Mideast War blowback

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The protests at Columbia University last spring were dogged: Students galvanized by the war in Gaza staged demonstrations for weeks on end, erected tent cities on campus lawns and annexed a university building.

But nearly a year later, as the university again finds itself at the center of unprecedented controversy, the student revolt that captivated the world appears to be largely absent.

Students say that amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on international student protesters, the harsh punishment of some of last year’s participants and the university's new rules restricting campus demonstrations, speaking out simply isn’t worth the risk.

A freshman Columbia engineering student said he felt “proud” last year as he watched the protests from his home in Texas. But the student, who asked NBC News not to publish his name because of the sensitivity around the war in Gaza, said that while he’d like to join protests this year, he won’t.

“It’s too dangerous, frankly,” the 18-year-old student said. “Not every family of the people that will go out to protest have the financial capabilities to be able to afford a lawyer in the event that you’re pressed charges.”

Sebastian Javadpoor, a senior who leads the university’s student-led Democratic club, agreed. Students are avoiding protests by choice, he said: “You have students who are not participating in protests because they’re terrified.”

The crackdown goes far beyond Columbia. In recent days, immigration authorities have arrested students at Georgetown University, Tufts University and the University of Alabama. NBC News obtained a video of authorities detaining Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student, on Tuesday. It shows several Department of Homeland Security officers in plainclothes surrounding Ozturk, a Turkish national, grabbing her hands and taking her away as she screamed out in confusion.

Last Friday, threatened by the Trump administration with the loss of $400 million in federal research grants for “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” the university acquiesced to sweeping changes.

Columbia agreed to ban masks at protests in most cases, enlist 36 new campus security officers — who, unlike previous security officers, will have the ability to arrest students — and hire a senior vice provost to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African studies, according to a document the university said it shared with the federal government and posted on its website Friday.

But students and faculty members protested the arrests and the changes in policy only a handful of times in recent weeks.

Unlike the sprawling demonstrations last year, a student protest on March 14 was confined to a small, tight space outside the university gates. It was surrounded by police barricades and lasted just a few hours.

On Monday, a few dozen faculty members held a vigil for democracy, which also took place off campus. A student activist group also encouraged students to sit out of classes and wear masks in defiance of the partial ban. Yet the response was muted, students said.

Most of the dozens of students NBC News approached in recent weeks declined to speak on the record. Many said they feared speaking out would get them in trouble with the university. (Earlier this month, the university announced that it suspended or expelled some of the students who participated in the takeover of Hamilton Hall last year.)

Others said they feared that voicing their opinions would draw the ire of federal authorities. And some said they were simply fatigued by the controversies engulfing the university.

Allie Wong, a Ph.D. student who was arrested while protesting on campus in April, said the Trump administration’s actions and the university’s response have had a “tremendous chilling effect” on a campus known for challenging authority.

n 1968, Columbia students similarly took over Hamilton Hall to protest the U.S. government’s involvement in the Vietnam War, prompting more than 700 arrests. Not including last year, students blockaded or occupied the university academic building again at least four more times since then, according to the university’s website.

“There’s this pride that this is the epicenter of constructive dialogue and social change,” Wong said.

But things are different now, she said. “It’s not uncommon that people get arrested during protests,” she said. “It is uncommon that in the aftermath of protests, a year later, that the president of the United States is going through and actively targeting individuals to make a spectacle out of it.”

A Justice Department spokesperson said the department “makes no apologies for its efforts to defend President Trump’s agenda in court and protect Jewish Americans from vile antisemitism.”

Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said the pressure put on Columbia by the federal government is an attempt to bring universities “to heel” and poses grave First Amendment concerns for other schools.

“The goal is not just to chill that kind of speech at Columbia, but to chill it everywhere,” Wizner said, “and to communicate to every university, public and private, that if you don’t engage in these kinds of crackdowns on your own, we’re going to impose them with the threat of crippling funding cuts.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in interviews this week that there was no timetable to restore the university’s funding but that Columbia was “on the right track.”

Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, said he was “disappointed” that Columbia didn’t push back against the administration’s demands. The AAUP, which defends the rights of faculty, sued several federal agencies Monday, arguing that the actions violated the professors’ right to free speech.

If the university won’t “stand up and fight back” against government incursions, he said, “then it’s likely we won’t have the kind of higher education which has been the engine of this country’s economy and democracy for the last 100 years.”

Michael Thaddeus, a professor of mathematics at Columbia who joined Monday's protest, said the mood among the faculty is “profound alarm and dismay.”

Still, to an outsider, life on campus might appear status quo, he said.

“Classes are continuing, athletic competition is continuing, the libraries are open. I was watching a campus tour go by outside,” said Thaddeus. “It’s just a weird combination of normal and very abnormal.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday the State Department has revoked 300 or more student visas, as the White House increasingly targets foreign-born students whose main transgression seems to be activism.

Rubio warned that the administration was looking out for “these lunatics.” Around the country, scholars have been picked up, in some cases by masked immigration agents, and held in detention centers, sometimes a thousand miles from their homes with little warning and often with few details about why they were being detained.

“It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio said at a news conference in Guyana, where he was meeting with leaders.

