A Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil had been detained by the authorities in the United States as he had organised demonstrations in support of Palestine during the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. The official reason being given is that he failed to mention his association with United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East.
Israel contends that some UNRWA employees were working for Hamas and has banned it. An immigration judge, after hearing conducted inside a Lousiana jail where immigrants were kept in a double-fenced razor wire thousands of miles away from where he was detained, has finally ruled the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil.
Ranjani Srinivasan, a doctoral student in urban planning also at Columbia University in New York, had her US student visa revoked because of having been part of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. As the State Department revoked her visa, her enrollment was withdrawn by the University, reducing her to a persona non grata. Her departure from the US has been described as ‘self-deportation.’ She has been accused of being involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organisation.
Had she not fled she would have been arrested by Department of Homeland Security of the US administration. A Homeland Security official has said that it is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the US. He also said that when anyone advocates for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and that person should not be in the US.
Badar Khan Suri was a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University when he was arrested because he is married to a Palestinian Mapheze Saleh, whose father used to work with Hamas in the past. I was part of a delegation along with Badar Khan Suri which went to Gaza in January 2011 on a humanitarian mission. For now Badar Khan’s deportation from the US has been stalled by a court.
A 31-year old Ph.D. scholar from India at a university in Connecticut with a five-year funding guarantee suddenly finds that his monthly stipend will be stopped from May because he wrote two pro-Palestine pieces in 2023. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confirmed that visas of over 300 foreign students have been similarly revoked.
According to him US gave visas to come and study and get a degree, not to become an activist that tears up university campuses. He admits that actions of these students, even though lawful, could harm American foreign policy interests.
Trump's threat to stall funds to universities
Donald Trump administration is also threatening to slash federal funds to about 60 universities, including Columbia, as these institutions have allowed anti-Semitism protests on campus. However, Harvard University has decided to stand up to the attempts by Trump administration to dictate terms to it rather than surrender as some of the other institutions are doing.
Trump administration defied the independence of judiciary when it deported 200 members of an alleged Venezuelan gang against an order forbidding it from doing so, by saying that a single judge in a single city did not have the authority to block its actions. Trump justified the deportation by saying that they were bad people. However, the judge has said that the Trump administration officials could face criminal contempt charges for violating the court order.
Homeland Security is also preparing to deport 5,32,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, who came to the US in 2022 under the humanitarian parole programme.
Considering the history of US, the scale of violence it has committed overwhelms any violence done by terrorist groups. US is responsible for the most number of people killed in a single incidence of attack, close to 1.5 lakhs in Hiroshima and additional 70,000 in Nagasaki, three days later in 1945 in World War II. People who got killed in these two bombings were not combatants, but ordinary civilians. US has not apologised for the biggest terrorist attack so far in the world.
In the Vietnam war about 38 lakhs people are estimated to have been killed, half of whom were civilians. US itself lost about 58,000 soldiers.
In Iraq about 5 lakhs children were starved to death because of sanctions imposed by US on Iraq. A total of 15 lakhs people, mostly ordinary civilians, were killed by the US in the aftermath of Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Over 50,000 civilians killed in Gaza
In the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas over 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed yet Israel’s hunger has not been satiated. It has infringed a truce deal and re-launched attack on Gaza since March so that it can have the remaining 59 hostages back who were among the 251 abducted by Hamas on 7 October, 2023.
So far 141 hostages including 114 Israelis have been released by Hamas in exchange for 1,995 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails as part of a peace deal brokered by Egypt, Qatar and US. Israel is holding thousands of Palestinians and bodies of 72 Palestinians in its jails, including that of a minor. The complicity of US in this war crime has been widely decried globally.
Considering that Native Indians are the original inhabitants of what is today US, majority of whom languish in reservations, the moral authority of the US in describing others as terrorists and deporting them is questionable.
US Presidents would appear to be the most bad people if the scale of violence and their misadventures were compared. As a country it’ll be held responsible for killing most number of people on earth in all wars taken together.
Free thinking and speech
I was detained at San Francisco airport in 2005 when some right wing Hindtuva organisations complained to the Homeland Security that one terrorist and Naxalite was coming from India. I was invited by mostly educational institutions in US and Canada for close to a month long trip to talk about the anti-Coca Cola movement in India. After a couple of hours of interrogation at San Francisco airport I was allowed to enter the US.
The final question a Homeland Security officer asked me in a secluded room was why did I make a statement that US is the biggest terrorist state in a press conference in Manila in 2002. I said that I opposed the nuclear weapons made by my country and therefore had a right to oppose the military policy of US which was a bigger player in the game of warfare. The officer said that I was entitled to my opinion and welcomed me to the US.
It may not be possible for me to enter US again after writing this article. But a bigger loss I’m saddened by is the academic freedom under threat on US campuses. Imagine if the Free Speech Movement had not taken place in the 1960s on University of California, Berkeley campus, where would the US be today globally as the defender of human rights and democracies?
US had held high standards of human rights, at least within the country, and university campuses have played important role in it. I credit the UC, Berkeley campus for making me an activist and I consider it part of my education. I learned more outside the four walls of classroom on the UC, Berkeley campus than inside.
Unfortunately the short sighted US leaders of the present administration are bent upon destroying the environment on campuses which encouraged free thinking and speech. That is a big loss for democracies around the world as so many international students get a chance to study in these institutions.
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