In early April, the Trump administration revoked the visa of a recent Cal Poly graduate, a promising young immigrant. Just a few months ago, our neighbors hosted his wedding to an American citizen with roots in the Palestinian diaspora. He’d lived in the U.S. for eight years and always been a stellar student, even serving as a member of the President’s Club at his community college. He often volunteered in this community, feeding the hungry in a downtown park.
On April 13, leaving his wife behind, this young man fled to his home country. He and his bride feared that he’d be arrested, incarcerated, and deported.
Our Cal Poly friend had ample reason to be afraid. We should all be very afraid. The Trump administration is trampling on the constitutional rights guaranteed to all Americans, including immigrants. Those rights include freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition; protection from unwarranted search and seizure; and due process, habeas corpus, and equal protection of the law. They’re directing their campaign at immigrants, college students, and the nation’s system of education, especially colleges.
On March 8, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made their first arrest in this campaign by seizing Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Columbia University and a native of Palestine. Khalil is a permanent resident of the U.S., but ICE extracted him at gunpoint from his New Jersey home and flew him to a detention center in Louisiana.
The government claims the power to deport Khalil under a rarely used statute that empowers it to deport any non-citizen if the secretary of state deems that their presence raises “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Khalil served as a spokesperson for Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia, but he had no criminal record. He’s denounced antisemitism and is highly regarded by Jewish as well as pro-Palestinian students. The university had asked his assistance in resolving protests at Columbia in the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
It’s been more than six weeks since Khalil’s arrest. As he languishes in that Louisiana prison, the Trump administration has escalated its campaign against students, colleges, and anyone whom it deems to be “not aligned with the goals of the Trump administration.” Soon after Khalil’s arrest, Trump bragged on social media that his arrest was only “the first of many to come.”
On March 29, masked ICE officers abducted Tufts University student Rumeysa Öztürk as she walked to a friend’s home. A video of her arrest reveals a Mafia-style abduction by armed thugs. ICE secretly transferred Öztürk to New Hampshire, Vermont, and finally to Louisiana, where the government seeks a more favorable court to deny her appeal. Her “crime”? Co-authoring an op-ed in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts for its complicity with Israel in oppressing Palestinians.
In recent weeks the State Department has revoked the visas of at least 1,000 international students, affecting more than 200 colleges and universities. Typically, students are given no notice of the revocation; they learn about their loss of legal status only from a State Department website.
This unconstitutional attack on academia and constitutional rights is not stopping there: The Trump administration is canceling federal research contracts at universities unless administrators turn over control of admissions, the hiring and firing of professors, and shaping of instructional content.
To date, many of our most highly ranked institutions of higher education have bowed and scraped to please Trump and his enablers in Congress. On April 14 however, Harvard President Alen Garber flatly and publicly refused: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” wrote Garber. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Upon receiving the letter from Harvard, the Trump administration canceled billions in research grants and contracts to the college. This action suspended critical research on tuberculosis, Alzheimers, and other major health challenges.
I’ve known many non-citizen students and they’ve been among the best and the brightest in my classrooms.
During all my decades in academia, not once did I fear the prospect of the federal government investigating me or my colleagues for expressing views that were not “in alignment with the president’s ideology.” Yet that’s exactly the fear held by millions of educators and students.
On May 7, Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong will testify before the House Subcommittee on Education. Trump is threatening to slash tens of millions in federal funding for research grants at Cal Poly. Will Armstrong apologize when he faces Congress? Or will he take a cue from Harvard and reject unconstitutional demands that jeopardize the independent spirit of his staff and students? Δ
John Ashbaugh writes from SLO. Send a commentary in response to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Apr 17-27, 2025.
Neither Harvard nor any other school are being forced to relinquish any constitutional rights. They are merely being required to observe the same nondiscriminatory policies that the federal government has been requiring for all schools which receive government assistance, for a number of decades now. I suspect that many on the left would have a far different perspective on academic freedom if a school’s interpretation of “academic freedom” including allowing the Ku Klux Klan or Nazis to maintain a chapter on campus, or granting a preference in admission to applicants whose ancestry could be traced back to the Mayflower. The concept of “nondiscrimination” should be pretty easy to figure out. It doesn’t include preferring one group over another in order to engage in social engineering.
Queensryche comes to mind: https://youtu.be/vAI2QOBMlTA?si=A3ujmrLvya…