As ICE agents arrest international students at campuses across the U.S., immigration law professor Daniel Kanstroom discusses the human cost. He says the round-ups are designed to "send a message... to scare people, and it's working."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are the recent ICE actions against international students?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. In recent weeks, immigration agents have descended on college campus towns across the country and carried out waves of arrests of international students. Just last week, a video circulated of six ICE agents in masks and plain clothes surrounding and arresting a 30-year-old Turkish Ph.D. student from Tufts University as she stepped out for dinner during Ramadan.
She held a valid F-1 student visa, but was detained because it had been revoked, reportedly without warning. Her case is not an isolated one. Several arrests have taken place at other universities, too, like Columbia, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Alabama, where an Iranian doctoral student was taken into custody after his visa was annulled by the State Department.
Chapter 2: Who is Daniel Kanstroom and what is his perspective on ICE arrests?
To help us understand the legal dimensions of these actions, what they mean not only for international students, but for U.S. visa and even green card holders, really anyone who wasn't born in the United States, is Daniel Kanstrom, a professor at Boston College Law School and scholar on immigration and human rights.
He founded the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic, where law students advocate for migrants and directs the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project. which explores the long-term impacts of deportation on families and communities. Canstrom's latest book, The New Deportation Delirium, examines the sprawling system of deportation in our country since 9-11.
Daniel Canstrom, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you. It's good to be here.
I'm happy to have your expertise on the show today. And I want to start with the case of Romeza Ozturk. She is the PhD student at Tufts University. She's from Turkey and is here on a student visa. In this video that circulated last week, we see the arrest unfold. We see a man in a black hoodie and a face mask approach her as she leaves her apartment. And that man grabs her hands.
And I want to play a little bit from that video. What we're about to hear is Ozturk sort of scream a little. It appears she doesn't know for a moment what's happening. Okay. We hear her yelling out and then we see some other people in plain clothes who we later learn are ICE officers. They surround her and one person pulls out a badge and then they cuff her and take her off.
Professor Canstrom, what was your reaction when you first saw this video?
I think my immediate reaction was what I hope would be anyone's immediate reaction. Which was horror. This is a very, very extreme example of government power. Masked agents, which are extremely unusual in this country. Arresting somebody suddenly without permission.
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Chapter 3: Can international students be deported for their speech?
Any apparent warning to what must have been for her a terrifying and probably unknown fate for reasons that she probably had some general understanding of, but no specific charging document, no specific reason. warrant, no reading of charges, no explanation. This is a horrible thing to see.
And one would think that tactics like this would be limited to the most extreme cases, you know, SWAT teams or hostage situations. But to see a graduate student in Somerville, Massachusetts, pulled off the street, it had to be terrifying. And that was my first reaction. I can tell you about my second, third, and fourth reaction as we go forward, because I had a lot of different reactions.
A judge in Massachusetts temporarily barred the deportation of Ozturk, but the Department of Homeland Security said that she was originally detained and her visa terminated because she was in support of the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas. And what they appear to be referencing is an op-ed she wrote that was critical of Israel. Can she be deported for that?
Well, this is a kind of unknown situation. What we're going to have to see is the relationship between the government's power to regulate the status of non-citizens who are in this country, especially non-citizens who are here temporarily, although temporarily could mean many years, as it did in her case.
versus the general protections of the First Amendment, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and general protections of due process of law, and general procedural protections in our government. And those things are going to be tested in her case, among many others. The government does have enormous power over students who are coming here to study.
But the government is also restrained by the Constitution. And we haven't seen this particular provision used very often. In fact, it's quite rare. And so the courts are going to have to sort out how to calibrate that balance. My own feeling is that unless they can come up with some activities that she actually engaged in that were against the law...
They may have a hard time deporting her simply for speech or for publishing an op-ed.
Okay. So just so I'm clear, this question that I think continues to come up as we see more and more arrests, whether students who hold a visa have First Amendment rights, I think what I'm hearing from you is it's both yes and no.
It is both yes and no. And the provision at issue here, you know, goes back quite a long way and gives specific authority to the Secretary of State with a very vague set of standards. They call it the alien, but let's say the non-citizens. Activities or actions or speech in the United States would have potentially serious foreign policy consequences.
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Chapter 4: Why are students detained in remote Louisiana centers?
Is it something about that detention center or something by design?
It is something by design, and it's not a new phenomenon. This has been going on for quite some time now in this country where people have been moved to these detention centers in Louisiana and elsewhere. And originally, I think it was part of a change in detention of non-citizens who were facing deportation.
