Stella Ragas/Columbia Daily Spectator
Mary, a graduate student at Columbia University, was riding the subway home last Thursday night when she received a text message from a friend: “ICE raids allegedly.” Only a few days earlier, agents from the Department of Homeland Security had arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and a legal permanent resident of the U.S., and tried to arrest Ranjani Srinivasan, a 37-year-old Fulbright scholar from India, accusing them of supporting Hamas during demonstrations on campus. In both instances, DHS showed up at Columbia housing, apartment buildings similar to Mary’s home.
Mary (whose name has been changed for privacy) is an international student attending Columbia on a student visa. In the past 16 months, she went to a few pro-Palestine rallies on campus. She never held a bullhorn or appeared in the news, but the mere fact that her opinions, as she puts it, “could be known” by either the university or the U.S. government, was enough to paralyze her with worry. After receiving the text message, she got off the subway and waited while her partner circled the block, scouting the route between the station and their apartment for signs of DHS agents. “I am double-, triple-thinking everything I do. The paranoia is justified in many ways, and it’s been pretty debilitating,” she says. “Columbia’s administration didn’t care about Mahmoud or Ranjani, so why would I trust them to help me?”
Khalil’s detention set off protests across the city, including rallies that drew hundreds around Columbia’s campus. Yet those protests masked a quieter reality: International students have largely retreated from public life, fearing they may be next. Before this week’s spring break, visa and green-card holders hunkered down in dorms or fled the Upper West Side altogether. (All the students interviewed for this story participated in pro-Palestinian actions.) “People are just terrified,” says Layla Saliba, a Palestinian American graduate student. “International students are scared to come to campus, and people aren’t getting guidance from their deans. They’ve been left to deal with it by themselves. Students are the ones who are taking care of each other, organizing an ‘ICE Watch’ chat. The administration hasn’t done anything.”
In the wake of Khalil’s arrest, Columbia’s communications with students have been steady but vague. Interim president Dr. Katrina Armstrong wrote a letter acknowledging the “distress” students are feeling about having federal immigration agents around campus. In a follow-up email, Armstrong said she was “heartbroken” by the presence of federal agents in university housing. “The university is obligated to comply with the law,” she wrote, omitting any mention of Khalil or his case. One statement denied rumors circulating among students and faculty that Columbia’s leadership had requested the immigration officers. “The school has sent out Orwellian emails about wellness resources; this doesn’t feel like a problem that’s going to be solved by expanding counseling and gym hours,” says Nara Milanich, a professor of Latin American history at Columbia’s affiliate school, Barnard College. “There is a desire from everyone for the administration to do something less anemic.” Meanwhile, Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, attempted to level with international students during a meeting. “Nobody can protect you,” he reportedly said. “These are dangerous times.”
Armstrong, who took office last summer, weighed concerns about academic freedom and safety against the $400 million in federal grants and contracts the Trump administration suspended earlier this month over what it said was the school’s tolerance of antisemitism. On Friday, Armstrong and Columbia’s board caved and agreed to meet a list of the government’s demands, including a ban on nonmedical face coverings and appointing a senior vice-provost to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department. “We have worked hard to address the legitimate concerns raised both from within and without our Columbia community, including by our regulators, with respect to the discrimination, harassment, and antisemitic acts our Jewish community has faced in the wake of October 7, 2023,” the university wrote in an unsigned memo, according to The Wall Street Journal.
If Columbia hadn’t met the government’s demands, some faculty worried Trump could have gone further, cutting off more than $400 million to make an already existential crisis exponentially worse. People familiar with Armstrong’s thinking say she was trying to take a practical approach to secure funding while appeasing the Trump administration. The school’s capitulation won’t address activists’ concerns, and it inflames those about academic freedom. “The university is bending over for the administration,” says a Palestinian student who is worried about his immigration status. “There is a deep sense of betrayal students are feeling right now.” Another international student wondered what would stop Trump from doing this again at Columbia next semester or at any other school the administration wants to target. “Why aren’t they putting up any fight?”
Fearful as they may be, student activists are hardly shocked by Khalil’s detention or the school’s capitulation. Many are certain Khalil ended up on Trump’s list because he was doxxed. Pro-Israel groups were naming pro-Palestinian students before October 7, 2023, but since then, groups like Betar, as well as Zionists with large social-media followings like Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School who was suspended for harassing and intimidating colleagues, have taken the practice to new heights. Student protesters made efforts to hide their identities, being careful not to draw undue attention to students who aren’t U.S. citizens, and they were discreet with information. Ask a question like “Who’s in charge?” at a demonstration, and campus activists tended to answer vaguely, recalling The Battle of Algiers. Many pro-Palestine protesters hid their faces behind masks or keffiyehs, a tactic that today would violate the terms of Columbia’s bargain with Trump. “Once your face is all over one of these doxxing pages, the university gets external pressure to punish you, and they seem extremely willing to respond to that pressure,” says Marie Adele Grosso, a Barnard junior who is currently on probation after participating in a sit-in.
Over the past 16 months, Khalil didn’t hide his own identity at rallies and protests. He was aware of the risk, acknowledging at a press conference last spring that he had avoided arrest, fearing it might jeopardize the student visa he had at the time. Still, he made efforts to protect himself and his fellow students. In January, he sent an email to Columbia administrators telling them students were “facing severe and pervasive doxxing, discriminatory harassment, and very possibly deportation in retaliation for the lawful exercising of their rights to freedom of speech, expression, and association.” But things only got worse: A few weeks later, Davidai called Khalil a “terror supporter” on X, then tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio in another post, which suggested Rubio should deport Khalil. It was all getting to Khalil, who shared his fears with a Palestinian American student who was also facing mounting threats; pro-Israel activists had recently tried to get her father fired from his job. The day before his arrest, Khalil followed up with a more personal appeal to the administration: “I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home.”
Khalil’s first public statement after his arrest echoed those of his friends and fellow activists in New York. “Columbia targeted me for my activism,” Khalil wrote in a letter from an immigration detention facility in Louisiana. “While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University.”