Many of those rounded up by Trump officials attended or were part of the pro-Palestinian movement that swept college campuses last year, and while the administration hasn’t said publicly why these students are being singled out over others, at least one sought by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement appeared on lists made by far-right pro-Israel groups as targets for deportation.

And Trump allies, many in government again, telegraphed for months before he took office that they’d seek to deport students who openly advocated for Hamas or other U.S.-designated terrorist groups or after they participated in an unauthorized campus protest and were suspended, expelled or jailed.

The detentions are a signal of a broader effort by President Donald Trump to clamp down on the actions of legal permanent residents, student visa holders and others who live and work legally in the United States, one that threatens to undermine a fundamental American right to free speech and to assemble, experts and advocates said.

“There’s something uniquely disturbing about sending a message to the best and the brightest around the world, who traditionally have flocked to U.S. universities because of their openness, because of their freedom, because of their intellectual vigor, and now say, ‘We don’t want you here,’” said Ben Wizner, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, has repeatedly said the administration’s deportation policy is “worst first,” meaning it is prioritizing removing people with criminal records or people suspected of being national security threats. According to the Department of Homeland Security data, there are at least 400,000 noncitizens convicted of crimes in the United States. The administration has sent more than 200 Venezuelans to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, alleging that the migrants have gang ties, claims that families and attorneys of some of those deported have strongly denied.

Targeting students is a shift from their stated goal of going after criminals, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst with the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

Bush-Joseph said that for noncitizens, “the government has so much discretion when it comes to granting or taking away immigration benefits, and that can be done based on a number of reasons.”

The State Department has used as justification for some student deportation proceedings an immigration provision that dates to the Cold War and gives Rubio the authority to deport noncitizens if their activities pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” And U.S. officials can revoke a student visa if they deem the student a threat.

Some scholars have already been deported.

Another was Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national who was in the United States with a valid student visa and pulled off the street.

Ozturk co-authored an opinion essay in the Tufts student newspaper last year criticizing the university for how it responded to student demands, calling for the school to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” The essay, which was authored by four students and endorsed by 32 others, does not mention Hamas.

In response to questions about Ozturk’s arrest, Rubio questioned why “any country in the world” would allow people to come into their countries and disrupt college campuses.

“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to be a social activist that comes in and tears up our university campuses,” he said.

“If you invite me into your home because I say, ‘Oh, I want to go to your house for dinner,’ and I come into your house and I start putting mud on your couch and spray-painting your kitchen, I bet you you’re going to kick me out,” Rubio said.

Ozturk is being held at a Louisiana detention facility. It’s not clear where Doroudi has been sent, and little is known about his case.

The National Iranian American Council demanded information on Doroudi’s whereabouts and whether he’d been charged with a crime and called for those “unjustly detained” to be released.

“Doroudi’s arrest comes on the heels of the baseless arrest of students and a green card holder as apparent retaliation against their speech and activism against war,” the group said.

Meanwhile, one far-right group has compiled names and other identifying information of students and professionals — both noncitizens and U.S. citizens — who are alleged to be “promoting hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on college campuses,” saying its goal is to combat antisemitism on campuses. Another group says it handed the Trump administration a list of hundreds of names for deportation; at least one of the students listed on both sites, Momodou Taal, has been targeted by the Trump administration for deportation and asked to surrender to ICE. Taal, a Ph.D. student who is a U.S. visa holder, participated in protests at Cornell University expressing support for Palestinians in Gaza.

A doctoral student at the University of Alabama has been arrested and detained by immigration authorities, as the Trump administration continues to target noncitizens in higher education.

The university said in a Wednesday statement that the student was recently "detained off campus by federal immigration authorities." Due to federal privacy laws, the college couldn't reveal any more about the case, but it added that international students are "valued members of the campus community."

The Crimson White, the university's newspaper, reported that the man is Iranian national Alireza Doroudi, a doctoral candidate studying mechanical engineering. He was arrested at home at 5 a.m. ET Tuesday, the newspaper reported.

According to records available on ICE’s website, Doroudi is currently being held in a “detention facility.”

It is not clear why he was detained, what charges he may face, or if he has retained a lawyer. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Democratic senators said in a Thursday hearing that the Trump administration is undermining its own goal of addressing antisemitism on college campuses by firing the federal staffers who investigate civil rights issues in schools.

t the same time, however, the Department of Education terminated half the staff in its Office for Civil Rights, the congressionally mandated arm of the agency that investigates failures by schools to address discrimination. As of mid-January, the office had 12,000 open investigations but recently stopped updating its list of pending cases.

During a hearing about campus antisemitism held by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said slashing staff at the Office for Civil Rights while trying to crack down on discrimination is like axing the fire department while trying to fight fires.

“You can’t just cut an agency in half and pretend everything’s fine,” Murray said.

Rabbi David Saperstein, one of the hearing witnesses and a former United States ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, agreed that downsizing the civil rights office harms Jewish students, particularly because it will increase caseloads for investigators.

“They’re grinding it to a halt,” Saperstein said, “and it is the students of America of all kinds who are facing discriminations that are going to suffer.”

Catherine Lhamon, the head of the Office for Civil Rights under the Biden administration, told NBC News earlier this month that investigators were averaging around 50 cases per person when she left the government in January. With the office now slashed in half, it’s expected that caseloads would significantly increase.