There had been a use of local facilities, and there were problems with that, by which I mean local jails and state-run facilities. There were all sorts of questions about conditions. So there was a move to try to create more federal detention facilities.
But when one asks why was this particular one situated in a fairly remote area – I believe it's at least a couple hours, maybe more, from New Orleans, as I recall – lawyers have routinely noted two things. One, it makes it incredibly difficult to actually be in touch to visit with a client, which is important if you want to represent somebody.
It's very helpful if you can sit in a room with them and look into their eyes, get to know them as a client, have long interviews with them. And second, that particular part of the country and the particular judges in that part of the country tend to be rather supportive of the government and rather unfriendly to lawyers for non-citizens.
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Chapter 5: What are the broader implications of recent deportation tactics?
So it has a reputation as being a difficult place if a person is moved there because so-called habeas corpus petitions have to be filed in the place where the person is actually held. This actually was an issue in Mr. Khalil's case, too, about whether you could bring him back to the place where he has his witnesses and his lawyers and where the alleged activities took place.
So there's often a struggle about that. But this is not a new government tactic. However, like many of the tactics that we're witnessing now, it's being used in extremely expeditious ways and often apparently with the intent of avoiding a judge's order not to do it.
You know, one of the things I want to talk with you about is what you are seeing in your work, because you have, as a professor, as a legal scholar, the ability to see the big picture, but then you also have your ear to the ground as part of this Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic, which you founded. Students there provide services for people like advocating for people who are detained.
What are you hearing right now? What are some of the concerns that people are coming into the clinic talking about? What are some of the students seeing that are working with international students and others who may be concerned about their status at this moment?
Well, even beyond our clinical programs, what I hear from a range of lawyers throughout the country and from potential clients and from former clients and from family members of potential clients and former clients and from colleagues who are citizens or non-citizens or naturalized citizens or married to non-citizens is a tremendous sense of fear.
And I think that is a big part of what the administration has been aiming to do. So the administration has acted on the shoulders of a system that was long recognized as being extremely discretionary, extremely deferential to government power, potentially extremely arbitrary, potentially extremely harsh. I've been writing about this for more than 25 years. And yet we're seeing
uniquely extreme examples of it done with a kind of cruelty and a kind of, I would say, gratuitous cruelty, arrogant cruelty that has rarely been seen in the history of this country. And the point of that is to send a message, is to scare people. And it is working. I just heard this morning about a person who was apparently
sent to this prison in El Salvador who had been under an order from an immigration judge specifically not to be sent to El Salvador. The government has admitted that it was a mistake. And yet they say, well, but there's nothing we can really do about it because now he's in the custody of El Salvador. It's hard to imagine a more terrifying set of facts than that.
What I'm hearing from you as a legal expert, you believe that this focus on these students who are here legally is a scare tactic. But can you get a little bit deeper into this idea? Because Trump has laid out very clearly during his campaign trail and his first few days of office that he wanted to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
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Chapter 6: How does birthright citizenship play into current immigration debates?
Tell us your thoughts about this action taken against birthright citizenship for anybody born in the U.S. after February 19th, 2025. I mean, it's been fought in the court, but it would limit birthright citizenship to at least one parent being a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident to qualify. You've been very critical of this. Talk to me about the ramifications of something like this.
Well, first of all, I think it's useful to go back and ask why this country has birthright citizenship in the first place. Because I think many people think that is kind of odd. U.S. citizenship is such an incredibly valuable commodity. Why do we just give it to people based on the accident of having been born here? That's a fair question. But the answer is important.
It was created in the aftermath of the Civil War, primarily to redress a situation in which African-Americans, particularly slaves and even freed slaves and even people who had not been enslaved at all, were deemed by the Supreme Court not to be citizens.
And the country realized that having a large cohort of people who were excluded from the courts and from the right to vote and all the aspects of citizenship was a very dangerous thing. And it was integral to slavery, but it was also a bad thing in general.
we created an amendment to the Constitution that guarantees that anyone who's born in the United States, subject to its jurisdiction, which actually means only excluding a very small category of diplomats and Native American Indians, perhaps, and people on warships or invading armies, those people all get citizenship. So we opted for a generous conception of citizenship.
And I think that has stood us well. The Supreme Court upheld it in the late 19th century. It's been reaffirmed ever since then in many court opinions. And yet it keeps coming under challenge for varieties of reasons in particular historical periods. But if we remember why we created it in the first place, then I think that helps us to understand what's so dangerous about trying to remove it.
Our guest is legal scholar and immigration expert Daniel Kanstrom. Our interview was recorded yesterday. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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