International PhD students make emergency plans in fear of US immigration raids

A wave of shock and fear has spread among university researchers as US immigration officials have moved to detain and deport international students and scholars. The officials allege, in many instances, that the detainees’ involvement in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes a threat to national security.

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Multiple organizations representing university faculty members filed a lawsuit on 25 March challenging the actions, which include high-profile cases that have landed several student researchers in jail and sent others into hiding. Professors and students who spoke to Nature say they have already begun brushing up on their legal rights and taking precautions.

“People are living in fear, if not for their lives, then certainly for their liberty and safety,” says Michael Thaddeus, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York City. He stresses that the detentions are just one part of a broader attack by the government of US President Donald Trump on scientists and academics that includes the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants at Columbia and other universities.

One graduate student who studies public health tells Nature that they are crafting contingency plans on how to reunite with their children and spouse if they are detained returning from a pending research trip abroad. “These are insane things to be thinking about in the United States,” says the scientist, who recently had their primary research grant terminated by the Trump team and who asked for anonymity out of fear that they would be targeted by the administration.

The Trump White House and the US Department of State did not respond to Nature’s requests for comment.

Taking away visas

Trump set the stage for the current detentions by signing an executive order on 30 January that called on US immigration officials to deport alleged student “sympathizers” of Hamas, which attacked Israel in October 2023 and is designated as a terrorist group by the United States. Many students and professors reject that charge, arguing that most protestors were not supporting Hamas but opposing Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Protests over Israel–Hamas war have torn US universities apart: what’s next?

Marco Rubio, head of the US Department of State, confirmed at a press event last week that his agency has revoked visas for at least 300 students, with more to come. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” Rubio said.

In nearly a dozen cases that have attracted media attention, officials with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have detained or sought to detain students and scholars who have been living legally in the United States either on visas or ‘green cards’ that provide permanent residency status. The list includes several well-known pro-Palestinian activists such as Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student studying social-media use among youth at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Both are being held in a detention center in Louisiana.

Although the US state department has broad latitude over visas and green cards, the lawsuit filed by faculty organizations in a federal court in Boston last week alleges that, in many instances, these actions violate students’ constitutional right to free speech, which scholars say applies to everybody, not just US citizens.

“This is ideological deportation,” says Ramya Krishnan, an attorney at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute and counsel on the lawsuit. She raises particular concern with the Trump administration’s argument that many of the arrested scholars pose a threat to US foreign policy because of the opinions they have voiced about the war in Gaza. What’s to stop the administration from saying that opinions on climate policy or other issues are threats?, she asks. “There really is no limit to the government’s theory here, and that is part of what is so disturbing.”

Already, multiple cases seem to hinge on issues other than students’ involvement in the Gaza war protests. For instance, on 16 February, Kseniia Petrova, a bioinformatician at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was arrested at the US border after failing to declare frog embryos she was bringing to her laboratory from France. She is also being detained in Louisiana.

The White House and the state department did not respond to questions from Nature about the reasons for various detentions.