Muslim students react to Trump campus detentions

(RNS) — A journalism student studying for her master’s degree at Columbia University, a young woman who asked to be identified simply as Elena, expected to be pushed by her professors to vigorously report the news on campus and beyond. But after fellow Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 8, despite having a green card, her professors have warned Elena, and others like her who are in the country on student visas, not to report on Khalil’s case for safety reasons.

 “[Our professors] are trying really hard to allow us to do our own jobs, but this is new territory,” Elena told me. “The J-school told us this for our own safety, and those of us who are here on visas are scared.”

Acknowledging the bizarre limbo that journalism students like Elena are caught in, adjunct professor of media law Stuart Karle urged students to “exercise more caution while reporting.” 

Khalil, who has not been charged with any crime, is at the center of a firestorm over the Trump administration’s targeting of students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests on numerous college and university campuses last spring, accusing them of supporting terrorism or promoting antisemitism.

Badar Khan Suri. (Photo courtesy of Georgetown University)

At the heart of the debate is what constitutes free speech and the right to protest in this country, as well as the administration’s apparent stripping of due process in the detention of Khalil and, this week, Badar Khan Suri, a Muslim scholar at Georgetown University, who was detained on Wednesday (March 19).

Khan Suri has had his student visa revoked based on the same rarely used immigration law that gives the secretary of state power to deport noncitizens deemed a threat to American foreign policy.

The detentions have left students across the country feeling grim about not only their right to disagree with U.S. policy and support for Israel, but their ability to engage in academic discourse when, at the whim of the current administration, they could be arrested, deprived of degrees, deported.

Bilal Irfan, who graduated from the University of Michigan last year and is currently studying for a master’s in bioethics at Harvard University, has been researching the devastating collapse of Gaza’s health care system from non-stop targeted bombing and its impact on maternal health, orthopedics, otolaryngology, sleep health and more. “There’s a heightened sense of fear and a great insecurity that if speech is criminalized, then what else can be criminalized? And retroactively, who else can they go after?” Bilal said.

I gave Irfan, whom I’ve interviewed in the past, the option to disguise his identity in this column for his safety, as I’ve done with other students in my coverage of campus protests. But he told me there was no point. “I frequently get death threats 1742514971,” he said. “I even got an email from a cardiologist who called me a Neanderthal and suggested I go back to Afghanistan. At a certain point you get numb to it.” He added: “Witnessing what my colleagues are facing in Gaza, it feels foolish to be scared.”

Irfan is a U.S. citizen, but Elena is not, a distinction that amps up the stakes when it comes to what a student may report, protest, publish, post on social media, or even perhaps just say in class. But who is to say this targeting of anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian (or even pro-Palestinian-adjacent, as seems to be the case with Suri) speech — or speech in favor of anything that isn’t within the presidential administration’s purview — won’t move from visa and green card holders, to naturalized citizens, to born citizens?

At the University of Michigan, which also has been the site of numerous forms of student protests against Israel’s bombing campaigns, some faculty took it upon themselves last spring to survey 1,453 students, alumni, administrators, and parents and community members deemed to be part of the school’s “anti-Islamophobia and pro-Palestinian communities.” 

The survey, called the “U-M Community Assessment on anti-Palestinian Bias and Islamophobia,” was conducted to address Michigan administrators’ “repeated institutional failures in its crisis response and communications regarding campus-wide experiences, needs, and rights of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students, staff, and faculty,” its organizers said. They argued that the school’s responses had been one-sided, fostering “an environment where anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab sentiments are normalized while structural Islamophobia is allowed to proliferate unchecked.”

Basit Zafar. (Photo courtesy of University of Michigan)

Michigan economics professor Basit Zafar helped facilitate the survey questions. “We were in this climate where communication from the university was … talking about how the campus climate is not safe for a certain set of students, and there was no mention of how things were like for Arab, Muslim and, broadly speaking, pro-Palestinian communities,” he told me this week.

But instead of going by anecdotes that foregrounded the loudest and most influential voices, Zafar wanted data. The survey showed that 90% of respondents felt that institutional communications and responses to the terrible events of Oct. 7, 2023, and ensuing horrific bombing of Gaza were slanted and dehumanizing. Nearly as many deemed the school’s efforts to combat Islamophobia inadequate, while “conversely, only a quarter of respondents perceive the university’s efforts to address antisemitism negatively.”

After the report was released, Zafar said university administrators had one meeting with the stakeholders. “These are all smart people. It’s not that they saw the report and thought, ‘This is how these people feel? These are things that are happening?’ Everyone on college campuses knows what is going on.” It was something to be acknowledged, he said.

What has happened since then? Nothing, Zafar said. A year later, the survey is being conducted again. Students are even more scared and exhausted now. Across the country, “students have been suspended, their degrees have been withdrawn. There has been incremental regress, and people have been paying the price for some time, only that the price is much higher now. There’s even more suppression, it’s even more blatant now. It’s not hidden,” Zafar said.

And what people aren’t realizing is that it’s not only Arab and Muslim students who are suffering, Zafar said. “Eleven students at the University of Michigan have been criminally charged. Four of them are Jewish students. So when the Trump administration tries to paint [protesters] as brown people or foreign-funded [agitators who support terrorism or are antisemitic], that’s not the case.”

At nightly Ramadan prayers and iftar events in homes and across American college campuses as Ramadan enters its final days, the worry is palpable.

(Dilshad D. Ali is a freelance journalist. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)