DU Students and Faculty React to Detentions and Deportations

“When I got here, I thought that having a visa was going to be enough for me to feel safe because I was here legally,” Ale said. “But since three weeks ago, I feel that having a visa doesn’t matter anymore.”

Ale, a graduate student at the University of Denver with an active student visa, declined to be identified by her last name over concerns of her visa being revoked in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s ongoing campaign to deport international students whose activities run “counter” to U.S. interests. 

As of Thursday morning, immigration authorities led by Rubio have revoked 605 student visas, including 20 in Colorado, citing a section of the McCarthy-era 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. While official justification for many of the revocations has not been shared, Rubio said he is targeting students involved in advocacy for Palestinian rights, whom he called “lunatics.” 

Ale first visited the U.S. when she was 14 and has since lived, traveled and studied in several states. Apart from a school shooting at the University of Arizona, which she attended before DU, she said she’s generally felt safe. That all changed during Donald Trump’s second presidential campaign. 

Leading up to and following the 2024 election, Ale said she experienced multiple racist and xenophobic encounters, including a man telling her to “go back to her country” after hearing her speak Spanish in public. When Trump took office and began his campaign of “mass deportations,” her anxiety over getting racially profiled and deported grew. 

Ale stopped going to Aurora, one of Trump’s highly publicized targets for ICE raids, and started carrying her passport with her, always on the lookout for ICE’s infamous white SUVs. While Trump’s policies were already affecting most aspects of her life, the administration’s targeting of international students in recent weeks has had a direct impact on her academics.

“I mean, my master’s is human rights, so that’s a starting point where I know that that’s not a topic that this government is very happy to talk about or even question or critique,” Ale said, referencing the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID and elimination of research grants for projects involving what he called “illegal DEI mandates.”

“I don’t know what research I can do, what research I can’t do, and how that will affect me staying here,” Ale said. “When I came here, I thought, okay, I can do something good in a country that actually respects and will try to respect (human rights) more than my original country. When these things started happening these last few months, it frustrates me because I thought that I was going to stay here to work in the field that I chose to study and develop my career in.”

One of Ale’s classes involves a research project investigating human rights abuses by U.S. forces overseas, which the class plans to use to submit policy recommendations to the State Department. However, her professor cautioned the class’ international students about putting their names on the project over visa concerns, a warning he later broadened to the entire class.

National Context Behind Rubio’s Campaign 

Another DU graduate student who preferred to go by Izzy, also due to visa worries, pointed out that this has a wider impact on the international student community. 

“Our international students are having trouble finding internships or jobs (because of visa sponsorship requirements),” she said. “Maybe (ICE) won’t knock on our doors to send us away, but it’s a softer way to do it, just not being recruited by employers. Then, eventually, we will have to leave.”

Targets of Rubio’s campaign to remove “people that are supportive of movements that run counter to the foreign policy of the United States” include Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk. Khalil, who has a green card, was targeted due to his role as a negotiator in the Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment last spring; Öztürk, for an op-ed in which she criticized Tufts’ response to pro-Palestine resolutions passed by its union. 

These detentions have come under intense fire over their violation of the students’ First Amendment rights. The public debate on whether these free speech rights apply to non-citizens and advocates of Palestinian rights has been frustrating for DU Professor Rebecca Galemba, who teaches and researches intersections of migration and other social issues.

“Constitutional protections don’t discriminate based on citizenship. Those rights are there, but, for some reason, we’re okay with those being eroded,” Galemba said. “If we don’t care about what’s happened to our colleagues who (talk critically about Palestine), we’re all in trouble because that is the model. It’s not the exception.”

Essentially, she said, this campaign is a sign of what’s to come, adding, “if you erode them for someone, then they don’t mean anything anymore for anyone.”

While information on the students targeted has been limited due to privacy concerns, reporting from Inside Higher Ed shows that most have participated in some kind of pro-Palestine advocacy or had minor legal infractions like speeding tickets. However, unlike visa revocations under previous administrations, which typically left students’ legal status intact, Rubio’s campaign has also taken away the right of these students to remain in the U.S., making them vulnerable to detention and deportation. 

