From students to scholars, the crackdown on dissent is now a deportation campaign.
By Faisal Kutty
May/Jun 25
At 6:15 a.m. on March 19, 2025, United States federal immigration agents in tactical gear descended on a quiet residential street in Northern Virginia. Their target: Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University scholar, a legal U.S. resident, and an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Without a warrant or criminal charges, they arrested him outside his home. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) justified this action with documents obtained by his lawyer that referenced his alleged “pattern of anti-American sentiment” and “pro-Palestinian advocacy.”
Within hours, Suri, who was transferred to a federal detention facility in Texas, is now in Louisiana. No formal charges have been filed. No court date has been set. His whereabouts were kept from his family and legal team for nearly 48 hours.
Suri’s case is part of a disturbing trend that has escalated since the new administration took office. The administration has launched a sweeping crackdown on political dissent through immigration enforcement – targeting not just undocumented migrants, but legal residents, academics, tourists, and even dual nationals – and it is doing so by twisting immigration law into a blunt instrument of repression.
A Brown University Assistant Professor and Lebanese-born physician Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a U.S. visa holder, was deported to Lebanon in mid-March 2025 despite an order from a federal judge halting her removal. U.S. officials cited her attendance at a public funeral for slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as grounds for deportation after finding photos on her phone. Alawieh, a transplant nephrologist serving vulnerable patients, completed extensive training at Yale, the University of Washington, and Ohio State. Although she had no criminal record, officials claimed her presence posed a foreign policy risk. Her case highlights a disturbing shift: ideological affiliations or perceived sympathies, rather than criminal conduct, are being used as a basis for exclusion and deportation from the U.S.
The revival of Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act has been central to this crackdown. Originally passed during the Cold War (1947-91), the statute allows for the deportation of legal residents if the Secretary of State believes their presence may cause “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” In effect, it allows for the deportation of individuals based on political speech, even if that speech is protected under the First Amendment.
In the second Trump Administration, this act has become a cornerstone of the president’s arch-conservative domestic agenda.
The highest profile case in which the Immigration and Nationality Act has been levied remains that of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and permanent U.S. resident. On March 8, he was detained by ICE agents after an Iftar dinner. Hours later, his green card was revoked, and he was forcibly transferred from New Jersey to Louisiana. No charges. No hearing. Just the disappearance of an undesirable ordered by the state. A judge has temporarily blocked his deportation and moved the case back to New Jersey as the court decides the merits of the government’s position.
His alleged crime? Organizing a peaceful student encampment in support of Palestinian rights.
The administration’s dragnet has swept up many more, such as Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Fulbright scholar and Tufts University. Ozturk, a doctoral student, was snatched in broad daylight by masked federal agents and flown 1,500 miles away to a detention facility in Louisiana because she co-authored an academic op-ed in March 2024 in support of the Boycott Divest and Sanctions movement.
New York resident Yunseo Chung, a South Korean-born Columbia University student and permanent U.S. resident, narrowly avoided arrest after ICE attempted to detain her. A federal judge blocked her deportation and sharply criticized the government’s claim that her peaceful protest activities constituted a “foreign policy risk.” Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian PhD candidate in engineering at the University of Alabama, was quietly taken into custody with no criminal charges and remains in detention at the time of this writing despite no link to any activism being publicly presented against him.
Even those outside the U.S. borders are not safe. Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian PhD student at Columbia, fled to Canada after learning she had been flagged by U.S. authorities. Her visa was revoked, ICE agents visited her home, and the DHS later posted footage of her at the airport while branding her a “terrorist sympathizer.” Leqaa Kordia, a Syrian American dual citizen and Columbia University medical researcher, was denied reentry after a family trip abroad. She had posted online condemning Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
In California, two German tourists were detained separately in San Diego and Tijuana, placed in solitary confinement, and subsequently deported after officers reviewed their digital devices and found pro-Palestinian posts on them. A French physicist traveling to Los Alamos National Lab for a research project was denied entry due to private messages criticizing Trump’s climate policy.
Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian actress and entrepreneur was detained and shackled by U.S. border agents over a paperwork discrepancy related to her visa. Despite holding valid documents and having no criminal record, she was held for two weeks, placed in chains, and ultimately barred from entering the U.S. for five years. “It felt like I had been kidnapped,” she told The Guardian.
In each case, no laws were broken. Those detained were not criminals or security threats. They were travelers, students, and scholars whose views clashed with the current administration’s ideological agenda.
What we are witnessing is not immigration enforcement. It is an ideological cleansing of America.
As The New York Times and The Guardian documented, border agents and ICE officials are now empowered to use artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and social media monitoring to flag individuals who express dissenting political views. In many cases, private groups like Canary Mission and Betar, a militant, right-wing, Zionist organization, are feeding names and digital dossiers to the DHS. Betar reportedly used facial recognition to identify international students protesting Israeli policies on campus and lobbied for their deportation.
Students and faculty at Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford reported unannounced visits from federal agents or unexplained blocks on their visas. Some learned later that their names had been flagged by university trustees or external watchdog groups tracking “anti-Israel extremism.”
The legal architecture enabling this crackdown rests on vague statutes and court deference to executive authority, especially in immigration. The administration has taken full advantage of this deference by shipping cases to conservative jurisdictions like Louisiana’s Fifth Circuit Court, using sealed orders, applying rapid transfers, and issuing retroactive visa revocations to bypass due process.
In Ragbir v. Homan (2d Cir. 2018), the court held that retaliatory deportation for protected speech is unconstitutional. Khalil’s lawyers have invoked this precedent. But in conservative circuits, judges are increasingly treating immigration as an exception to constitutional protections.
The U.S. presents itself as a nation governed by the rule of law, a place where rights are protected, free speech is sacred, and justice applies to all. But when immigration law is carved out as an exception, when it becomes a lawless zone where speech is criminalized and due process is ignored, that foundation begins to crack. If the government can detain, silence, and expel individuals based not on what they’ve done, but based on what they believe or say, then no one is truly safe – not immigrants, not citizens, not even those born on American soil. A democracy that makes dissent deportable does not just fail immigrants. It fails itself.
This assault on dissent echoes earlier moments in American history. The Enemy Aliens Act, still on the books, was once used to intern Japanese Americans and surveil Germans during World War II. Today, it underpins the logic of guilt by association: if you speak out on behalf of a disenfranchised group, your rights are conditional.
The second Trump Administration has also embraced blacklist tactics, much like those of the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Canary Mission and Betar maintain dossiers on students and professors who they consider to be critical of Israel. Those named often find themselves denied entry to the U.S., blocked from employment, or targeted by coordinated harassment campaigns.
Even Jewish activists can become targets. As University of Haifa professor Itamar Mann and Columbia University professor Lihi Yona argue in Defending Jews from the Definition of Antisemitism, the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism has created a legal and rhetorical tool to punish both Palestinians and dissenting Jewish allies.
Maura Finkelstein, reportedly the first tenured professor dismissed over her anti-Zionist views by Muhlenberg College, said, “I wasn’t fired for hate speech. I was fired for my political opinions. For being anti-Zionist. For being vocal. For being a Jew who rejects Zionism.”
The consequences of this crackdown are far-reaching. It is reshaping the meaning of U.S. residency, border policy, and academic freedom.
According to the Center for American Progress, the administration’s enforcement strategy has diverted thousands of law enforcement personnel away from investigating violent crimes and public safety threats to instead focus on detaining students, tourists, and researchers for critical speech.
This isn’t about protecting Americans. It’s about making examples of those who dare to speak up.
If Americans allow the government to strip visas and green cards for expressing unpopular ideas, they legitimize a system where speech becomes a privilege, not a right and where political views determine one’s legal existence.
We’ve seen this before. In McCarthy’s America during the so-called Red Scare, the government came after communists. In Nixon’s America, it was civil rights leaders and the anti-war left. Today, it’s Palestinians, their allies, and all those critical of Trump’s embrace of state fascism.
Once they are all out of the way, who will the government come for next?
Faisal Kutty is a lawyer, law professor, and affiliate faculty member at the Rutgers University Center for Security, Race, and Rights. You can follow him on X @faisalkutty.
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