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In recent months, the Trump Administration has used the U.S. immigration apparatus in increasingly expansive ways in its crackdown against noncitizens. In the process, it has often transgressed legal bounds in open defiance<\/a> of checks and balances on its executive power, and has made irreversible mistakes<\/a> such as unlawful and unjustifiable deportations.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the vast majority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have focused on increasingly indiscriminate detentions<\/a> of low-profile migrants, it has also used detentions and the threat of indefinite detention to intimidate and penalize<\/a> university students who are not U.S. citizens for criticizing the role of Israel and the United States in aiding its war on Gaza. Even more troubling is the timing of ICE\u2019s attempts to detain individuals: In multiple instances, student activists have been targeted by ICE<\/a> or had their visas revoked<\/a> shortly after being doxxed by rightwing websites and collectives such as the anonymous pro-Israeli forum<\/a> Canary Mission.<\/p>\n In a few high-profile cases, ICE has pursued individuals as a result of their political speech without informing the individual or their university about changes in their immigration statuses. Using one clause in a 1952 McCarthy-era law<\/a> known as the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the Trump Administration has claimed the authority to change the immigration status of those who hold views that are, as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described<\/a>, \u201cadversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests\u201d of the United States\u2014a claim with which at least one judge<\/a> has recently agreed.<\/p>\n One such case led Cornell University Ph.D. student Momodou Taal to flee the country last month after a rapid\u00a0 legal battle. Taal was suspended from Cornell<\/a> in spring of 2024 for his participation in the school\u2019s Palestine solidarity encampment, and again in September 2024 after participating in a disruptive action at which the university claims he shoved a police officer\u2014a charge he categorically denies<\/a>. After his second suspension, the university initiated an internal process that would have resulted in Taal\u2019s F-1 student visa being revoked, forcing him to leave the country. It quietly backtracked on that process following widespread national pushback, but banned Taal from Cornell\u2019s campus. Despite repeated accusations by Cornell administrators, Taal was never found guilty of wrongdoing, and agreed to alternative resolution processes for both suspensions.<\/p>\n But Taal later found himself targeted by rightwing organizations such as Betar, a Zionist extremist<\/a> group that identifies pro-Palestine student activists for the Trump Administration. In November 2024, Betar placed Taal on a list of thirty individuals it hoped to see deported after President Donald Trump took office, and singled him out<\/a> on its social media on March 13. The next day, the State Department claims it received a request from ICE to look into revoking Taal\u2019s visa, which it then did. On March 15, Taal filed a complaint<\/a> against Trump alongside two co-plaintiffs, Sriram Parasurama and M\u0169koma Wa Ng\u0169g\u0129, seeking an injunction against his use of two Executive<\/a> Orders<\/a> which they claimed had been used to violate their First and Fifth Amendment rights.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven that Cornell placed a target on my back, and the high-profile nature of my own case, I think we had quite a reason to believe that I was going to be targeted,\u201d Taal said in an interview with The Progressive<\/em> on March 24.\u00a0 \u201cThe best way to protect myself and others in this moment, we decided, would be to challenge the legality and constitutionality of the Executive Orders.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to go more on the offensive, rather than waiting for something to happen and then reacting to it,\u201d said one of Taal\u2019s co-plaintiffs, Sriram Parasurama, in an interview with The Progressive <\/em>on March 22. \u201cI\u2019m viewing this as very much a test of: How much does the law really matter anymore?\u201d<\/p>\n When he filed the complaint, however, Taal did not yet know that his visa had been revoked, and that federal agents were actively pursuing him<\/a>. He was officially informed of the change in his immigration status on March 21<\/a>\u2014a week after his visa was revoked\u2014and did not appear in court when his legal team and co-plaintiffs presented the case in court on March 25, fearing that he would be detained by ICE. The plaintiffs unsuccessfully sought a restraining order to bar ICE from pursuing Taal while the case proceeded, and he soon went into hiding.\u00a0<\/p>\n On March 31, Taal and his co-plaintiffs asked for the case to be voluntarily dismissed. Knowing he could be picked up and detained indefinitely without charge, as has happened to others critical of the United States and Israel, Taal fled to Canada. \u201cI have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,\u201d he wrote<\/a> in a statement on X.