Trump wants to deport foreign students like me. Universities must challenge it reviews

When I got to study in the United States, the terrifying spectrum of deportation was the last thing in my mind.

As a British – a citizen of the “first world” – I was the beneficiary of the “Special relationship” between the US and the United Kingdom.

No matter how terrible it was, the deportation happened with the asylum seekers in Mexico or Haiti, in a world removed from the snow-covered hills in New York, at home at Cornell University, where I study. Or so I thought.

In January, while teaching a class about Afro -American literature, I received a text message that caused me to look nervously on the window for the danger on the street below.

Immigration agents and customs application (ICE) were observed by making raids in the center of Ithaca. I had reason to be afraid: the day before, President Donald Trump signed an executive order asking the agencies to take into account the deportation of foreign students who, like me, were confronted with disciplinary actions for activism in Palestine.

The order requires universities to “monitor and report activities by students and extraterrestrial staff” and asks the Secretary of Education to provide an inventory of court and disciplinary inventory that involves an alleged anti -Semitism.

Not being characterized by anti -war protests that took place on American campuses last year, Trump was quoted in a white house Fact sheeT: “For all the resident aliens who joined the pro-Jihadist protests, we inform you: come 2025, we will find you and deport you.”

Trump’s words have become reality since then. On Saturday night, ice immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian who drove the camp at Colombia University and transferred to a detention unit in Louisiana, a thousand miles away from his strongly pregnant wife, who stays in New York. His permanent resident status who owned a green book did not do much to protect him.

Making unprecedented measures to punish students for peaceful activism against the war of Israel in Gaza, universities have opened the way for Trump’s order and raids that have started now.

These institutions are facing a fork on the way: they can comply with the order and can become complicated in a repression on dissent or they can rise before Trump and his clan, to protect their students and they can quickly hold their freedom of expression.

Universities must prove if they are for the first amendment or against it.

I myself, I was suspended after taking over the students of a career fair in September 2024, with Boeing and L3harris – companies that provided Israel some of the weapons he used to bear the war on the Palestinian population – described as genocide by human rights groups.

Many of the 100 students who took part in protest were involved in previous actions, including a major camp that lasted over two weeks and the occupations of major academic buildings.

But, in an unprecedented movement, Cornell sang 15 of us for suspension, largely black, Muslim, Arabs and Jews.

Four of us are international students and they could face deportation. In addition, Bianca Waked, a Canadian Arab student, who was suspended in April 2024 because she drove a camp on campus, also faces this perspective.

Although there was no suggestion that my actions were anti -Semitic or violent in any way during subsequent disciplinary procedures, I was expelled from campus and I could not go to the library or I could not visit my academic department.

While I live in a private residence on Campus, I was actually placed in a form of arrest at home for one month before lifting my suspension.

All this to take a position against annihilating the desire of innocent people.

However, I was one of the luckiest.

Four students were arrested by the Campus police because he shot and resisted the officers; The accusations of three of them have been either abandoned or will be rejected by a period without other accusation.

At least one student was evacuated from Campus accommodation, while others were prevented from participating in Shabbat or Muslim prayers.

In a high profile caseMomodou Taal, a British student colleague, was suspended and threatened by deportation.

expert I warned that Trump Presidency intends to use protests in Gaza as a tool to make a “wider war against awakening against progressive thinking at American universities.

And so, stinging in this way, Cornell and other universities have left the door wide open for Trump’s burning insurgents to revolt.

The suspensions are embarrassing for an institution that prides itself on the freedom of expression and an inheritance of the student protest. Indeed, freedom of expression was the theme of the University 2023-2024.

Ironically, while punishing us for taking over a career fair, the university is still proud of its site about its progressive history, which includes the taking of Willard Straight Hall in 1969, in which black students occupied the campus, protesting against institutional racism. On that occasion, Cornell was willing to meet some of the requirements of his students and opened the first department of African studies in the US.

The level of censorship at the University became a public embarrassment issue on February 3, during a key lecture by the distinguished activist and academic Angela Davis.

Davis was introduced by one of Cornell’s highest black administrators, Marla Love, the dean that supervises the department that handed me the suspension and prison.

Sainking that Davis’s work “causes us to face today’s injustices,” Love invoiced as a meditation on the contemporary relevance of Dr. Martin Luther King in addressing “war and militarism, imperialism, global human suffering and governmental abuse.” Davis only did this: she challenged injustice, not only in the way she hoped for the university’s leadership.

“From him (Dr. Martin Luther King) I learned about the indivisibility of justice. It is not possible to request justice for some and leave others outside the circle of justice, ”she said, before leaving the topic.

“I understand that there are those who cannot participate this evening, because they were expelled from this community because of their efforts to criticize the antidemocratic forces of the state of Israel,” Davis said.

During the question and answers session, Davis’s discussion, a university student, revealed that the University prevented him from making questions about Palestine or ironically about campus censorship. Anyway they did this.

After leaving Cornell because he prevented the campus protest, Davis, who wore her iconic Afro Gray, bent over and asked: “So they offered you a list of topics that you didn’t have to talk about?”

“This is indeed frightening,” she added.

While Davis’s discussion has provided a welcome moral impulse to student activists, he will do little to eliminate the threat of deportation hanging over our head.

Cornell must provide assurances that it will not work with the immigration authorities and the Department of Internal Security to eliminate us. The removal of the protest and the legitimate dissident will reach nowhere. He has not already received Colombia anywhere.

Last week, the Trump administration withdrew $ 400 million in federal subsidies at Colombia University for It is assumed that it fails to contain anti -Semitism and “illegal protests”. This is the same university that at the end of April 2024 he called in NYPD to delete a pro-palestine camp. The raid, in which more than 100 were arrested and many beaten, came a few days after the then president, Minouche Shafik, promise To intensify the repression of Colombia on the protesters, while it faced a powerful Congress committee.

All this is not surprising, because, in the end, “this is America”, a country that, as the Gambino Childish song Hit suggests, is rooted by systemic racial violence and the application of surviving law.

As a non-Cetanic black Muslims, Taal and I fall to the intersection of the deep history of the US, post-9/11 Islamophobia and now a revived xenophobia.

Unless Cornell does not take a firm position, it is not clear whether our British passports will save us.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.