Ranjani Srinivasan is a PhD student in Urban Planning at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University, months from her graduation. She should be worrying about her scheduling her dissertation defence, final edits and how many friends and family might be able to attend this defining moment of her doctoral career. Instead, she has had to cross borders to Canada, and unceremoniously have an airport snapshot on loop released to the world press by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of State for the United States. Noem, described Srinivasan as “one of the Columbia University terrorist-sympathisers”, who “used the CBP app to self deport”.
I think of Ranjani’s departure more akin to exile.
Indian news reporting has been largely based on the Department of Homeland Security press release where Srinivasan is characterised as “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organisation”. The pairing of the word ‘terrorist’ with ‘student’ might be a tactic familiar to Indian readers. It is certainly one internet trolls of all provenance have latched on to. While the specifics behind these allegations have not been shared, what we know is that Srinivasan is said to have run afoul of her visa requirements for liking a few posts on social media, and for having received a summons on April 30, 2024, for charges that were later dropped. She had been trying to return to her dorm after a picnic with friends. There were many such summons issued that night, including to a professor at the cusp of retiring filming the fracas, who said of his accidental arrest, “I certainly posed no danger to anybody. I was literally standing in the street and not blocking anybody.”
Many are now repeating the line “a visa is a privilege”. But what is the infraction here, exactly? And more, what happened to the presumption of innocence till proven guilty? The only continuing wrongdoing Ranjani is accused of is her political speech – signing a pro-Palestine letter, and liking a few posts. Ranjani is not a student leader nor an organiser. While she is a member of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), a union that includes teaching assistants, she held no leadership role in it. Ranjani’s case lays bare a calculus we have always suspected, but now hear said aloud and reiterated everywhere – that there is a deeply differential application of First Amendment rights, or the rights to free speech as it is commonly understood, even though these are extended to non-citizens by the United States Constitution. Now the president of the United States gets to decide what American interests are.
Ranjani Srinivasan. Photo by special arrangement.
I arrived in the United States myself as a doctoral student on an F1 visa, in a post 9/11 New York. I was late by a week to join classes because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was new, and no one – certainly not the consulate functionaries on Ho Chih Minh Sarani in Kolkata – quite knew what SEVIS or an I-20 was, much less how to issue one. My department wrote many emails advocating for the importance of me being there at the start of the semester, my university applied the full force of the office of international students in parsing the new requirements and speeding up the paperwork. It is breathtaking to think we have travelled in a couple of decades from there, to a place where universities and the DHS are working together to cancel I-20s for fully enrolled, academically gifted, international students months from completing their degrees.
Reports now reveal the first ICE raid on Columbia’s campus was on March 7, where federal agents in search of Ranjani were rebuffed for not having a warrant. The next night, on Saturday March 8, DHS agents picked up Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate prominent in his role as student negotiator in the Gaza Solidarity Encampments of spring 2024. This was the first publicly reported case of a student being targeted for deportation specifically for their pro-Palestinian activism by the Trump administration. In Mahmoud’s instance, agents entered behind him and his eight-month pregnant wife returning home from an iftar, did not identify themselves at first, did not have a warrant, mistakenly believed Mahmoud to be on a student visa, and decided to arrest him anyway even after he disclosed he was a legal permanent resident.
Ranjani has given one interview since leaving the city to The New York Times, in which she describes in harrowing detail a series of three visits by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to her Columbia dorm room, twice foiled by her intrepid roommate. The part of this narrative I fixate on is not the third visit under the backdrop of her dramatic departure, but rather what must have happened between the second and third visits. Because to me, that distance is the interregnum between the prestige of an Ivy league institution and start of the collapse of the American university system.
Also read: ‘My Name Is Mahmoud Khalil and I Am a Political Prisoner’
What happened between visits that the federal administration was able to convince a judge to issue a judicial warrant for this doctoral student two months from graduation? What made Columbia de-enroll her, making her I-20 invalid, thus rendering her out of status? How did sealed city records get passed to federal agents, equating a desk appearance ticket later dismissed with criminal wrongdoing? And what will happen to those students who will return from Spring Break to discover their teaching assistant gone?
The way Ranjani describes her experience is akin to political asylees being forced into exile – “I’m fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do – like shout into the abyss that is social media – can turn into this dystopian nightmare where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathiser and making you, literally, fear for your life and safety”.
Rather than see Ranjani’s case as exceptional, we must understand it as a harbinger to President Trump’s policy toward higher education, specifically the instrumentalisation of student visas to quash dissent. And even more particularly, to punish Columbia for the prominent role they have had in student activism in the last 18 months. Because the administration, with no notice nor due process, was able to cancel the F1 visa of a student on whim. Rather than adjudication or appeal, they chose ICE.
In a statement released yesterday through her union SWC, Ranjani is quite clear, in her case, of “the extent to which Columbia has been cooperating with ICE, instead of protecting its students”. What we are all left grappling with is the extent to which Columbia can protect anybody. Or indeed, even its own educational mission.
Immigration policy and federal monies are the two enforcement arms of President Trump’s policy in higher education. I am reminded of Andalusian poet Federico Garcia Lorca, writing nearly a hundred years earlier, of his time at Columbia, “Ay Harlem, threatened by a throng of headless suits!” (‘The King of Harlem’, 1929).
These ICE raids ensued the week of President Trump announcing $400 million in federal grant cuts to the university. Several area research institutes, including the South Asia Institute, The Middle East Institute, the Institute of Latin American Studies had their federal grants were terminated with notice on March 7 on charges of “discrimination”. Grants in medicine, public health, the department of psychology, the earth institute, the climate school and other research programmes have been equally affected by the abrupt termination of their grants. And on Thursday March 13, the Trump administration handed Columbia a list of conditions to which the university must acquiesce, if we hope to regain our grants, in a move my colleague, esteemed Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock, has described as “the most dangerous letter in the history of higher education in America”, where the government, “like a mob boss”, has presented the university with demands “like a ransom note”.
Also read: ‘What Happened to Me Can Happen to You’, Says Columbia Student on US Revocation of Her Visa
While Ranjani is the first case I am aware of visa cancellation and deportation proceedings, and Columbia the first with widespread federal grant cuts, there is already news of others. Dr Badar Khan Suri, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University, was detained by ICE on March 17 and had his student visa cancelled for “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media”. A French researcher was denied entry into the United States because, “the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy”. Dr Rasha Alawieh, a doctor at Brown University, was deported on March 17 from Boston’s Logan International while returning from a visit home to Lebanon, despite having a valid visa and a judge staying her deportation. Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian detained for two weeks without explanation, wrote after her release, “Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.” Cornell could lose $80 million in federal funding, and is on the list of 60 universities which received warning letters from the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on March 10.
Tomorrow I will likely wake up to the news that the Department of Education no longer exists under Trump’s presidency. Millions of students and educators will be left in limbo, and as ever the most underserved will be made most existentially vulnerable. Watching this steady trickle of terrible news turn into a daily torrent, wondering if anything or anyone will stop it and turn the tide, I am reminded of another Indian urban planner – Badal Sircar. He wrote about the 19th century Santhal rebellion, the possibility of a more progressive horizon, and how to overcome being inured by the daily onslaught of bad news, in his 1979 play Bashi Khobor.
Ranjani was doing important work – citylife changing work even – on the relationships between land, labour and caste in deindustrialised small towns in India from 1960s to the present. I am left wondering when I will get to read her work now.
Shayoni Mitra, Senior Lecturer, Department of Theatre, Barnard College, Columbia University, researches and teaches on political performance. She is the Interim Director of the South Asia Institute, Columbia University.
