Innocent immigrants live in fear of Trump "disappearances": Christians and Evangelicals must stop this horror
Echo opinion published in the Houston Chronicle:
Foreign students band together against Trump-led disappearances.
Maine Writer: Where are those "Christians" and Evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump: Scriptures emphasizes the importance of welcoming strangers and treating them with dignity include Leviticus 19:33-34, Matthew 25:35 and Hebrews 13:2. These passages highlight the biblical mandate to show hospitality, love, and support to those who are not part of our immediate community.
I’ll never forget the creeping dread that consumed Princeton University’s campus in March 2020. Laughter in dining halls faded to anxious murmurs. Sidewalks once alive with hurried students became corridors for tearful phone calls home — or bitter day-drinking “darties.” As a junior drowning in midterm prep, I could barely process the uncertainty.
But for my international friends, like Sara from El Salvador, it was crushing. I’ll never unsee the moment she broke down, trembling, after her country announced a severe quarantine policy: If she returned home, she would face 30 days isolated in an austere military facility. Her plans, her safety, her future — gone in an instant.
Now, five years later, that same gut-wrenching helplessness is back. But this time, it’s engineered by the U.S. president. My first reaction reading about Donald Trump’s crusade against Harvard and his push to revoke the school’s authorization to enroll international students entirely was simple: This is madness. My second: Haven’t these students persevered through enough❓😨
But for my international friends, like Sara from El Salvador, it was crushing. I’ll never unsee the moment she broke down, trembling, after her country announced a severe quarantine policy: If she returned home, she would face 30 days isolated in an austere military facility. Her plans, her safety, her future — gone in an instant.
Now, five years later, that same gut-wrenching helplessness is back. But this time, it’s engineered by the U.S. president. My first reaction reading about Donald Trump’s crusade against Harvard and his push to revoke the school’s authorization to enroll international students entirely was simple: This is madness. My second: Haven’t these students persevered through enough❓😨
These students uprooted their lives for a dream they deemed worth everything. They left family and familiarity behind to conquer the maze of U.S. college applications — tests, essays and odds stacked against them. Ineligible for most scholarships, they paid staggering tuition, often funded by families making extraordinary sacrifices. Visa rules limited them to on-campus jobs and school-sponsored internships, no matter their ambitions or financial strain. They face barriers their American peers can’t see — hurdles many gladly embrace, fueled by the promise and privilege of a world-class education.
I know this because I walked that path myself, starting college on a student visa and later transitioning to a different visa.
The grad student described checking his visa status daily, his entire future hinging on a webpage. “It’s been panic every day for months,” he said. “Just wondering — will I be targeted?”
He’s heard story after story of friends’ visas suddenly revoked, and was stunned by how little support they seem to have received from Houston’s universities. Institutions that should have been champions of their aspirations, he noted, seemed paralyzed by fear and red tape, leaving students stranded to fight for themselves.
The grad student spoke of his friends’ shattered lives — students deported mid-degree with no stipend, no way to finish years of research they had built their futures on. “That’s the bare minimum we could expect,” he said, disappointment cutting through his words. But when institutions failed, the students didn’t. “Among us international students, we’ve taken care of each other,” he said. Through apps like SOS, they built plans for disappearances, creating a network of solidarity to brace against the fate of Rumeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student from Turkey. Plainclothes ICE officers arrested her without warning and hauled her away in an unmarked car.
That grassroots, DIY organizing makes the grad student feel less helpless, less lost. There’s a sense that the students are caring for one another, that people are reclaiming humanity from polarized systems. He sees how these same struggles echo across other communities who feel targeted by the Trump administration — people of color, undocumented workers — and the answer, he insisted, is the same: “We just have to create a culture where we look after one another.”
Through it all, he still sees hope in the Houston he first met when he arrived here two years ago: diverse, open, brimming with possibility. He remembers his very first day — nervous at a bus stop, when a stranger from Argentina stopped to ask if he was OK. “It felt like I wasn’t in a foreign place,” he said.
That warmth hasn’t left him. Houston, he told me, isn’t its skyline or its oil economy. It’s the people — the ones from everywhere who built this city brick by brick, dream by dream. That spirit doesn’t vanish with the stroke of a pen or an executive order, he said. “At the end of the day, it’s the community that matters.”
And isn’t community what got many of us through the pandemic, through those raw, disorienting months that became years? Community saved Sara, my Salvadoran friend, when her world collapsed: New Jersey friends made sure she had a place to stay. Community saved me too: a bevy of frat boys helped me carry moving boxes at the last minute; a stranger offered her car to haul my things to the storage unit; other students’ parents treated us to pizza when normalcy felt a lifetime away.
How quickly we forget. The same grit, compassion and humanity that carried us through back then is what we need now — to reach across fear, across divides and remember what it means to truly look out for one another, even when our own leaders are shouting at us to do otherwise.
Regina Lankenau is an editorial writer, columnist and a member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board. She can be reached at regina.lankenau@houstonchronicle.com.
I know this because I walked that path myself, starting college on a student visa and later transitioning to a different visa.
Like so many others, I came to the U.S. because it stood as a beacon: a place where bold ideas and dreamers from every corner of the world were welcome. Now it guts me to watch this shining place retreat behind walls of fear and exclusion.
Back in 2020, it was a pandemic that threw international students’ lives into chaos. Today, it’s a government they trusted, treating them like pawns in a political battle they have little part in. Trump has targeted international students with precision, hitting higher education where it hurts most.
