In recent months, the Trump Administration has used the U.S. immigration apparatus in increasingly expansive ways in its crackdown against noncitizens. In the process, it has often transgressed legal bounds in open defiance of checks and balances on its executive power, and has made irreversible mistakes such as unlawful and unjustifiable deportations.
While the vast majority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have focused on increasingly indiscriminate detentions of low-profile migrants, it has also used detentions and the threat of indefinite detention to intimidate and penalize university students who are not U.S. citizens for criticizing the role of Israel and the United States in aiding its war on Gaza. Even more troubling is the timing of ICE’s attempts to detain individuals: In multiple instances, student activists have been targeted by ICE or had their visas revoked shortly after being doxxed by rightwing websites and collectives such as the anonymous pro-Israeli forum Canary Mission.
In a few high-profile cases, ICE has pursued individuals as a result of their political speech without informing the individual or their university about changes in their immigration statuses. Using one clause in a 1952 McCarthy-era law known as the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the Trump Administration has claimed the authority to change the immigration status of those who hold views that are, as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described, “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the United States—a claim with which at least one judge has recently agreed.
One such case led Cornell University Ph.D. student Momodou Taal to flee the country last month after a rapid legal battle. Taal was suspended from Cornell in spring of 2024 for his participation in the school’s Palestine solidarity encampment, and again in September 2024 after participating in a disruptive action at which the university claims he shoved a police officer—a charge he categorically denies. After his second suspension, the university initiated an internal process that would have resulted in Taal’s F-1 student visa being revoked, forcing him to leave the country. It quietly backtracked on that process following widespread national pushback, but banned Taal from Cornell’s campus. Despite repeated accusations by Cornell administrators, Taal was never found guilty of wrongdoing, and agreed to alternative resolution processes for both suspensions.
But Taal later found himself targeted by rightwing organizations such as Betar, a Zionist extremist group that identifies pro-Palestine student activists for the Trump Administration. In November 2024, Betar placed Taal on a list of thirty individuals it hoped to see deported after President Donald Trump took office, and singled him out on its social media on March 13. The next day, the State Department claims it received a request from ICE to look into revoking Taal’s visa, which it then did. On March 15, Taal filed a complaint against Trump alongside two co-plaintiffs, Sriram Parasurama and Mũkoma Wa Ngũgĩ, seeking an injunction against his use of two Executive Orders which they claimed had been used to violate their First and Fifth Amendment rights.
“Given that Cornell placed a target on my back, and the high-profile nature of my own case, I think we had quite a reason to believe that I was going to be targeted,” Taal said in an interview with The Progressive on March 24. “The best way to protect myself and others in this moment, we decided, would be to challenge the legality and constitutionality of the Executive Orders.”
“We wanted to go more on the offensive, rather than waiting for something to happen and then reacting to it,” said one of Taal’s co-plaintiffs, Sriram Parasurama, in an interview with The Progressive on March 22.
I’m viewing this as very much a test of: How much does the law really matter anymore?
When he filed the complaint, however, Taal did not yet know that his visa had been revoked, and that federal agents were actively pursuing him. He was officially informed of the change in his immigration status on March 21—a week after his visa was revoked—and did not appear in court when his legal team and co-plaintiffs presented the case in court on March 25, fearing that he would be detained by ICE. The plaintiffs unsuccessfully sought a restraining order to bar ICE from pursuing Taal while the case proceeded, and he soon went into hiding.
On March 31, Taal and his co-plaintiffs asked for the case to be voluntarily dismissed. Knowing he could be picked up and detained indefinitely without charge, as has happened to others critical of the United States and Israel, Taal fled to Canada. “I have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,” he wrote in a statement on X.
On March 8, less than a week before the State Department revoked Taal’s visa, federal agents detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who completed his graduate studies at Columbia University in December and was awaiting graduation in May. The agents, who refused to identify themselves, claimed that Khalil’s student visa had been revoked, even though Khalil was in the United States on a green card rather than a student visa.
According to a legal filing from Khalil’s lawyers, “Mr. Khalil’s wife presented the [Department of Homeland Security] agents with documents confirming Mr. Khalil’s status as a lawful permanent resident, handing them to an agent who was speaking on the phone. The agent looked confused when he saw the documents and said, ‘He has a green card’ to the individual with whom he was on the phone.” Despite knowing that Khalil was a lawful permanent resident, ICE detained him anyway. He is currently being held without charges in a detention center in Louisiana.
On January 29, six weeks before Khalil’s arrest, Betar accused Khalil of making unsubstantiated threatening comments against Zionists, and wrote “He’s on our deport list!” Two days after his arrest, U.S.-based Jewish publication the Forward reported that Betar’s former U.S. director, Ross Glick, had “discussed Khalil with aides to Senators Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to ‘escalate’ the issue,” during a meeting in Washington, D.C., where he appears to have met with Senator Cruz directly.
The Forward described Glick as saying that Khalil was “making it too easy for us,” and that members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to Trump officials. Under Glick’s direction, Betar shared its lists of preferred targets with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, Attorney General then-nominee Pam Bondi and other officials.
Then there is the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish citizen with an F-1 visa attending Tufts University. Öztürk was accosted on the street as she left her residence on the evening of March 27, by masked individuals claiming to be police, who handcuffed her and forced her into an unmarked van in less than a minute. Like Khalil, Öztürk was also taken to a detention center in Louisiana, thousands of miles from her residence, where she is still held at the time of writing.
Two days after her abduction, Canary Mission posted on X, writing,
This is Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national being deported for ‘activities in support of Hamas,’ according to DHS. Sources point to her Canary Mission profile as the primary cause.
Canary Mission targets those it deems to be antisemitic by maintaining profiles of individuals critical of Israel, as well as individuals who engage in activity it deems antisemitic. Canary Mission’s definition of antisemitism is extremely broad, and includes support for boycotts and divestment campaigns targeting Israel. The only item linked on Oztürk’s Canary Mission profile that is specific to her is an op-ed she co-authored demanding that Tufts University divest from companies with ties to Israel and acknowledge “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
Like in Taal’s case, the timeline of Öztürk’s arrest, as recounted by the U.S. government, raises several questions. According to a Tufts University declaration on the matter, the university received an email at 10:31 a.m. the morning after Öztürk’s abduction, but with a notice dated the previous day. The notice stated that “Rümeysa’s visa was cancelled because she was a ‘non-immigrant status violator,’ ” citing the INA in its rationale. The Tufts declaration also notes that Öztürk’s record in ICE’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System was changed to note that her visa was terminated hours after she was picked up.
More recently, Mohsen Mahdawi, another green card holder who is Palestinian, was arrested by ICE at a meeting the agency claimed was a citizenship interview. Betar had posted its deportation request, tagging ICE, for Mahdawi on X on January 29. The account claimed, after Mahdawi was detained, that he was on their “original list.” Rubio relied on the same INA rationale to arrest and deport Mahdawi, based on a memo claiming that his presence in the country could undermine the Middle East peace process.
Taal, Khalil, Öztürk, and Mahdawi were all targeted by doxxing sites and collectives for their political speech, then pursued by ICE shortly after. No one was informed of these individuals’ changed immigration statuses until after ICE had already sent agents to their residences or detained them—the documentation emerged after the fact. In none of these three cases were students found guilty of any charges—in fact, none of them have even been charged with any crime.
Even more troubling, the INA argument, which was deployed in all four cases, poses a broadly interpretable foreign policy rationale that has implications already infringing on speech in a way that—as Taal’s case demonstrates—jurisdictionally prevents courts from stopping the expulsion of foreign nationals because of their political speech.
“We are certainly concerned with the trend of spiriting detainees out of the jurisdictions in which challenges are brought, like in the case of Mahmoud Khalil,” wrote attorney Chris Godshall-Bennett, who represented Taal and the co-plaintiffs, in an email to The Progressive.
Godshall-Bennett, who is the legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, added that Judge Elizabeth Coombe’s decision that she does not have jurisdiction over immigration matters in the Taal et al. v. Trump et al. case “underscores just how much the INA’s jurisdiction-stripping provisions already are a barrier to justice.”
A common factor among Khalil, Öztürk, Taal, and Mahdawi appears to be that these individuals hold similar views, and are being doxxed by those who oppose criticism of the United States and Israel. ICE has denied to The New York Times that it is working with tips from Canary Mission, yet there is little explanation as to why Öztürk is in detention without charge, aside from the fact that Canary Mission mentions her co-authoring the op-ed, and takes credit for her abduction by ICE.
Despite ICE’s denial that it works off tips from Canary Mission, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of which ICE is a part, does appear to have used Canary Mission as a source of evidence upon which it denied entry to an individual. The Progressive has acquired documentation of an individual denied entry into the United States, with a printed record of a questionnaire from DHS (given to this individual as a record) citing Canary Mission as a source of incriminating information.
The use of Canary Mission to deny entry or deport individuals takes a page directly from Israel’s playbook: The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in 2018 that Israeli immigration services have prevented Americans from entering Israel because of their profiles on Canary Mission. In a number of cases, Haaretz found that being doxxed by Canary Mission was the basis for American students being detained for questioning, and was “the number one source of information for the decision to bar entry” to the American student Lara Alqasem on the “suspicion of boycott activity,” according to the Forward.
A spokesperson for the Coalition for Mutual Liberation, Cornell’s organization coordinating protests and actions related to the genocide in Gaza, wrote in an email to The Progressive that Betar “took credit for Momodou Taal’s deportation.” The spokesperson also wrote that Betar believes people will be targeted for their beliefs regardless of immigration status.
The INA is only meant to apply to foreign nationals who pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” rather than enabling U.S. government agencies to detain and deport people for their expressed views and activities protected under the First Amendment. But given the Trump Administration’s treatment of Taal and Öztürk, or even of Khalil and Mahdawi—permanent residents who are now detained without charge—many noncitizens now fear the possibility of being targeted for deportation based on their political speech. As Sriram Parasurama, Taal’s co-plaintiff said of his lawsuit against President Trump:
How much does the law really matter anymore?
Aaron Fernando is an independent journalist covering grassroots movements and solidarity economy projects, with a focus on land, policy, housing, and cooperative movements.