Fear has become the new reality at Columbia University, in New York, after last weekend the United States Immigration Service agents (ICE) arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student who legally resided in the country, for his participation in last year’s protests against the Gaza War.
A second Palestinian student, Leqaa Kordia, whose visa had expired, has been arrested by ICE agents, As announced The National Security Department. In addition, the same ministry ensures that another doctoral student who had participated in the protests, Ranjani Srinivasan, who had a visa and is originally from India, agreed to leave voluntarily from the country after her visa was canceled by the administration.
In Columbia, the Campus has been totally armored and with more security agents in the entries to avoid the presence of ICE from Khalil’s arrest. “We make classes by Zoom to protect international students who can also be the target of ICE agents for their participation,” explains Patricia Dailey, English teacher and comparative literature in Columbia.
Although ICE agents cannot enter the campus without a court order, they can be nearby, as long as they are public spaces. Therefore, the path to class or the university accommodations that are outside the campus has become dangerous for other international students involved in the protests. Just as some classes are being given by Zoom, information is also being sent to explain to the students how to react if they meet an ICE agent.
These are instructions similar to those that organizations that work with migrants have been distributing to undocumented people for weeks. The difference is that now that information is received by people in the United States legally and that, even so, they run the risk of being deported due to the persecution Trump has initiated against all the students who have manifested against Israel.
The first of many arrests
Last Monday, Trump said in a post of his social truth network that the authorities are going to “find, arrest and deport all the supporters of the country’s terrorists – and they will never return -.” “This is the first arrest of many who will come,” he said. The president himself said that Khalil was “a pro-hamás radical student”an accusation that could be used against him in the trial in which he will decide on his deportation. The attempted deportation has been temporarily paralyzed by a federal judge.
One day before Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration already applied the first measure of punishment against Columbia for the protests of almost a year ago and canceled 400 million dollars (about 369 million euros) in federal subsidies and contracts of this university.
“I’ve been working at this university for 20 years and I had never seen such a situation before,” explains Dailey, who also denounces that the same day they arrested Khalil, they wanted to stop another architecture student whom they failed to find. In a statement last Tuesday, the Association of American University Teachers (AAUP) also denounces that immigration agents have “touched the doors of other students without judicial guarantees.”
“The surveillance and scrutiny environment, both by the media and the administration, is very uncomfortable. And it’s sad. It is really sad, because I feel that they make us a show, a public spectacle of punishment for the rest, ”says Dailye. “It is not only an attack on Columbia, but to universities and freedom of expression, and the right to protest.”
The past spring the Republicans put in the point of view to the University of Columbia for being the epicenter of the proper campuses that extended throughout the country. The mobilizations served as a pretext to primar even more with the universities of the so -called Ivy League (the US elite universities) for their policies to promote the diversity of gender, race and other variables. The proportions were labeled with anti -Semites, although Jewish students who opposed the war in Gaza participated, and the right to demonstrate was questioned.
The Republicans accused the proper protesters of generating a feeling of insecurity on the campus and interfering with the right to education of Jewish students, and claimed that the protests could not interfere in the classes. Now it is the repression by the new Republican administration that interferes in the routines of the students, since it has generated fear and has led some to choose to receive the classes from home.
“As teachers, we try to transmit calm and focus on creating safe conditions so that they can concentrate with their classes. We must continue providing a space for teaching, because if we renounce it, then we have lost, ”says Dailey. The English teacher explains that she has not only put himself in the spotlight to the students, but also to all those teachers who defended the right to the demonstration last year. Then they denounced how the attacks against Columbia were an attempt by the conservatives to attack the freedom of chair in the universities.
Now, Trump has already threatened to cut funds to all those educational centers that continue to apply policies to protect minorities (Dei, for the acronym in English from diversity, equity and equality). Earlier this week, the Department of Education sent a letter to 60 public and private universities in which it warned the centers of possible “coercive actions” if they do not take measures to protect “Jewish students on the campus.”
“Specimens” punishments for Columbia
For Dailey, the cancellation of federal funds and Khalil’s arrest are measures that produce economic damage to the university, indirectly. “They scare people. They try to say that Columbia is not safe, that they do not come here. Somehow, what they want is to hit Columbia economically in all possible aspects. And that is one of the best ways to hurt us, because it reduces the number of people who want to donate money. We had many international students who did not come this fall for bad reputation, so our budget was affected. All this advertising is causing a lot of damage to education itself, ”laments the teacher.
In an email sent to the university community on Thursday, the Directorate of Columbia announced that it has expelled, suspended and revoked titles to those students who occupied the Hamilton Hall building during the protests against the Gaza War. The mail does not indicate how many students have been affected by a file that was already ongoing before the threats of the Trump administration.
The Government has also demanded to Columbia to implement drastic changes in students’ discipline and in the admission process. Only then, it will reconsider the cancellation of the 400 million dollars in subsidies and government contracts. The Trump administration asks the university to formalize its definition of anti -Semitism, to prohibit the use of masks “destined to hide the identity or intimidate” and to supervise the Department of Studies of the Middle East, Asia del Sur and Africa. “We expect immediate compliance,” said officials of the Department of Education in a letter.
“Authoritarian”
The previous rector of Columbia – which preceded Minouche Shafik, who resigned last year following the pressures for the “anti -Semitic” protests -, Lee Bollinger, pronounced himself on the arrest of Khalil and what, in his opinion, is an “authoritarian take” of universualad by the US government, as stated to Chronicle of Higher Education.
“He has been advancing and advancing, and not everyone is prepared to see it that way. The characters considered to follow models, such as Orbán and Putin, indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy, an authoritarian democracy or a strong man democracy. That is what we are living, ”said Bollinger. For the exrector, what is happening right now in Columbia is one of the first symptoms of an authoritarian drift: “You neutralize the powers of the government, neutralize the media, neutralized the universities, and you are on the road. We are starting to see the effects on universities. It is very, very scary. ”
“For us, Mahmoud’s arrest is not a surprise and they will use it to turn it into an example, not only for the Palestinians, but for migrant communities in general to exercise the first amendment of the Constitution [el derecho a la libertad de expresión]”, Explains to Eldiario.es Nesreen Hasan, from the Palestinian community network in the US. “We are worried, but we will not stop mobilizing and protesting, because if we stop we give them green light so that they go further in attacks against our community and the rest of migrant communities.”
Hasan points out that the escalation of the persecution against the Palestinian community and the propalestine movement is a consequence of the legacy of the previous president, Joe Biden, for whose administration the camping against the war represented one of the greatest answers to their policies. “Biden placed the foundations for Trump to do this. I don’t think Trump had gone so far if Biden hadn’t started. I remember when there were the camping and the White House sent communications denouncing the protests and the students who were in them. ”
With these attacks on the Palestinian community, Hasan believes that the Government is preparing a new entrance veto in the United States such as Trump approved in its first mandate for citizens from seven Muslim majority countries (then the courts stopped the decree).
Last January 20, One of the first executive orders signed Trump Its objective was to protect the United States from “terrorist foreign threats” and, among many other things, asked the competent authorities to “identify countries worldwide” whose citizens represent a risk for security and, therefore, justify “a partial or total suspension of the admission of their nationals” in the US, thus laying the foundations for a future prohibition.
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