Last week, an Indian PhD student at Columbia University, Ranjani Srinivasan, opted to self-deport after her student visa was revoked for participating in pro-Palestinian protests.

The US Department of State issued a statement stating that Srinivasan had been involved in activities supporting Hamas, which it designates a terrorist organisation. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it had obtained footage of her using the CBP Home App to leave the country on March 11.

Ranjani Srinivasan, a 37-year-old Indian PhD student at Columbia University, fled to Canada after federal immigration agents made multiple attempts to detain her following the revocation of her student visa.  

Over the course of eight days, agents visited her Columbia apartment three times, eventually entering with a judicial warrant—only to find that she had already left.

Feeling that the situation had become “volatile and dangerous”, she made the swift decision to leave. She packed her bags, left her cat with a friend, and departed for Canada. Her departure came just hours before the arrest of another former Columbia student, Mahmoud Khalil, further escalating tensions on campus.

Srinivasan, a Fulbright scholar pursuing a doctorate in urban planning, has found herself entangled in President Trump’s sweeping crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video of Srinivasan at the airport on X, declaring: “When you advocate for violence and terrorism, that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country. I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathisers use the CBP Home app to self-deport.”

Srinivasan’s lawyers denied the allegation, accusing the Trump administration of revoking her visa for exercising “protected political speech” and denying her “any meaningful due process” to contest the decision.

Systemic arrests?

Talking to The New York Times, Srinivasan recalled the ordeal as a “dystopian nightmare”.

She expressed fear that even “the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do—like shouting into the abyss that is social media—where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathiser and making you fear for your life and your safety.”

Srinivasan’s social media activity, she claimed, was largely limited to liking or sharing posts that highlighted human rights violations in Gaza.

According to CNN, her attorneys stated that while she had attended a handful of protests, she had not participated in last year’s occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. The night that incident unfolded, she was returning home from a night out with friends.

“As she approached her Columbia University apartment, she found the streets barricaded and police did not allow her to access her apartment. While all this was happening, Srinivasan was detained. She received a court summons and was charged with failure to disperse and blocking the sidewalk. Both charges were dismissed, and she has never faced any disciplinary action,” her attorneys said.

Srinivasan’s departure coincided with the arrest of another Columbia student, Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank.

Kordia, previously arrested in 2023 for pro-Palestinian protests in New York, was detained by an immigration official. DHS stated that she had overstayed her student visa, which had been revoked in 2022 “for lack of attendance.” It did not clarify whether she had been studying at Columbia or another institution.

“Everyone is really, really scared.”

A Columbia student, speaking to TRT World on condition of anonymity, described the climate on campus as one of fear.

“We are not using WhatsApp or Facebook to communicate with each other but more secure instant messaging services,” she said. “There is a lot of security [NYPD] on campus. People are avoiding coming to campus. Everyone is really, really scared.”

She said she had heard about Srinivasan’s case but claimed that the university was keeping it “under wraps.”

She shared an email with the TRT World sent to students by Columbia’s president, Katrina Armstrong, on Saturday.

In it, Armstrong acknowledged federal investigations into the university, stating:

“Over the last months, components of the federal government have announced investigations into our university, creating great concern across our community and the nation. The stakes are high not only for Columbia but for every college and university in this country. Columbia finds itself yet again leading the nation, and we will do what is right. This is a critical moment for higher education in this country. The freedom of universities is tied to the freedom of every other institution in a thriving democracy.”

To damage Columbia, Armstrong said, is to weaken American ingenuity and leadership.

Why Columbia?

A professor at a liberal arts college, also speaking anonymously to TRT World, called the situation “absolutely tragic and worrisome.”

He predicted further incidents of students being targeted. “Sadly, I think there will be a few more of these coming down the pike. To your second question quickly, of course. Without a doubt,” he said.  

Talking about Trump’s deportation drive, the professor said that we must be cautious in how we interpret this.

“It is in the interest of the Trump government to appear ruthless, all-knowing, all-powerful, etc. It is not. Its targeting is not systematic, it is opportunistic.”

Why Columbia? The professor argued that “the Columbia student encampment was one of the bravest, most clear and creative articulations of the Student Intifada at the symbolic heart of the US, New York City.”

According to the professor, the administration is able to do so because of the complicity and cowardice, however you might want to read it, of the Columbia faculty and administration.

He blamed university leadership for failing to stand up to federal pressure.

“The outgoing president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, was unprecedented in the ways in which she turned the university into a repressive apparatus in the Biden era—calling police to brutalise the students. So there was already complicity and capitulation to the Zionist lobby even before Trump,”

He further said that “the person at Columbia facilitating the Trump administration currently is a former Israeli spy—Dr Keren Yarhi-Milo, who heads the School of Public Affairs there. These are not hidden things.”

“I would, however, add the third and most important dimension to this tragedy unfolding. And that is the absolute incapacity, even impotence on the part of the faculty and administration who actually understand the settler-colonial dynamics of the Occupation of Palestine to organise as an interest group or class stratum,” he said, adding this incapacity is at the heart of this issue.

The professor claimed that where there should be a move to come together and defend the ethical and intellectual imperative that constitutes the ideological raison d’etre of the University, there is a very American form of liberal individualism that cannot conceive having ideals, only personal interests. 

“And so, because of the lack of resistance from those who are supposed to be Ivy League professors and guardians of knowledge, and have deep access to the knowledge of how braver peoples than them, the Black Radicals, the Vietnamese, Yemenis, Palestinians, Haitians etc. have organised dissent against great odds; what we have is a fragmented disarray of careerist liberals who are impotent,” he said.

Decolonial theory: Missing in action?

The professor cautioned that this was not just Columbia’s crisis, but a foretaste of what was to come for “the American university writ large.”

“Those of us who stand by the historical fact of the righteousness of the Palestinian struggle—we are being silenced by cowardly liberal chairpersons, deans, provosts everywhere. And so, this will continue, not because the Trump administration is ever-powerful, but because there is no tradition of organised dissent in the privileged professional managerial classes of Western academia.”

Professors may teach anti-colonialism and decolonial theory, he said, but they lack the ability to practise it. For him, the solution lay in student mobilisation beyond campus:

“The student movement must be able to mobilise and organise neighbourhoods, parents, their own social networks… This dovetails with the larger migrant rights and deportation issue as well.”