<\/p>\n On March 8, less than a week before the State Department revoked Taal\u2019s visa, federal agents detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who completed his graduate studies at Columbia University in December and was awaiting graduation in May. The agents, who refused to identify themselves, claimed that Khalil\u2019s student visa had been revoked, even though Khalil was in the United States on a green card<\/a> rather than a student visa.<\/p>\n According to a legal filing<\/a> from Khalil\u2019s lawyers, \u201cMr. Khalil\u2019s wife presented the [Department of Homeland Security] agents with documents confirming Mr. Khalil\u2019s status as a lawful permanent resident, handing them to an agent who was speaking on the phone. The agent looked confused when he saw the documents and said, \u2018He has a green card\u2019 to the individual with whom he was on the phone.\u201d Despite knowing that Khalil was a lawful permanent resident, ICE detained him anyway. He is currently being held without charges<\/a> in a detention center in Louisiana.\u00a0<\/p>\n On January 29, six weeks before Khalil\u2019s arrest, Betar accused Khalil<\/a> of making unsubstantiated threatening comments against Zionists, and wrote \u201cHe\u2019s on our deport list!\u201d Two days after his arrest, U.S.-based Jewish publication the Forward<\/em> reported<\/a> that Betar\u2019s former U.S. director<\/a>, Ross Glick, had \u201cdiscussed Khalil with aides to Senators Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to \u2018escalate\u2019 the issue,\u201d during a meeting in Washington, D.C., where he appears to have met with Senator Cruz directly<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Forward <\/em>described Glick as saying that Khalil was \u201cmaking it too easy for us,\u201d and that members of Columbia\u2019s board had also reported Khalil to Trump officials. Under Glick\u2019s direction, Betar shared its lists<\/a> of preferred targets with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, Attorney General then-nominee Pam Bondi and other officials.<\/p>\n Then there is the case of R\u00fcmeysa \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, a Turkish citizen with an F-1 visa attending Tufts University. \u00d6zt\u00fcrk was accosted<\/a> on the street as she left her residence on the evening of March 27, by masked individuals<\/a> claiming to be police, who handcuffed her and forced her into an unmarked van in less than a minute. Like Khalil, \u00d6zt\u00fcrk was also taken<\/a> to a detention center in Louisiana, thousands of miles from her residence, where she is still held at the time of writing.<\/p>\n Two days after her abduction, Canary Mission posted on X<\/a>, writing, \u201cThis is R\u00fcmeysa \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, a Turkish national being deported for \u2018activities in support of Hamas,\u2019 according to DHS. Sources point to her Canary Mission profile as the primary cause.\u201d<\/p>\n Canary Mission<\/a> targets those it deems to be antisemitic by maintaining profiles of individuals critical of Israel, as well as individuals who engage in activity it deems antisemitic. Canary Mission\u2019s definition of antisemitism is extremely broad, and includes support for boycotts and divestment campaigns targeting Israel. The only item linked on Ozt\u00fcrk\u2019s Canary Mission profile that is specific to her is an op-ed she co-authored <\/a>demanding that Tufts University divest from companies with ties to Israel and acknowledge \u201cacknowledge the Palestinian genocide.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Like in Taal\u2019s case, the timeline of \u00d6zt\u00fcrk\u2019s arrest, as recounted by the U.S. government, raises several questions. According to a Tufts University declaration<\/a> on the matter, the university received an email at 10:31 a.m. the morning after \u00d6zt\u00fcrk\u2019s abduction, but with a notice dated the previous day. The notice stated that \u201cR\u00fcmeysa\u2019s visa was cancelled because she was a \u2018non-immigrant status violator,\u2019 \u201d citing the INA in its rationale. The Tufts declaration also notes that \u00d6zt\u00fcrk\u2019s record in ICE\u2019s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System was changed to note that her visa was terminated hours after <\/em>she was picked up.<\/p>\n More recently, Mohsen Mahdawi, another green card holder who is Palestinian, was arrested<\/a> by ICE at a meeting the agency claimed was a citizenship interview. Betar had posted<\/a> its deportation request, tagging ICE, for Mahdawi on X on January 29. The account claimed<\/a>, after Mahdawi was detained, that he was on their \u201coriginal list.\u201d Rubio relied on the same INA rationale to arrest and deport Mahdawi, based on a memo claiming that his presence in the country could undermine the Middle East peace process<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Taal, Khalil, \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, and Mahdawi were all targeted by doxxing sites and collectives for their political speech, then pursued by ICE shortly after. No one was informed of these individuals\u2019 changed immigration statuses until after ICE had already sent agents to their residences or detained them\u2014the documentation emerged after the fact. In none of these three cases were students found guilty of any charges\u2014in fact, none of them have even been charged with any crime.