Visa and deportation controversies in the second Trump administration

The United States has long used its immigration policy as a tool for political control, particularly during the First and Second Red Scare. During the Palmer Raids, hundreds of left-wing immigrants were deported due to their political activities. Deportation was used to circumvent their constitutional rights when they could not be charged with a crime in the domestic legal system. Fear of immigrant radicalism led to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which expanded the government's powers to investigate and deport immigrants for their political beliefs. In August 2015, during his first presidential campaign, Trump proposed mass deportation of illegal immigrants. He proposed a "Deportation Force" to carry out this plan, modeled after the 1950s-era "Operation Wetback" program during the Dwight Eisenhower administration that ended after a congressional investigation. He returned to this idea during his third presidential campaign, and blurred the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, promising to deport both. To achieve the goal of deporting millions per year, Trump stated his intention to expand deportations without due process, which would be accomplished by the expedited removal authorities of 8 U.S. Code § 1225; invoking the Alien Enemies Act within the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798; and invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to allow the military to apprehend migrants and thus bypass the Posse Comitatus Act. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids would expand to include workplace raids and sweeps in public places. Stephen Miller said that illegal immigrants would be taken to "large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas", to be held in internment camps before deportation. In September 2024, Trump told a rally audience that the deportation effort "will be a bloody story". == Use of social media to identify potential deportees ==

The Trump administration is reportedly using an artificial intelligence "catch and revoke" program to scrape social media posts and identify students who allegedly support Hamas. A number of detained and deported activists have been targeted by doxing campaigns before their arrest. On March 25, 2025, the state department issued a directive stating that visa applicants would be ineligible if their social media activity indicated that they were "advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading others to endorse or espouse terrorist activities or support a designated foreign terrorist organization", and that similar activity could result in the revocation of existing visas. On April 9, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would screen social media accounts for anything it deems "antisemitic". == Targeting of higher education ==

The administration has focused its catch and revoke program on foreign students who have engaged in pro-Palestinian speech, characterizing them as pro-Hamas. The government plans to use its Student and Exchange Visitor Program to review institutions of higher education that have had significant pro-Palestinian protests, suggesting that it may decertify those institutions, making them ineligible to enroll student visa holders. Revocation of student visas also threatens a revenue stream for colleges and universities, with one senior Department of Justice official saying, "That's one of their biggest cash cows, foreign students." On April 8, 2025, in response to the large number of student visa revocations, Inside Higher Ed began tracking the number of known visa revocations for students and recent alumni and mapping the colleges and universities reporting visa revocations. As of April 9, the tracker showed 419 students and recent alumni from over 80 institutions of higher education across the U.S. In many cases, immigration authorities had not notified the institutions of the reasons for the visa revocations. On May 28, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the US would "aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students" and "revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong." China's ministry of foreign affairs formally objected to Rubio's announcement. American Association of University Professors v. Rubio On March 25, 2025, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued the Trump administration, arguing that it was promoting an "ideological-deportation policy" that harmed not only those the administration was attempting to deport but also university communities more generally, and that pursuing students and faculty on the basis of their views is unconstitutional. The plaintiffs, represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, filed their suit in the District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and asserted that the policy violated the First and Fifth Amendments. The case, American Association of University Professors v. Rubio, was assigned to Judge William G. Young. The Trump administration moved that the case be dismissed for lack of standing, and also claimed that there was no ideological-deportation policy and that the district court had no jurisdiction over immigration enforcement. On April 30, 2025, Young dismissed the Fifth Amendment challenge but ruled that the First Amendment challenge could proceed, saying, "It is well established that noncitizens have at least some First Amendment rights, and political speech is 'at the core of what the First Amendment is designed to protect.'" On July 9, 2025, unsealed deposition transcripts by Young revealed that the Trump administration relied heavily on the website Canary Mission to identify pro-Palestinian activists for deportation, and that Trump aide Stephen Miller was deeply involved in the effort. In September 2025, Young ruled for the plaintiffs, holding that the government had violated the First Amendment, and concluding: The decision notably contained a lengthy rebuke of President Trump, saying he violated his oath of office to the Constitution and engaged in "a full-throated assault on the First Amendment". January 2026 In January 2026, Young unsealed internal documents that, according to The New York Times, "indicate that in nearly all instances, the arrests of the students were recommended based on their involvement in campus protests and public writings, activities that the Trump administration routinely equated to antisemitic hate speech and support for terrorist organizations." The administration wrote of multiple students, "D.H.S. has not identified any alternative grounds for removability". The administration wrote that there was no evidence Öztürk had "engaged in any antisemitic activity” or made “any public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization or antisemitism generally." An official testified in 2025 that the administration reviewed lists complied by Canary Mission and Betar US. In January 2026, Young declared the policy unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act. Young also gave AAUP or MESA members challenging adverse immigration status changes a presumption that the change was retribution from their protected speech. He wrote, "Relief is limited pursuant to CASA" and "Plaintiffs [...] have shown by clear and convincing evidence that Secretaries Noem and Rubio have intentionally and in concert implemented Executive Orders in 14161 and 14188 a viewpoint-discriminatory way to chill protected speech" that "violated the First Amendment." "Upon the [...] filing a complaint" by an AAUP or MESA member, "removal from the United States is automatically stayed during the pendency of the Sanction Action. The United States bears the burden affirmatively to ascertain and determine whether such person has filed a Sanction Action in the United States District Courts [...] The reason for this burden-shift is to prevent the apparent present practice of whisking non-citizens out of the district to avoid jurisdiction. The burden is minimal: all the United States need do is check the Sanction Plaintiff's name on PACER [...] This stay is akin to those temporary stays presently in effect in many district courts. See, e.g., United States v. Russell". Young also appended "two hypotheticals" that "are not of record in this case". The first is a noncitizen from Venezuela who is a member of the AAUP or MESA and whose temporary protected status is revoked. "the government's got to prove it [i.e. that the Presidential action in no way constituted retribution]. And that's part of the sanction." The second hypothetical is a noncitizen member of the AAUP or MESA who says something about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. "Well again, the government's going to have to prove that their reason was not in fact in retribution ... and in addition, my second, that it's an appropriate exercise of governmental power." == Detention of activists ==

Yunseo Chung Chung is a Columbia University student who came to the U.S. from South Korea at age 7 and is a lawful permanent resident with a green card. On March 5, she was among a group of protesters arrested during a sit-in at Barnard College to express solidarity with students protesting the Gaza war who had been expelled. Charges against Chung were dropped. The government characterized the protest as "pro-Hamas", a claim Chung's lawyer rejected, saying, "The idea that a valedictorian just shows some humanity to fellow people is somehow a threat to U.S. foreign policy, and it really makes you wonder what's going on with our foreign policy." On March 10, federal law enforcement told Chung's lawyer that Chung's permanent resident status was being revoked. Agents searched for Chung at her dorm and her parents' home, though she was not there. Federal agents had searched for Chung at various Columbia residences pursuant to a federal criminal warrant for harboring out-of-status noncitizens. Chung's lawyer filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the case was assigned to judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, who ruled that Chung could not be detained for the time being. The stay on Chung's detention was extended in May Aditya Wahyu Harsono On March 27, 2025, Aditya Wahyu Harsono, an Indonesian citizen and hospital supply chain manager, had his visa revoked without notice and was arrested by ICE at his workplace and detained in the basement of a hospital in Marshall, Minnesota, before being transferred to Kandiyohi County Jail. Harsono's attorney said that ICE coerced hospital management into staging a meeting so that he could be apprehended. Harsono was fired from his job after his arrest. When he attempted to tell ICE agents that he had legal status during his arrest, he was told that the system that could verify this was "down" for the day. Harsono had participated in the Daunte Wright protests in 2021 and was arrested for violating a curfew order. He also frequently posted in support of Gaza on social media and ran a small nonprofit to raise money for aid to Gaza. On May 14, after Harsono had been detained for 49 days, a district court judge ordered his release. The judge found that his arrest and detention were likely in retaliation for his political activities. Mahmoud Khalil Leqaa Kordia On March 14, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had arrested another Columbia student, Leqaa Kordia, for overstaying her student visa. Kordia is a Palestinian from the West Bank who was residing in New Jersey and had been arrested in 2024 for her involvement in a protest for Gaza. Her mother lived in Gaza, and Kordia was separated from her for 20 years. 