Back in 2020, it was a pandemic that threw international students’ lives into chaos. Today, it’s a government they trusted, treating them like pawns in a political battle they have little part in. Trump has targeted international students with precision, hitting higher education where it hurts most.
Trump and the Republican administration yanked more than 4,700 foreign students’ permission to study; 😥frozen student visa processing to trawl through applicants’ social media in search of “red flags”; and launched an unprecedented effort to bully elite colleges into spying on their international students to root out so-called “troublemakers.”
Yes, elite colleges have their flaws. Though I studied under several conservative professors at Princeton, the overall campus atmosphere stifled conservative thought. Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, antisemitism has escalated. But the Trump administration’s measures don’t foster safer, freer campuses — they enforce silence, choking the very openness they pretend to protect. Some of the foreign students facing terrible consequences were protest leaders. Others seem to have lost visas due to parking infractions, speeding tickets, calling the police for help — or for no discernable reason at all. While a federal judge has blocked many of the administration’s visa revocations, many students — under pressure or lacking recourse — have already self-deported.
The damage extends far beyond the Ivy League. This week, after struggling to find students who felt safe enough to speak, I connected with a graduate student from the University of Houston who asked for anonymity. He’s in his 30s, a first-generation student from South Asia, here on a scholarship. Like many of the institutions Trump criticizes, University of Houston relies on its 5,000 international students — not just to balance budgets but to push groundbreaking research and innovation. At UH, both students and faculty have reportedly had visas revoked. While the university insists that only a “small number” have been affected, the fallout has been staggering. Fear now dominates the campus, the grad student said. International students live with constant paranoia, convinced one misstep could cost them everything.
Yes, elite colleges have their flaws. Though I studied under several conservative professors at Princeton, the overall campus atmosphere stifled conservative thought. Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, antisemitism has escalated. But the Trump administration’s measures don’t foster safer, freer campuses — they enforce silence, choking the very openness they pretend to protect. Some of the foreign students facing terrible consequences were protest leaders. Others seem to have lost visas due to parking infractions, speeding tickets, calling the police for help — or for no discernable reason at all. While a federal judge has blocked many of the administration’s visa revocations, many students — under pressure or lacking recourse — have already self-deported.
The damage extends far beyond the Ivy League. This week, after struggling to find students who felt safe enough to speak, I connected with a graduate student from the University of Houston who asked for anonymity. He’s in his 30s, a first-generation student from South Asia, here on a scholarship. Like many of the institutions Trump criticizes, University of Houston relies on its 5,000 international students — not just to balance budgets but to push groundbreaking research and innovation. At UH, both students and faculty have reportedly had visas revoked. While the university insists that only a “small number” have been affected, the fallout has been staggering. Fear now dominates the campus, the grad student said. International students live with constant paranoia, convinced one misstep could cost them everything.
The grad student described checking his visa status daily, his entire future hinging on a webpage. “It’s been panic every day for months,” he said. “Just wondering — will I be targeted?”
He’s heard story after story of friends’ visas suddenly revoked, and was stunned by how little support they seem to have received from Houston’s universities. Institutions that should have been champions of their aspirations, he noted, seemed paralyzed by fear and red tape, leaving students stranded to fight for themselves.
The grad student spoke of his friends’ shattered lives — students deported mid-degree with no stipend, no way to finish years of research they had built their futures on. “That’s the bare minimum we could expect,” he said, disappointment cutting through his words. But when institutions failed, the students didn’t. “Among us international students, we’ve taken care of each other,” he said. Through apps like SOS, they built plans for disappearances, creating a network of solidarity to brace against the fate of Rumeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student from Turkey. Plainclothes ICE officers arrested her without warning and hauled her away in an unmarked car.
That grassroots, DIY organizing makes the grad student feel less helpless, less lost. There’s a sense that the students are caring for one another, that people are reclaiming humanity from polarized systems. He sees how these same struggles echo across other communities who feel targeted by the Trump administration — people of color, undocumented workers — and the answer, he insisted, is the same: “We just have to create a culture where we look after one another.”
Through it all, he still sees hope in the Houston he first met when he arrived here two years ago: diverse, open, brimming with possibility. He remembers his very first day — nervous at a bus stop, when a stranger from Argentina stopped to ask if he was OK. “It felt like I wasn’t in a foreign place,” he said.
That warmth hasn’t left him. Houston, he told me, isn’t its skyline or its oil economy. It’s the people — the ones from everywhere who built this city brick by brick, dream by dream. That spirit doesn’t vanish with the stroke of a pen or an executive order, he said. “At the end of the day, it’s the community that matters.”
And isn’t community what got many of us through the pandemic, through those raw, disorienting months that became years? Community saved Sara, my Salvadoran friend, when her world collapsed: New Jersey friends made sure she had a place to stay. Community saved me too: a bevy of frat boys helped me carry moving boxes at the last minute; a stranger offered her car to haul my things to the storage unit; other students’ parents treated us to pizza when normalcy felt a lifetime away.
How quickly we forget. The same grit, compassion and humanity that carried us through back then is what we need now — to reach across fear, across divides and remember what it means to truly look out for one another, even when our own leaders are shouting at us to do otherwise.
Regina Lankenau is an editorial writer, columnist and a member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board. She can be reached at regina.lankenau@houstonchronicle.com.
Labels: American Immigration Council, Houston Chronicle, Princeton University, Regina Lankenau, University of Houston
posted by Juliana L'Heureux | 5:15 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home