Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty
I’ve lived a lot of life but can’t say I’ve ever had the secretary of Homeland Security tweet a video of me before.
On March 14, a day before the story broke of an international student, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University who fled from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Canada, I received a call from a friend informing me that a video of me accompanying Srinivasan was released and being circulated online by Kristi Noem.
My body involuntarily began to tremble.
Despite my status as a natural-born American citizen and the fact that I had committed no crime, I envisioned a battalion of law enforcement officers dragging me from my apartment and forcing me into an unmarked vehicle, just as they had with Mahmoud Khalil six days before, and just as they have attempted to do with other students on Columbia’s campus.
I didn’t leave my apartment for four days.
Dismantling the American Dream
The chaos unfurling at Columbia is no longer about Palestine, Israel, or divestment. And insofar as it ever was, the administration’s ever-tightening grip on Columbia is not about antisemitism — and it is not at Harvard University, where the specter of antisemitism is being used to threaten funding there just as it was at Columbia.
It is about freedom of speech, immigration policy, constitutional equality, police, and control over people’s lives. The crackdown is a declaration about upward mobility and dictating what “opportunity” looks like for different people.
This is about Donald Trump’s systematic and calculated dismantling of the American Dream, encapsulated in a singularly defining moment in American history. It’s about McCarthyist accusations of “antisemitism” being leveraged as a scapegoat to justify Trump’s ruthless and indiscriminate assault on international students.
With the administration now unleashing on Harvard and other schools sure to come soon, we are at a critical opportunity to come up for air and recognize that what is happening here under the auspices of rooting out “antisemitism” is, in fact, an assault on the American Dream. It’s a program that runs counter to the values and liberties Columbia, many other universities, and the country as a whole espouse.
An Immigration Policy of Terrorism
Unlike other forms of violence, terrorism is a tactic intended to rupture society. It is the deliberate use of physical and narrative violence wielded against symbolic victims to coerce, intimidate, and hijack established institutions and policies. Terrorism triangulates violence by targeting innocent victims for the purpose of igniting mass hysteria and chronic fear.
Those four days holed up in my apartment after Noem tweeted a video of me offered a visceral glimpse into the terror that international students at Columbia and beyond experience every day.
For Srinivasan, the line was much more direct: Noem exploited her terror as a marketing ploy to promote a new “self-deportation” app.
Referring to Srinivasan’s harried departure as a self-congratulatory gold star for a successful immigration policy — that is to say, the Trump administration’s immigration policy of terror.
This is the strategy of the federal government, abetted by Columbia, with its constant invocation of the specter of “antisemitism.”
Antisemitism at Columbia
Antisemitism at elite institutions is a very real and reprehensible problem. Yet accusations of “antisemitism” at Columbia now serve as a catch-all cudgel wielded to silence voices of dissent.
Most ironically, this weaponization of the accusation has led to the silencing of Jewish student voices, and disregard for the real issues Jewish students and faculty face.
The Jewish community at Columbia is a tremendous part of our diverse and inspiring, campus life. To use Jews as political pawns is antisemitic. To scapegoat and put a target on their backs is antisemitic.
To claim to protect Jewish students while withholding funding from their own research is antisemitic. For Trump to position himself as the arbiter of who gets to be Jewish is antisemitic.
This form of antisemitism uses the very real experiences of bigotry and racism hurled at our Jewish community as a tool to achieve its own financial interests and autocratic goals.
What is happening at Columbia is not and has never been about protecting our Jewish community.
The Antidote
I was asked to accompany Srinivasan just an hour before I needed to arrive at the airport. I went because she feared being disappeared, apprehended, or detained without anyone knowing where she was.
As a light-skinned U.S. citizen, I carry a learned confidence around authority and law enforcement. Yet, even with such a privilege, anxiety pulsed through my chest as our plane touched down in Canada.
I can’t adequately capture the relief that washed over me as Srinivasan passed through the immigration checkpoint unchallenged. And as I exhaled for the first time in what felt like days, my thoughts drifted to my own family’s story.
During World War II, my Chinese grandfather fled to the United States without “documentation.” Despite the barriers imposed by the Chinese Exclusion Act, he was drawn by the promise of the American Dream.
My mother’s family can be traced back to Peregrine White — the first child to be born aboard the Mayflower. These stories run deep in my veins, reflecting both the immigrant experience and the American journey. Together, they illuminate the essence of what we have come to recognize as the American Dream: struggle, sacrifice, and a conviction that the freedom our shores offer is for all.
The Trump administration’s tired strategy is to turn us as Americans against each other in a divisive zero-sum game — to pit Democrat against Republican, the “elite” against the working class, the Jewish community against those calling to end the Palestinian genocide, the immigrant against the citizen.
The antidote is already baked into our national creedos: “We the people.” This is not a description of adversaries. Each of us, immigrants included, are part of a rich and storied history of struggle, sacrifice, and self-determination.
If our democracy is to survive, it’s imperative that we reject the forces of autocracy that seek to divide us and remember that immigrants, perhaps more than anyone, are the lifeblood of the American Dream.
