Excerpt:
Ranjani Srinivasan was busy talking to an adviser at Columbia University when the federal agents first came to her door. The day before she’d got an unexpected email that her student visa had been canceled, and she was trying to get information.
“It was my roommate who heard the knock and immediately recognized (it as) law enforcement,” Srinivasan told CNN. “She asked them ‘Do you have a warrant?’ And they had to say ‘No.’”
“I was stunned and scared,” she said. “I remember telling the adviser ‘ICE is at my door and you’re telling me I’m fine? Do something.’”
They returned another day, also without a warrant, Srinivasan said. Matters escalated when they came a third time, with a judge’s permission to enter the Columbia apartment. By then she had already left the country.
The biggest question for Srinivasan is why they came at all.
Srinivasan had renewed her student visa just a few months earlier, being granted permission for another five years in the United States — more than enough time to complete her PhD in urban planning. She was no stranger to immigration rules, having won a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard University for her master’s degree and then returning to her native India for the requisite two years after.
Her dream acceptance at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation coincided with the beginning of the Covid pandemic, so she started her studies in Chennai, India, before making it to New York City.
By last month, the end of her doctorate was almost in sight, she was grading papers for the students she was teaching and fretting over a deadline for a journal. Far from her mind was a night almost a year before when she got caught up in a crowd.
That evening in April 2024 she’d been trying to get back to her university apartment from a staff picnic when she was swept up in a police operation against a crowd protesting Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, she said.
Srinivasan had only just returned to the US, having been away from Columbia since before the war began and generated passionate protests. “We didn’t really know what was going to happen that day,” she said. “The whole perimeter of the neighborhood had been barricaded.” Unable to prove she lived there, she wasn’t allowed to go to her street, so she ended up circling the neighborhood, looking for a way through, she told CNN.
“They kept shifting the barricades, and then I think around 200 cops descended, and they kind of charged at us. It was absolute confusion. People were screaming, falling, people were running out of the way,” she said. Too small to force her way through the melee, she ended up in a large group of people detained by the police.
She said she was held with the crowd for several hours but never fingerprinted or booked for an arrest. She was given two pink-colored summonses by the New York Police Department — one for obstructing pedestrian traffic and the other for failure to disperse — before being released. A lawyer working pro bono for a number of the students got the summonses dismissed even before she had to appear in court. That means there should be no record against her, and as far as Srinivasan was concerned, she could forget the whole thing.
She did not report the dismissed summonses on her visa renewal.
When asked why Srinivasan’s visa was revoked, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement “these citations were not disclosed.”
That was never mentioned to Srinivasan when she was told her visa had been taken away.
Yes