Amid a lack of vocal leadership, a chilling effect on free speech at DU

While so far, none of DU’s roughly 1700 international students have reported having their visas or legal status revoked, the events have still affected the way Izzy and Ale express themselves in and out of the classroom. 

Ale, who had posted frequently about human rights on social media, made her accounts private and now takes down her posts after several hours, if she posts at all. To Izzy, who moved to the U.S. from Turkey last fall, restrictions on speech are not new. She said she plans to be “smart” about when and where she shares her opinions.

“With my friends, I’m super open because I think our values are very similar, but in the classroom, I think I will be more cautious about what I say instead of expressing it super loudly and in a sincere way,” Izzy said. “I would like to talk when I believe that it’s going to create some impact. Just talking to talk in class, maybe it’s not as important or (worth) taking the risk.”

Fritz Mayer, Dean of the Korbel School of International Studies, where Galemba teaches, sent out an email detailing Korbel’s support of students at risk of deportation along with information about a support hotline. Despite the DU administration’s self-proclaimed commitment to civil discourse and free speech, they have yet to issue a public statement or offer public support to international students regarding the recent visa revocations.

A DU media spokesperson said in an email that the school had not experienced any ICE activity so far and that, if it was approached by law enforcement, it would abide by FERPA laws, which require “the student’s written consent, a valid court order or subpoena” for the school to share student or employee information. 

Still, the university’s public support would mean a lot to Ale. “It would be nice to know that they have our backs a little bit more,” she said.

To Galemba, DU’s silence is a sign of a dangerous trend in higher education. While she noted that pockets of faculty across the university had started their own “ad hoc” initiatives to advocate for and provide resources to students at risk of visa revocation or deportation, she was “shocked” by the lack of central messaging or action. 

“We know the authoritarian playbook is, ‘come after intellectuals, come after universities.’ If they’re just going to preemptively roll over, we’re all basically doomed,” she said. “It also sets the tone. If we don’t see our leaders saying anything, then we don’t feel supported as faculty. Then, students feel fearful. If (the students) don’t see them saying anything, they think that they don’t matter. They’re even more invisible. They feel even more disposable.”

Galemba worries that, because of the revocation campaign, international students “just won’t come” to DU. The ripple effect on international admissions could also pose serious financial issues for DU, which is already facing severe budget cuts and relies on the international student body to pay, for the most part, full tuition. 

Ale and Izzy are now skeptical that the U.S. will be able to continue to produce groundbreaking research in their areas of study, and the professional opportunities they thought they’d have here seem to be disappearing.

“We may end up not creating (academic) impact, but just surviving here,” Izzy said, saying that if that happened, she’d leave the country. “I won’t sacrifice my goals. If it’s not possible, then I do not have to change myself; I have to change the environment.”

Paired with the administration’s withdrawal of federal grants for research associated with DEI, many worry about the chilling effect of these recent attacks on academic freedom and the “marketplace of ideas” ideology that has driven the debate around civil discourse on American college campuses for decades. Though DU receives less federal funding than public schools, several individual grants, including a $150,000 grant for the Chicano movement oral histories project “Documenting the Past, Fostering the Future,” have been pulled due to their association with DEI.

Galemba noted that academia was already dealing with an “incentive structure that pushes out more innovative ideas” through pragmatic factors like funding and job security. With the current restrictions? 

“We’re going to obviously fall behind by years,” she said. “If people are afraid to actually do what they want to do, then that limits the public discourse. It limits the research. It limits what students can learn, and this goes down to K through 12. You have a generation of censorship.”

As for Ale’s project, the second-year graduate student is still undecided as to whether she’ll include her name on the recommendations for the State Department. She started her studies in the US, confident she’d begin her career and eventually build a life here, something the project could support. Now, she’s not so sure. 

“I don’t know if it’s worth it because if I get targeted, I won’t even have a career here anymore,” Ale said. “It’s black or white right now.”