200 of her extended family members living in Gaza had been killed since the start of the Gaza war. ICE targeted Kordia after the NYPD shared information that it had gathered on her with ICE. This information was used as evidence in her deportation case. This collaboration with ICE raised questions and concerns about New York City's adherence to sanctuary laws intended to prevent local police from assisting in federal immigration enforcement efforts. In April, a judge granted her bond, but the government invoked a rarely used provision to prevent her release while it appealed the decision. In its appeal, DHS accused Kordia of supporting Hamas. She refuted these claims in court. As of May 28, Kordia was being held at the Prairie Land Detention Center in Texas. Kordia said she was held in an overcrowded 37-person capacity cell with 86 other people for several weeks and forced to sleep on concrete. She said the bathroom was open with limited privacy. In February 2026, Kordia was hospitalized after suffering a seizure in detention. In March, after more than a year in detention, she was released on a $100,000 bond. She still faces deportation proceedings. Mohsen Mahdawi On April 14, 2025, Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian Columbia University student and 10-year U.S. resident who was seeking U.S. citizenship, was arrested at the ICE office in Colchester, Vermont, after what he had been told would be a naturalization interview. While at Columbia, Mahdawi was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests. He had been targeted by pro-Israel groups and individuals online since 2024, including Canary Mission and Betar. Mahdawi went into hiding after Khalil's detention and asked Columbia administrators to help him find a safe place to live, which they refused to do. He is facing a deportation order to the West Bank, which he called "a death sentence" due to the ongoing and escalating Israeli incursions into the territory which have affected several members of his family. On April 14, 2025, Mahdawi's legal team filed a habeas corpus petition against Donald Trump and his administration, describing his detention as unlawful. His lawyers requested a temporary restraining order to prevent him from being transferred out of Vermont by federal authorities. Vermont federal judge William K. Sessions III granted the request and ordered that Mahdawi remain in Vermont. The case, in the District Court for the District of Vermont, was reassigned to Judge Geoffrey Crawford, and on April 30, Crawford granted Mahdawi's request to be released on bail, and said the case raised a "substantial claim that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees." The Trump administration appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, asking the court for an emergency stay of Crawford's ruling and challenging the determination that Crawford had authority to make such a ruling. The case was assigned to judges Susan Carney, Alison Nathan, and Barrington Parker, and on May 9, they denied the appeal. Rümeysa Öztürk Salah Sarsour On March 30, 2026, ten ICE agents pulled Salah Sarsour over and detained him after following him from his Milwaukee, Wisconsin home. Sarsour is a businessman and the president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, the state's largest mosque. He is involved with pro-Palestinian advocacy organizations and has spoken in support of Palestinian causes. His wife, children, and grandchildren are US citizens. ICE transferred him to the Clay County, Indiana jail. He has no criminal record in the US; he is charged with being a threat to US foreign policy based on two arrests in Israel, one of which occurred when he was a teenager before his approval for legal permanent resident status. Local elected officials and clergy members called for his immediate release. Ranjani Srinivasan Srinivasan, an Indian national and Fulbright scholar at Columbia, chose to self-deport after having her visa revoked. She had been detained during the Hamilton Hall protests, but all charges were dismissed. Her attorney said she had not participated in the protests. Srinivasan was also accused without evidence of being a supporter of Hamas. Ahwar Sultan In early 2025, 12 Ohio State University students' visas were revoked, including that of Ahwar Sultan, an Indian citizen and OSU graduate student who had been arrested in 2024 in connection with the OSU Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Sultan later sued the Trump administration, challenging the revocation of his visa. After the event ended, police detained Sultan and Musa. Sultan was warned about, but did not receive, a court summons. Musa was issued a summons for criminal trespass, despite attempts by university faculty to talk down OSU police. Badar Khan Suri Khan Suri, a Georgetown University researcher from India with a student visa, was detained by federal immigration authorities on March 17, 2025. The government revoked his visa but did not charge him with a crime. He has no criminal record. Khan Suri's lawyer argued in his petition to the court that Khan Suri was targeted because of his U.S. citizen wife's Palestinian heritage and because the government suspects that the couple opposes U.S. foreign policy. Khan Suri was held in Texas, where an immigration court hearing was scheduled for May 6. The Georgetown chapter of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine organized a rally calling for his release. In an open letter printed