<\/p>\n Even more troubling, the INA argument, which was deployed in all four cases, poses a broadly interpretable foreign policy rationale that has implications already infringing on speech in a way that\u2014as Taal\u2019s case demonstrates\u2014jurisdictionally prevents courts from stopping the expulsion of foreign nationals because of their political speech.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are certainly concerned with the trend of spiriting detainees out of the jurisdictions in which challenges are brought, like in the case of Mahmoud Khalil,\u201d wrote attorney Chris Godshall-Bennett, who represented Taal and the co-plaintiffs, in an email to The Progressive<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Godshall-Bennett, who is the legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee<\/a>, added that Judge Elizabeth Coombe\u2019s decision<\/a> that she does not have jurisdiction over immigration matters in the Taal et al. v. Trump et al.<\/em><\/a> case \u201cunderscores just how much the INA\u2019s jurisdiction-stripping provisions already are a barrier to justice.\u201d<\/p>\n A common factor among Khalil, \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, Taal, and Mahdawi appears to be that these individuals hold similar views, and are being doxxed by those who oppose criticism of the United States and Israel. ICE has denied<\/a> to The New York Times<\/em> that it is working with tips from Canary Mission, yet there is little explanation as to why \u00d6zt\u00fcrk is in detention without charge, aside from the fact that Canary Mission mentions her co-authoring the op-ed, and takes credit for her abduction by ICE.<\/p>\n Despite ICE\u2019s denial that it works off tips from Canary Mission, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of which ICE is a part, does appear to have used Canary Mission as a source of evidence upon which it denied entry to an individual. The Progressive <\/em>has acquired documentation of an individual denied entry into the United States, with a printed record of a questionnaire from DHS (given to this individual as a record) citing Canary Mission as a source of incriminating information.<\/p>\n The use of Canary Mission to deny entry or deport individuals takes a page directly from Israel\u2019s playbook: The Israeli newspaper Haaretz<\/em> reported in 2018<\/a> that Israeli immigration services have prevented Americans from entering Israel because of their profiles on Canary Mission. In a number of cases, Haaretz<\/em> found that being doxxed by Canary Mission was the basis for American students being detained for questioning, and was \u201cthe number one source of information for the decision to bar entry\u201d to the American student Lara Alqasem on the \u201csuspicion of boycott activity,\u201d according to<\/a> the Forward<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the Coalition for Mutual Liberation<\/a>, Cornell\u2019s organization coordinating protests and actions related to the genocide in Gaza, wrote in an email to The Progressive<\/em> that Betar \u201ctook credit<\/a> for Momodou Taal\u2019s deportation.\u201d The spokesperson also wrote that Betar believes<\/a> people will be targeted for their beliefs regardless of immigration status.\u00a0<\/p>\n The INA is only meant to apply to foreign nationals who pose \u201cpotentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States\u201d rather than enabling U.S. government agencies to detain and deport people for their expressed views and activities protected under the First Amendment. But given the Trump Administration\u2019s treatment of Taal and \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, or even of Khalil and Mahdawi\u2014permanent residents who are now detained without charge\u2014many noncitizens now fear the possibility of being targeted for deportation based on their political speech. As Sriram Parasurama, Taal\u2019s co-plaintiff said of his lawsuit against President Trump: \u201cHow much does the law really matter anymore?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In recent months, the Trump Administration has used the U.S. immigration apparatus in increasingly expansive ways in its crackdown against noncitizens. In the process, it has often transgressed legal bounds in open defiance of checks and balances on its executive power, and has made irreversible mistakes such as unlawful and unjustifiable deportations.\u00a0 While the vast […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":203377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[77960,16931,18527,20346,16930,77961,428,7519,5109,11417,33852,6763],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-203376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-aaron-fernando","tag-activism-dissent","tag-activists","tag-amendment","tag-dispatches","tag-doxxing","tag-ice","tag-means","tag-palestine","tag-protest","tag-rightwing","tag-student"],"yoast_head":"\n