We Protest a World of Walls

One week ago today, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard’s certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). If the order stands, international students on F- and J-visas will have to withdraw or transfer from the University to avoid deportation. As of last Friday, a federal judge has granted a temporary restraining order to block the DHS’s demands.

In an email to the student body on Friday, May 23, President Alan Garber wrote that the University “condemn[s] this unlawful and unwarranted action.” Garber, pacing across the presidential office’s antique Persian rug, must have been thinking: “We gave them what they wanted! How could this happen after Harvard almost entirely rolled over to the White House’s demands for information on Harvard’s international students?” As Claudine Gay’s term should have taught us all, however, no amount of compliance will appease the University’s Zionist donors or its Republican detractors. Garber has been showered with praise — including in the fawning full-page ads you’ll find in today’s edition of the Crimson — for “standing up” by filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration. But we cannot forget that Trump is targeting international students in order to launch an intensified assault on student pro-Palestinian speech, and this is an effort that the University itself spearheads.

The public both within and without the University has latched onto seize on these spectacles of “resistance” because we lack imagination; the most we can hope for is for Garber to quietly ask Trump to please release a little pressure from the foot on his chest.

But the existence of ICE is not an inevitability. For one thing, the agency was founded in 2003; many of you reading this are likely older than it. And like Harvard, ICE does not protect us — it is part of a racialized immigration system used to shape the country in the image of those in power. Nothing makes this more obvious than the Trump administration’s recent move to fast-track immigration for white Afrikaners, the former stewards of South Africa’s apartheid state, under the baseless claim that they face anti-white violence in their home country.

We should not find this surprising. In fact, American immigration policy has always been a tool of apartheid, both at home and abroad. U.S. border immigration and Israeli apartheid in particular have worked hand in hand. In 2004, Israel’s Elbit Systems deployed drones at the U.S.-Mexico border for surveillance; it uses these same drones to target and murder civilians in Gaza. In 2007, an Israeli conglomerate, Golan Group, trained ICE agents in hand-to-hand combat practices used by the IOF. In 2014, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection signed a $145 million contract with Elbit’s American subsidiary. In October 2017, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries built Trump’s border wall prototypes. The list goes on and on.

ICE has also always been Islamophobic in its mission. It was created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which was passed after September 11, during the Bush presidency. In the days immediately following 9/11, the Bush administration detained approximately 1,200 immigrants — nearly all of whom were Muslim, Arab, or South Asian — for alleged ties to terrorism, though not even a single case resulted in conviction on terrorism-related charges. In the eight years after its founding, ICE deported two million people — doubling the total number of deportations the U.S. had conducted in the past 100 years.

Bush was followed by Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama, who showed us that anti-immigration policy is not partisan. Obama deported a historic number of immigrants: over three million, one million more than Bush. In his first three years in office, Obama deported 380,000 more people than Trump did in the same period. Obama also streamlined the process: under his administration, 75 percent of deportations were made without a court hearing. By the time Trump took office, his work was cut out for him. In other words, the fact that masked ICE agents are now abducting people off the streets without due process or recourse is not a new development — two decades of anti-immigration rhetoric and policy, from both sides of the aisle, have written the playbook for it.

From Bush to Obama to Biden, politicians have concealed the violence, racism, Islamophobia, and tenuous legality of ICE’s actions by framing them as efforts to target “national security threats.” It should come as no surprise that Trump is doing the same. Immigrants with legal status are being deported. Minors are expected to represent themselves at immigration court. And of course, Trump’s highest-profile “national security threats” are those who dare to call for an end to the genocide in Gaza.

With this history in mind, the stunned media coverage of the international students abducted by ICE — among them Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi — seems both necessary and exceptionalizing. That students can be disappeared without a trial merely for supporting Palestine is horrifying; but what about people who do not have the protection of an education, or the good fortune of proper documentation? Advocates have made the point that the only thing Öztürk did to provoke her deportation was write an op-ed. But is there any action for which ICE should be allowed to abduct and deport someone? Thankfully, for now, Öztürk is back home in Massachusetts on bail. But ICE continues to make sweeps in local, mostly Latino communities in the Boston area, and these raids receive only a fraction of the coverage of Öztürk’s abduction.

Garber experienced popularity for the first time in his life when he defied Trump’s demands to end DEI programming and further limit student protest. But stopping short of committing to protect students from ICE and protecting our right to protest — as well as gutting DEI programming later on anyway — only confirmed what we knew him to be: a coward.

Rather than holding Harvard accountable, bystanders criticize anti-Zionists for dividing the University, for drawing unwanted attention to the genocide in Palestine. This response is rooted in fear. Coverage of abductions like Öztürk’s has unsettled even the most comfortable, but we cannot forget that this did not start with Trump. Who will remember the families separated after 9/11? Who will remember the children imprisoned in Obama’s cages? Since its inception, ICE has terrorized the very communities that many are only now beginning to show concern for. Since the beginning, ICE has colluded with the genocide of Palestinians. The fight for liberation is a daily and ongoing struggle. When we protest Israeli apartheid, we protest ICE. We protest a world of walls.

As we navigate the fear and unpredictability of this moment, we must ask ourselves: when has lying down ever been effective? Not when Claudine Gay condemned pro-Palestine speech, not when the administration refused to protect doxxed students, and certainly not when Garber released student information to the DHS. Trump is demanding that we dig our own graves; Garber has already bought the coffin. If we refuse to fight back, we accept this fate. The fight for Palestinian freedom is tied to the fight for our own. International students and pro-Palestinian activists have never been safe in the eyes of the state, and the sacrifice of some has never yielded safety for all. Protect your friends. Protect your neighbors. We have a duty to keep us safe.