When I arrived to study in the United States, the terrifying spectre of deportation was the last thing on my mind.
As a Brit – a citizen of “the First World” – I was supposedly the beneficiary of the “special relationship” between the US and the United Kingdom.
As awful as it was, deportation happened to asylum seekers from Mexico or Haiti, in a world far removed from the snow-capped hills of Ithaca in upstate New York, home to Cornell University where I study. Or so I thought.
In January, as I taught a class on African American literature, I received a text message that caused me to nervously peer out the window for danger on the street below.
Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been spotted conducting raids in downtown Ithaca. I had reason to be afraid: the day before, President Donald Trump had signed an executive order asking agencies to consider deporting foreign students who, like me, faced disciplinary action for activism on Palestine.
The order requires universities to “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff” and calls on the secretary of education to provide an inventory of court and disciplinary cases involving alleged anti-Semitism at universities.
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Mischaracterising the antiwar protests that took place across US campuses last year, Trump was quoted as saying in a White House fact sheet: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.”
Trump’s words have since become reality. On Saturday night, ICE immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian who led the encampment at Columbia University, and transferred him to a detention facility in Louisiana, a thousand miles away from his heavily pregnant wife, who remains in New York City. His status as a permanent resident holding a green card did little to protect him.
By taking unprecedented steps to punish students for peaceful activism against Israel’s war in Gaza, universities paved the way for Trump’s order and the raids that have now begun.
These institutions face a fork in the road: they can comply with the order and become complicit in a crackdown on dissent, or they can stand up to Trump and his clan of bullies, protect their students and hold fast to their stated values of freedom of expression.
Universities must demonstrate whether they are for the First Amendment, or against it.
I, myself, was suspended following the student takeover of a career fair in September 2024, featuring Boeing and L3Harris – companies that have supplied Israel with some of the weapons it has used to carry out its war on the Palestinian population – described as genocide by leading human rights groups.
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Many of the 100 or so students who took part in the protest were involved in previous actions, including a major encampment that lasted over two weeks and occupations of major academic buildings.
But in an unprecedented move, Cornell singled out 15 of us for suspension, mostly Black, Muslim, Arab and Jewish students.
Four of us are international students and could face deportation. In addition, Bianca Waked, a Canadian Arab student, who was suspended in April 2024 for leading a protest encampment on campus, also faces this prospect.
Though there was no suggestion that my actions were anti-Semitic or violent in any way during subsequent disciplinary proceedings, I was banished from campus and could not go to the library or visit my academic department.
As I live in a private residence on campus, I was effectively placed under a form of house arrest for a month before my suspension was lifted.
All this for taking a stand against the wanton annihilation of innocent people.
Still, I was one of the luckier ones.
Four students were arrested by campus police for shoving and resisting officers; the charges of three of them were either dropped or will be dismissed pending a period without further charges.
At least one student was evicted from campus accommodation, while others were prevented from attending Shabbat or Muslim prayers on campus.
In one high-profile case, Momodou Taal, a fellow British student, was suspended and threatened with deportation.
Experts have warned that the Trump presidency is intent on using Gaza protests as a tool to wage a wider “war on woke” against progressive thought at US universities.
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And so by punishing us in this way, Cornell and other universities have left the door wide open for Trump’s book-burning insurgents to run riot.
The suspensions are embarrassing for an institution that prides itself on freedom of expression and a legacy of student protest. Indeed, freedom of expression was the 2023-2024 university theme.
Ironically, while punishing us for a takeover of a career fair, the university still boasts on its website about its progressive history, which includes the 1969 Willard Straight Hall takeover, in which Black students occupied the campus, protesting against institutional racism. On that occasion, Cornell was willing to meet some of the demands of its students and opened the first department of Africana Studies in the US.
The level of censorship at the university became a matter of public embarrassment on February 3, during a keynote lecture by the distinguished activist and academic Angela Davis.
Davis was introduced by one of Cornell’s most senior Black administrators, Marla Love, the dean who oversees the department that handed down my suspension and confinement.
Highlighting that Davis’s work “challenges us to confront the injustices of today”, Love billed the lecture as a meditation on the contemporary relevance of Dr Martin Luther King in tackling “war and militarism, imperialism, human global suffering and governmental abuses of power”. Davis did just that: she challenged injustice, just not in the way the university leadership would have hoped.
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“It was from him [Dr Martin Luther King] that we learned about the indivisibility of justice. It is not possible to call for justice for some and leave others outside of the circle of justice,” she said, before going off-topic.
“I understand that there are those that cannot attend this evening because they have been banished from this community because of their efforts to criticise the anti-democratic forces of the State of Israel,” Davis said.
During the question-and-answer session, Davis’s discussant, an undergraduate student, revealed that the university had barred them from fielding questions about Palestine or, ironically, about censorship on campus. They did so anyway.
After lacerating Cornell for hampering campus protest, Davis, sporting her iconic grey afro, leaned over and asked: “So they gave you a list of topics that you weren’t supposed to talk about?”
“This is really scary,” she added.
While Davis’s talk offered a welcome morale boost to student activists, it will do little to remove the threat of deportation hanging over our heads.
Cornell must offer assurances that it will not work with immigration authorities and the Department of Homeland Security to remove us. Cracking down on legitimate protest and dissent will get it nowhere. It got Columbia nowhere already.
Last week, the Trump administration withdrew $400m in federal grants from Columbia University for supposedly failing to contain anti-Semitism and “illegal protests”. This is the same university that in late April 2024 called in the NYPD to clear a pro-Palestine student encampment. The raid, in which more than 100 were arrested and many beaten up, came days after the then-president, Minouche Shafik, promised to intensify Columbia’s crackdown on student protesters as she fawned before a powerful congressional committee.
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All of this is hardly surprising because, after all, “this is America”, a country that, as the hit Childish Gambino song suggests, is steeped in systemic racial violence and overbearing law enforcement.
As non-citizen Black Muslims, Taal and I fall at the intersection of the US’s deep history of anti-Blackness, post-9/11 Islamophobia and now a resurgent xenophobia.
Unless Cornell takes a firm stand, it is unclear if our British passports will save us.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
