Can a parking ticket get you deported now?
Flying is already unpleasant enough. Judging by the crashes and near misses lately, it’s gotten more dangerous. Maybe not statistically so, but enough to make the cost and inconvenience more of a nuisance. So something I just ran across may make us even more reluctant to enter an airport.
It is the case of Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian doctoral student at Columbia who learned that, for reasons unknown, her visa had been revoked about the time immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil. Agents came twice to her door, and the Fulbright recipient pursuing a Ph.D. in urban planning did not answer. Before they could return with a judicial warrant, she packed some belongings and hopped a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.
The New York Times from March 15:
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that characterized Ms. Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer and accused her of advocating violence and being “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization.” The department did not provide any evidence for its allegations.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, posted surveillance footage on social media that showed Ms. Srinivasan lugging a suitcase at LaGuardia as she fled to Canada. Secretary Noem celebrated Ms. Srinivasan’s departure as a “self-deportation.”
Noem is ghoulish enough, especially after her Frau Schmerz video from El Salvador’s Terrorist Confinement Center, but it’s that surveillance footage in the tweet below describing Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer that’s really unnerving.
“I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers use the CBP Home app to self deport,” Noem says. I guess that means CBP didn’t have a chance to check Srinivasan for tattoos.
It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America.
When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.
I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers… pic.twitter.com/jR2uVVKGCM
— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) March 14, 2025
WTF? Does the CBP Home app trigger a video capture of a departing foreigner? It doesn’t mention that on the website. Or is CBP surveilling everyone in the airports? (I’m naive, I know.)
It seems Srinivasan had her visa revoked for not reporting dismissed tickets on her visa renewal. And those summonses were for what?
Ms. Srinivasan’s current situation can be traced back to last year, when she was arrested at an entrance to Columbia’s campus the same day that pro-Palestinian protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, a university building. She said she had not been a part of the break-in but was returning to her apartment that evening after a picnic with friends, wading through a churning crowd of protesters and barricades on West 116th Street, when the police pushed her and arrested her.
She was briefly detained and received two summonses, one for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic and another for refusing to disperse. Her case was quickly dismissed and did not result in a criminal record, according to her lawyers and court documents. Ms. Srinivasan said that she never faced disciplinary action from the university and was in good academic standing.
“She was taken in with roughly 100 other people after being blocked from returning to her apartment and getting stuck in the street,” said Nathan Yaffe, one of her lawyers. “The court recognized this when it dismissed her case as having no merit. Ranjani was just trying to walk home.”
Ms. Srinivasan said she did not disclose the summonses in the visa renewal form later in the year because her case had been dismissed in May and she did not have a conviction.
You know, in answer to “Have you ever been arrested or convicted for any offense or crime, even though subject of a pardon, amnesty, or other similar action?”
Apparently, “crimes against the American people” extend to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, jaywalking, or a parking ticket. You are a terrorist sympathizer or an actual terrorist if DHS says so, and no further evidence required. The Trump 2.0 administration and freaks like Stephen Miller and Noem have us well on our way to being a police state.
Update: The Trump administration’s roundup of student protesters is genuinely shocking
“The defining feature of American democracy, you could be forgiven for having thought, is that you can say what you think without having to fear that you will be arrested, locked up or deported for it.”
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Have you fought the coup today?
National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense