THEY’VE had their visas revoked, been kidnapped off the street by unidentified masked agents, have disappeared to detention centres in faraway states and have been called terrorist sympathisers by the Trump government.

This is now the lived reality for overseas students in the US. They have committed no crime, received no due process and been denied access to lawyers. In some cases, their universities — among the most prestigious in the country — have not only failed to protect them, but have played an active role in turning them in to authorities.

As of April 24, over 280 colleges and universities have identified 1,800-plus international students and recent graduates who have had their legal status changed by the State Department, according to Inside Higher Ed, which retains a tracker. At least 1,400 students are believed to be facing deportation. Many of those arrested were picked off personally by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has accused them of “involvement in pro-Palestinian protests,” which, under US law, is not a crime.

It began with the arrest of Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil, who remains the most high-profile of those effectively abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), detained and threatened with deportation.

A Palestinian green card holder, affording him permanent US residency, and married to a US citizen, Khalil had served as the liaison between students at last year’s pro-Palestine encampment and university authorities.

But, after Donald Trump returned to the White House and fearing for his safety, Khalil appealed in early March to then Columbia president, Katrina Armstrong, warning her that the attacks against him included “calls for my deportation and death threats... I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene.”

The next day, he was seized at his home, leaving behind his wife, who was then eight months pregnant. On Monday, she gave birth to their first child while Khalil continued to languish in a Louisiana jail. 

“What more could I ask for as a role model for our children than a man who, with unwavering conviction, stands up for the liberation of his people, fully cognizant of the consequences of speaking truth to power?” Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, wrote to him.

Threatened by the Trump administration with the withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding, Columbia opened its doors wide to ICE agents. Trump took the money anyway.

Ranjani Srinivasan, a fifth-year doctoral student from India at Columbia, who had participated in on-campus protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, was on the phone with a Columbia adviser about her safety when ICE agents knocked on her door. 

Since they lacked a warrant, her flatmate, a US citizen, refused to open it. Srinivasan fled into hiding that day and self-deported to Canada two days later. 

“I had imagined that I just had to wait it out and the university would intervene to protect me,” Srinivasan wrote, decrying “the extent to which Columbia has been co-operating with ICE, instead of protecting its students.”

Upon Srinivasan’s departure, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, whose rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of many hate groups, called her “one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathisers.”

Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old South Korean student at Columbia and a green card holder, also fled into hiding after being personally targeted for deportation by Rubio. Her dorm room was later ransacked by ICE agents. Chung has lived in the US since she was seven. Her attorneys continue to fight her deportation, citing a violation of her first amendment right to free speech without fear of persecution.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian undergraduate at Columbia and a practising Buddhist, was born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank and has been living in the US for more than 10 years. But he, too, was arrested and detained in Vermont after turning up for what he thought was a citizenship test. Although technically stateless, he fears deportation to Palestine would be “a risk on my life.” He has also received death threats in the US.

In a filmed conversation during a prison visit from his Vermont senator, Peter Welch, Mahdawi said his “hope and my dream" was to “see an end to the war, an end to the killing, see a peaceful resolution between Palestinians and Israelis. How could this be a threat to anybody except the war machine that is feeding this?”

Like Columbia, Yale University readily collaborated with the Gestapo-style tactics of the Trump administration. Yale Law School suspended and then fired faculty member Helyeh Doutaghi, purely on reports from an AI-driven zionist online platform. 

Doutaghi, an Iranian legal scholar, wrote that her dismissal was “a violation of my constitutional rights, free speech, academic freedom, and fundamental due process rights. I am being targeted for one reason alone: for speaking the truth about the genocide of the Palestinian people that Yale University is complicit in.”

Like Srinivasan, Momodou Taal, a Cornell University doctoral student with dual British and Gambian citizenship, also chose to leave the country. 

“I have lost faith that I could walk the streets without being abducted,” said Taal, who had participated in on-campus protests against the Gaza genocide. Weighing up these options. I took the decision to leave on my own terms.”

Perhaps the most dramatic arrest, filmed from an upstairs window, was that of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish former Fulbright scholar at Tufts University, who was abruptly seized on the street on her way to an Iftar dinner by six masked plain clothes ICE agents, bundled into an unmarked car and flown to a detention centre in Louisiana, leaving her attorneys “unaware of her whereabouts and unable to contact her.”

Rubio is using a vague definition to strip overseas students of their visas and carry out mass arrests, which says “an alien is deportable from the US if the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that the alien’s presence or activities in the US would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the US.”

There are now numerous lawsuits challenging this, and lawyers are frantically working to secure the release of arrested students. On April 19, US District Court Judge Victoria Calvert issued a temporary restraining order for 133 international students and recent graduates, enabling them to continue their studies for at least two weeks and calling the government order “arbitrary and capricious.”

Some universities — most notably Harvard — have refused to capitulate to Trump’s blackmail. In Harvard’s case, this has resulted in the government freezing £1.6 billion in multi-year federal grants. Trump is also trying to further fine the university and to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

Harvard president, Alan Garber, said that the university’s goals to “nurture a thriving culture of open inquiry on our campus” and promote freedom of speech and thought “will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate.”

Harvard has now sued the Trump administration over the funding freeze and the government’s attempt to “gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard.”

In addition, an open letter signed by more than 200 university faculty members — a number that continues to grow — accuses the Trump administration of “unprecedented government overreach and political interference,” which is “now endangering US higher education.” The signatories say they “must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the more outspoken Democrats against the student abductions and deportations, warned that “in dictatorships they call this practice ‘being disappeared.’ No charges. No claims of any criminal behaviour.”

Added Murphy: “Today it’s Mahmoud Khalil, tomorrow it’s me or you.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.