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Noting that she was not an activist or part of groups that organised protests at Columbia University, Indian doctoral student Ranjani Srinivasan, who “self-deported” from the United States after her visa was revoked, said she was “surprised” at being a “person of interest” for the country’s administration, reported The New York Times on Saturday.
In an interview to the newspaper, Srinivasan said: “I am kind of a rando [random], like, absolute rando.”
Srinivasan, an Indian citizen, had gone to the US on a student visa as a doctoral student in urban planning at New York’s Columbia University.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security said that Srinivasan’s student visa had been revoked for allegedly supporting Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem stated that the action was due to Srinivasan “advocating for violence and terrorism”. She added that the Indian scholar had voluntarily left the country using the CBP Home App, or the Customs and Border Protection Home mobile application.
The app allows undocumented immigrants or persons whose visa has expired or has been revoked to notify the US government of their intent to leave the country, “offering them the chance to leave before facing harsher consequences”.
In an online interview to The Hindu, Srinivasan said she has temporarily taken refuge in Canada. She also said she was not aware of the specific charges brought against her by US authorities and is “super afraid of retaliation”.
Visa revocation
Srinivasan told The New York Times that she received an email from the US Consulate in Chennai indicating that her visa had been revoked on March 5.
The email stated that “information has come to light” that may make her ineligible for a visa. It did not explain what the information was.
The Department of Homeland Security told the newspaper that while renewing her visa in 2024, Srinivasan had not disclosed two court summonses related to protests on Columbia University’s campus.
However, it did not clarify how the summonses related to her allegedly “advocating for terrorism”.
In April, Srinivasan was briefly detained at an entrance to the university campus on the same day that students took over a building in protest over Israel’s war on Gaza.
She received two summonses, one for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic and another for refusing to disperse. Her case was dismissed and did not result in a criminal record. She also did not face any disciplinary action from the university.
In April 2024, Columbia University became the site of protests against Israel’s war on Gaza that has killed more than 61,700 persons, including over 17,400 children. Soon after, police officers entered the campus and arrested dozens of protestors.
Protest encampments against the war were also erected in several other universities in the US.
Srinivasan said she did not disclose the summonses in the visa renewal form as her case was dismissed in May and did not result in conviction.
“But maybe that was my mistake,” she told The New York Times. “I would have been happy to disclose that, but just the way they had questioned us was sort of assuming that you had a conviction.”
‘Unusual for ICE to search college campuses’
The Homeland Security department can revoke student visas if a person overstays or a fraud is discovered. Convictions and arrests may also result in the revocation.
However, it was highly unusual for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrive at university campuses looking for students whose visas had been recently revoked, immigration lawyers told The New York Times.
“It is more rare for the government to act the way it has, such as in the cases in Columbia University, where they are going on campus and conducting an operation to apprehend somebody,” said Greg Chen, a lawyer at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
On Friday, the Homeland Security department said that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested a Palestinian student, Leqaa Kordia, for overstaying her expired student visa.
On March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student of Palestinian origin, was arrested in the US. He had participated in pro-Palestine protests on campus last year. His green card was revoked.
A federal judge, however, stayed Khalil’s deportation.
A green card, officially known as a Permanent Resident Card, allows an individual to stay and work permanently in the US.
Srinivasan told The Hindu that she “became extremely scared” after Khalil was detained. She said that unlike Khalil, she was not an activist or a member of any group that organised demonstrations on campus.
She added that her activity on social media had been mostly limited to liking or sharing posts that highlighted human rights violations during Israel’s war on Gaza. She had signed several open letters related to the war, including one by architecture scholars, which called for “Palestinian liberation”, Srinivasan told The New York Times.
“I am fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do – like shout into the abyss that is social media – can turn into this dystopian nightmare where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathiser and making you, literally, fear for your life and your safety,” she told the newspaper.
Jason Houser, a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official during the previous Joe Biden administration, told The New York Times that “criminalising free speech through radicalised immigration enforcement is a direct attack on our democracy”.
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