Indian student ‘self-deports’ from US after visa revoked over Palestine protests

New York, March 15 (IANS/WISHAVWARTA) An Indian student who participated in pro-Palestine protests in the US has “self-deported” herself after her student visa was revoked, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has announced.

The Department said on Friday that Ranjani Srinivasan “was involved in activities supporting Hammas, a terrorist organization” and left the US on March 11 after her student visa was revoked by the State Department.

A citizen of India, she was a doctoral student in urban planning at Columbia University, the Ground Zero of student protests in support of Palestine and against Israel over Gaza that swept the US last year.

The university saw the violent takeover of a campus building, and scores of students were arrested when the university called in the police to quell the protests.

Noem said that it was “a privilege” to study in the US, but “when you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country”.

Homeland Security Department said that it obtained a video of Srinivasan using an app of the Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agency to “self-deport”.

“I am glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathisers use the CBP Home app to self-deport”, Noem said.

She posted a video of Srinivasan at an airport.

It was not clear if Srinivasan had been arrested in the protests or if she had expressed sympathy for Hamas because many of the protesters were only against Israel’s attack on Gaza in retribution for the Hamas terrorist attack on it.

Self-deporting – or leaving voluntarily before authorities take action – avoids the risk of her being put on a US military aircraft and sent home like the three planeloads of deportees who arrived in India.

Srinivasan was doing research at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

According to the school, she has a bachelor’s degree from CEPT University in Ahmedabad and got her master’s degree from Harvard with Fulbright Nehru and Inlaks Scholarships.

On the school website, she is shown with the gender-neutral “they” pronoun rather than she.

The site said that she had received support from the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard for her research, “Gold & Cyanide: Family, Caste, and the Post-extractive Landscape at Kolar Gold Fields”.

She had also worked for an environmental advocacy nonprofit in Washington on “frontier communities at risk from climate change” and as a researcher for the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

President Trump’s administration has trained its sights on the Ivy League university, accusing it of failing to stem the protests that it said veered into anti-Semitism and threatened Jewish students and faculty.

It has cut off $400 million in federal funds to the university.

Last week, a former Columbia student of Palestinian descent who was involved in protests there last year and in the affiliated Barnard College last week was arrested by immigration officials and is in custody, pending deportation.

Mahmoud Khalil, however, has a green card, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio said has been revoked.

His deportation has been temporarily put on hold by a federal judge.

Noem said that a Palestinian student at Columbia was arrested by an immigration official for overstaying her student visa.

Leqaa Kordia had a prior arrest record from joining the Gaza protests in the city.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department and Homeland Security are investigating whether Columbia was “harbouring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus”.

University Interim President Katrina Armstrong said immigration agents armed with court warrants raided two hostel rooms, but no one was arrested at that time.

The university also said that several students who participated in the occupation of the campus building were expelled.

These developments have sent a chill among students and faculty, who have held protests outside the campus against the crackdowns, including at the Trump Tower.

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