United States President Donald Trump announced on January 20 that he would take out the “worst of the worst” immigrants.
Following this promise, he beefed up the US-Mexican border with army units. Invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, he also began arbitrarily arresting and deporting Venezuelan, El Salvadoran and other immigrants — some with refugee status.
They were shackled like animals and paraded in front of the media as violent criminals, even though most were probably not.
Some deportees, including Venezuelans, have been sent to El Salvador’s notorious prisons where they are physically mistreated.
These cases are all in court — but too late for those already removed. Courts have issued temporary restraining orders, but have not ruled against Trump’s policy. The White House has called for judges who oppose Trump’s executive orders on immigration to be removed.
The Supreme Court has yet to rule on these cases.
Meanwhile, two high profile cases, involving permanent residents Yunseo Chung and Mahmoud Khalil, have led to protests.
Khalil is a Columbia University postgraduate and Chung is an undergraduate student at Barnard College, Columbia’s sister school. Both have been targeted for their opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank.
Chung was born in South Korea and Khalil — who is Palestinian — was born in Syria. Chung moved to the US from South Korea when she was seven.
On paper, permanent residents have the same rights as citizens — except the right to vote. However, the White House claims this is not the case and their status can be revoked.
Yunseo Chung
Chung participated in the student protest encampment at Columbia. She attended a sit-in protest on March 5 against Barnard’s expulsions of students involved in pro-Palestine activism, where she was charged with “obstruction of governmental administration” by police. A few days later, immigration officers came knocking on her parents’ door with a warrant for her arrest. Her “Green Card” was also revoked.
Chung went into hiding.
A federal judge ordered a halt, on March 25, on efforts to arrest and deport Chung. At the time of writing, it is not clear whether the administration will abide by the order or appeal it.
In her ruling, Judge Naomi Buchwald said that “nothing in the record” indicated that Chung posed a danger to the community, was a “foreign-policy risk” or had communicated with “terrorist” organisations.
After his arrest, Khalil was sent to Louisiana, where he remains in immigration detention, while his lawyers fight his deportation.
“No trips to Louisiana here,” Judge Buchwald said, barring Chung’s transfer away from the Southern District of New York.
Her lawyer said that the court had done the “just and fair thing,” and that the government was trying to silence pro-Palestinian activism.
“She’s a college junior doing what generations of college students before have done, which is speak up and protest,” her lawyer said.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would “investigate individuals engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organisation”, but did not say how Chung had supported Hamas.
Hit list
So far, the government has put more than a dozen international student visa holders, academics and scientists on its hit list.
As reported by The Wire, published by Jewish Voice for Peace: “On March 17, ICE detained Dr Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow in peace and conflict studies at Georgetown University, before transferring him to a detention facility in Texas.
“[On March 18] DHS issued a deportation order against Cornell University PhD student Momodou Taal, a day before he was set to appear in court for a lawsuit he filed against the US government to stop the deportation of student activists.”
CNN reported that Turkish-born Rumeysa Ozturk, a postgraduate international student at Tufts University in Boston, was arrested on the street by six plain-clothed federal immigration agents and driven away in an SUV on March 25. Ozturk was then flown across the country to the South Louisiana ICE processing centre.
Ozturk co-authored a 2024 Op Ed in the school newspaper, Tufts Daily, calling on the university administration to implement a decision of Tuft’s Community Union Senate to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel”.
Following Ozturk’s arrest, more than 1000 students and workers rallied demanding her release.
Mahmoud Khalil
Khalil was arrested at his home in front of his eight-month pregnant wife, Noor Abdulla, a US-born Muslim, political activist and dentist.
His arrest came just a day after the Trump administration cancelled US$400 million in federal grants to Columbia, saying the university administration had failed to stop antisemitism on its campus.
Khalil told Reuters hours before his arrest that the university had repeatedly called in police to arrest protesters and had disciplined many pro-Palestinian students and staff, suspending some.
“They basically silenced anyone supporting Palestine on campus and this was not enough. Clearly Trump is using the protesters as a scapegoat for his wider agenda fighting and attacking higher education and the Ivy League education system.”
Khalil dictated a letter from immigration detention on March 18, stating “I am a political prisoner”.
Historical reminder
Khalil’s case is a reminder of the long history of deportations and border control as a strategy to punish political radicals, socialists and Black activists fighting for equality.
In the 1920s, Pan Africanist leader Marcus Garvey was harassed and eventually deported from the US to Jamaica in 1923.
This occurred during the “Red Scare” of 1919–20, in the years following the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Hundreds of people were arrested and detained in what became known as the Palmer Raids, and more than 550 were ultimately deported.
The threat of deportation and control of the border also played a key role in the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.
Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1952, which allowed the state department to deny passports to US citizens who were members of the Communist Party or who refused to sign declarations testifying that they were not and had never been communists.
It authorised the federal government to deport “aliens” whom the secretary of state believed might have “seriously adverse foreign policy consequences” for the country, and to bar from naturalisation and deport immigrants who advocated “world communism” or belonged to organisations that did.
This is the law that the Trump regime is now drawing on in its case against Khalil.
What next?
Many other international students and permanent residents will be targeted.
The state department says it has already revoked the visas of more than 300 international students.
The attacks on immigrant workers have led many to fear going to work. And they have reason. As reported in Labor Notes on March 27, farm-worker organiser Alfredo ‘Lelo’ Juarez Zeferino was detained by ICE agents “in what many believe to be retaliation for his organising”.
“Juarez was pulled over while driving his wife to work. ICE agents shattered Juarez’s window and dragged him out of the vehicle for exercising his right to remain silent, his brother said.
“Juarez helped form Familias Unidas por la Justicia [Families United for Justice], an independent farm-worker union that emerged out of a 2013 work stoppage by berry workers in Washington state.”
Juarez is being held in immigration detention in Tacoma, Washington, where hundreds of people protested his detention on March 27.
In response to the labour shortages that immigrant deportations will result in, some Republican governors are pushing to change child labour laws to allow children to work in agriculture and meatpacking.
In Florida, for example, new legislation is being progressed that will allow employers to hire children as young as 14 to work overnight and before and after school. This has already happened in Arkansas, where injuries have escalated as labour protections barely exist.
Resistance
The broadside political attack on undocumented immigrants, permanent residents and international students has led to growing protests.
Civil liberty groups have filed legal action. But relying on the courts won’t stop the government’s attacks.
Street protests took place at Columbia and other colleges before Trump took office, but the vicious crackdown has had an impact.
The government is invoking accusations of “terrorism” and “antisemitism” in response to the pro-Palestine protests. However, in the face of the gas lighting, arrests and fear mongering, protests continue to grow. There is an increasing understanding that mass actions, including mass civil disobedience, are necessary.
Without a popular movement, the ruling class will allow the authoritarian president to expand his powers and take away basic democratic rights.