in the university's newspaper, The Hoya, a group of over 130 Jewish students, faculty, staff and alumni, condemned his arrest and detention, writing, "President Trump is weaponizing Jewish identity, faith and fears of antisemitism as a smokescreen for his authoritarian agenda". Khan Suri petitioned a district court in Virginia to return him to that state, and on May 14, Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ordered Khan Suri's release from ICE detention. Upon his release, Khan Suri decried the conditions of his detention, saying he was treated like a "subhuman" and as a high-security prisoner. His habeas petition said he was denied halal food, given only two hours of recreation time, and placed in a "TV room" without a bed or quiet conditions for sleeping. Momodou Taal Taal is a Cornell University graduate student with dual United Kingdom and Gambian citizenship. On March 22, 2025, he was told to surrender himself at the ICE office in Syracuse, New York. Taal's lawyers, fearing the Trump administration would target Taal, preemptively filed a lawsuit asking a New York federal judge to strike down Executive Orders 14188 and 14161 targeting student protestors. Taal's lawyers said he had been surveilled by law enforcement. Taal faced suspension for allegedly attending a protest at Statler Hotel to shut down a career fair where representatives from Boeing and L3Harris were recruiting. Instead of a suspension, which could have affected his visa status, university officials chose to ban him from campus. In February 2024, during a protest against the Cornell Student Assembly's rejection of a divestment resolution, Taal led chants outside Cornell's Day Hall and told the crowd, "We are in solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine from the river to the sea". Taal elaborated on his views in an interview, saying he supported no particular Palestinian militant faction but rather "the Palestinian right to resist to colonialism, as guaranteed by international law and the principle of self-determination". On March 28, 2025, U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Coombe ruled against Taal, saying that his lawyers had neither established that she had jurisdiction to stop the deportation nor shown that there was any clear threat to his constitutional rights that the lawsuit would address. On March 31, 2025, Taal announced that he had voluntarily left the United States citing fears for his personal safety. Jeanette Vizguerra Vizguerra, an activist for immigrant rights who came to the United States from Mexico in 1993, had obtained multiple stays of deportation under past administrations and gained a national profile in 2017 when she sought refuge from ICE in a Denver church. ICE detained her on March 17, 2025. Her apprehension by ICE was denounced by local politicians and organizations including Jared Polis and Mike Johnston as a political persecution and urged ICE to focus on violent offenders, and U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y. Wang blocked her deportation. Vizguerra has called herself as a political prisoner, and she and her lawyers are contesting her deportation on the grounds that it is motivated by her protected political activities, not her immigration status. Vizguerra said that the ICE agent who arrested her had her social media pulled up on his phone. The Trump administration argued that, as a noncitizen, Vizguerra had no legal basis to argue that her detention was politically motivated. Vizguerra has also blamed the financial interests of private prison companies such as GEO Group and CCI Corporation for the Trump administration's efforts to fill detention beds. In December 2025, Vizguerra was released after 9 months and 7 days in detention. Judge Wang ruled her prolonged detention unconstitutional. In her court case, the government argued that Vizguerra should have to wear an ankle bracelet, but Wang denied this request. Vizguerra is required to check in with ICE in January, and must give 48 hours notice before crossing state lines. == Farmworkers and union organizers ==

Lynn-Ette & Sons farmworkers On May 2, 2025, ICE agents pulled over a bus carrying immigrant workers for Lynn-Ette & Sons who had been in a multi-year battle with their employer over unionization. The employees were from Mexico and Guatemala and were employed as year-round workers. Sources in contact with the workers' families said that the raid "did not appear to be a broad sweep but rather a targeted enforcement aimed at specific people" and that the agents had a list of workers they expected to find on the bus. ICE did not identify themselves during the raid, but later confirmed they had been responsible for the arrests. As of May 5, five of the workers' locations were known while the other nine were unaccounted for. Lynn-Ette & Sons denied any prior knowledge or responsibility for the raid. Vermont migrant organizers In June 2025, José Ignacio "Nacho" De La Cruz and his stepdaughter Heidi Perez, both members of the farmworker-led immigrant rights group Migrant Justice, were violently arrested in Vermont by Border Patrol agents who smashed their car window and detained them. According to a spokesperson for Migrant Justice, De La Cruz called a hotline for migrant workers and remained on the phone with them while "calmly exercising his right to remain silent, requesting that border patrol explain the cause of the traffic stop." De La Cruz and Perez are in custody at Richford immigration station pending removal proceedings. De La Cruz was a member of Migrant Justice's steering committee and a worker-owner in a Vermont construction cooperative. He helped pass legislation protecting the rights of farm workers and dairy