"When I arrived in the US four years ago to start my doctorate at Cornell University, I thought I'd be the last person to be hunted down by the immigration authorities. As far as I could tell, the special relationship meant that a British passport carried a sort of immunity akin to that enjoyed by diplomats; it was a mobility that allowed me to work, after all, as a journalist unscathed across west Africa's restive Sahel belt for years."
"Things began to fall apart after I attended a pro-Palestine protest on campus in September last year. We had brought a job fair to a standstill because it featured booths from Boeing and L3Harris, companies that supplied Israel with the armaments it needed to carry out its genocidal campaign in Gaza. Although I was there for just five minutes, I was subsequently banned from campus, a punishment that felt like a kind of house arrest because my home was on the university's Ithaca campus."
"In January, as Donald Trump steamrolled into office brandishing an arsenal of executive orders targeting non-citizen student protesters, I left my home and went into hiding at the remote home of a professor, fearing the reach of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Three months later, I self-deported to Canada, then flew to Switzerland. I was prompted to flee after a friend, who had spent time with me in Ithaca, was detained at a Florida airport"
A British doctoral student at Cornell attended a pro-Palestine protest that halted a job fair featuring defense contractors. The student was present briefly but received a campus ban that prevented entry to university property while remaining housed on campus, creating a house-arrest sensation. Fears of immigration enforcement escalated after presidential executive actions targeting non-citizen protesters; the student hid at a professor's remote home and later self-deported to Canada before traveling to Switzerland. Cornell notified the student that US visa status had been effectively terminated, and Google sent an email indicating it had received and responded to an unspecified communication.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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