and their citizenship status,” she said. Still, she stresses, everybody in the U.S. — regardless of their immigration status — has a right to freedom of speech and expression, which includes criticizing the American and foreign governments.
At Columbia, which has become Trump’s biggest campus target, the international student community is rallying together after ICE detained Khalil and attempted to arrest Fulbright student Ranjani Srinivasan, who subsequently left for Canada. Grant Miner, the president of Columbia’s student workers union, said that typically about five people come to its international student working group meetings. Following Khalil’s arrest, 80 showed up. “People I’ve never seen before are coming to union meetings,” Miner says, “and that’s not because we did a good job organizing them, it’s because they feel angry.” Ph.D. student Allie Wong has been referring these students to mutual-aid funds and friendly lawyers, helping provide walking escorts for those who feel unsafe, and connecting them to healing circles. She’s also heard from international students who are considering moving off-campus or want a secondary place to stay should ICE agents show up at their residence. Some of her peers have expressed interest in helping out, but the Justice Department recently directed federal prosecutors to investigate local compliance with Trump’s immigration crackdown. That can include cases where the government believes U.S. citizens are harboring people who are in the country illegally. “This is paralyzing people who do have good intentions, and who want to help their friends, who are not promoting terrorism; they’re just trying to get a good education,” Wong says.
Some international students are confronting the Trump administration head-on. At Cornell, Momodou Taal, a British Gambian Ph.D. student, filed a lawsuit this month alongside two U.S. citizens that alleged the executive orders Trump is using to crack down on pro-Palestine activists amount to an unconstitutional silencing of their political views. “It got to a point where international students are becoming sitting ducks,” Taal says. “We shouldn’t be penalized and punished with the threat of deportation because of expressing our views.” Residents of Taal’s building tipped him off last week that unidentified law-enforcement officers had arrived at his Ithaca home, and in a statement on X he wrote, “Trump is attempting to detain me to prevent me from having my day in court.” On Friday, the Justice Department asked Taal to surrender to ICE; his legal team filed an emergency petition seeking to prevent the government from detaining him before a Tuesday hearing on the merits of his case.
Columbia student Yunseo Chung also filed a lawsuit Monday after immigration officials unsuccessfully tried to deport her. Chung is a lawful permanent resident like Khalil, and the government is relying on the same obscure immigration law to argue that her conduct — she was arrested after a campus sit-in — negatively affects America’s foreign policy. Chung, who does not appear to have a leadership role in the student protest movement, and her legal team filed a petition that would block her detention while her lawsuit is ongoing, which a judge granted Tuesday.
The crackdown has led several of the students I spoke with, including those from countries that routinely stifle free speech, to question their long-term plans. Even if they want to stay in America because of their strong community ties and a desire to fight for the cause they believe is right, they’re grappling with whether it’s worth living in a country that won’t allow them to freely express their political beliefs. James says he planned to stay in New York after his program ends, “not for nationalistic reasons” but because of the city and the friendships he’s built there. But now, he’s not sure it’ll be possible. “It’s not a question of wanting” to remain in the States, he says. “How long will it be until they find something to use as a reason to not let me in?”
Maryam came to the U.S. to work with particular scholars at Cornell and had no plans to stay in the country longer. Then they got into a relationship with an American citizen. “I started to think, Maybe I could settle down here. Maybe this is a place where we could have a family and be happy,” they say. But in the wake of Khalil’s arrest, the couple is talking about living “anywhere that is not here.” The future they envisioned together no longer feels realistic when “international students are being hunted by the federal government,” Maryam says. They’re not surprised that Trump is making good on his campaign promise, but they are increasingly worried that the American public won’t push back enough on the administration’s crackdown. “That scares me more than anything else,” they say. “That the entire world is finding a way to make this a personal failing rather than a structural issue of targeting students who engage in constitutionally protected speech.”