workers, such as the Vermont Housing Access for Immigrant Families bill. Perez had advocated for the extension of need-based financial aid and in-state tuition to all state residents. Supporters said the pair were taking groceries to migrant workers afraid to leave their homes when CBP apprehended them. CBP later accused De La Cruz of transporting other migrants within the United States, but did not charge him with a crime. Migrant Justice spokesperson Will Lambek said that CBP's allegations "do not change the essential fact that Nacho and Heidi were detained without cause while delivering food to farmworkers" and that they were "wholly unrelated to the actual circumstances of their violent detainment." The pair's detention provoked rallies in support of their freedom at the Richford border station, the Vermont Statehouse, and a federal court in Burlington. On March 27, 2025, ICE agents stopped his car while he was driving his wife to work, broke his window, and dragged him out of the car. Zeferino was taken to an ICE facility in Ferndale and later to ICE's Northwest Processing Center in Tacoma. His lawyers and community members said he was targeted for his activism. Local leaders including Rick Larsen and Bellingham mayor Kim Lund denounced his detention. Zeferino was detained for months in a Geo Group detention facility and said he was given only six opportunities to go outside during his confinement. He also said he organized a hunger strike in response to being served unsafe chicken. In July 2025, he chose to voluntarily leave the United States for Mexico, citing the difficulties of fighting an immigration case in the US. == Other speech-related controversies ==

Rasha Alawieh Rasha Alawieh was born in 1990. She is a Lebanese transplant nephrologist who had worked as an assistant professor at Brown University. Alawieh obtained her medical degree from the American University of Beirut in 2015. She completed her residency at the American University of Beirut Medical Center in 2018. That year, she obtained a J-1 visa She completed the Yale Waterbury Internal Medicine Program in June 2024, the same month the U.S. government approved her petition for an H-1B visa, sponsored by Brown Medicine. This visa was issued at the Lebanese consulate on March 11, 2025, and was valid through mid-2027. One of them was Nhlamulo Baloyi, a music executive whose controversial comments about white South Africans led the South African Human Rights Commission to seek an apology after they attracted Elon Musk's attention in February. Baloyi wrote that Kirk "won't be remembered as a hero" and "was used to astroturf a movement of white nationalist trailer trash!" Brazilian comedian Tiago Santineli said he did not regret making an aggressive joke on X that led to his visa's revocation. Far-right political influencer Laura Loomer took credit for Hamdi's arrest. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Hamdi's release, calling his arrest "a blatant affront to free speech." Ayman Soliman In July 2025, ICE detained Ohio hospital chaplain and Egyptian political asylee Ayman Soliman at a regular immigration check-in. Soliman sought asylum in the U.S. after working as a freelance journalist in Egypt during the Arab Spring. He was tortured under the Mubarak regime, and abducted again after the 2013 military coup against Mohammed Morsi. Soliman's lawyers believed his detention in the U.S. was related to his work with an Egyptian charitable organization that DHS alleged was associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Two academics cited in the government case said their work was misrepresented to justify detaining Soliman. Soliman called his experience in detention "traumatizing and dehumanizing" and said he was denied commissary, contact with his lawyer, and visitation while in isolation for five days. Soliman was released in September and is expected to have his visa status restored. Immigration officials likely concluded that they did not have a case to revoke his visa. == Reactions ==

In April 2025, waves of visa revocations and SEVIS terminations sparked widespread alarm and protest from student groups across U.S. university campuses. On April 10, about 150 students and affiliates from UC San Diego marched from the UC San Diego campus in La Jolla to the San Diego Federal Courthouse to demand protections for international students, led by the Students' Civil Liberties Union. On April 12, students and faculty with the UCLA Faculty Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the CSU Students for Quality Education organized a rally of over 150 attendees in Downtown Los Angeles in opposition to the mass termination of SEVIS in higher education institutions. On April 17, it was reported that at least 901 international students at 128 U.S. colleges and universities had sued the Trump administration for denial of due process in relation to these revocations. On April 22, over 200 higher educational institutions signed a letter pledging to resist Trump's attacks on universities, including the deportation of students. The leaders of several prominent universities, including Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University signed the letter. Columbia University was initially absent from the list, but signed after it went public. In August 2025, the Stanford Daily sued the Trump administration over its deportation policy, saying that student journalists felt intimidated by the possibility of facing deportation "for being associated with speaking on political topics, even in a journalistic capacity." The lawsuit requested a preliminary injunction to prevent the administration from deporting students for pro-Palestinian speech and activities. == See also ==