Jack is an international student at Penn State. I’m not going to tell you his real name, where he’s from or what he’s studying because I don’t want to reveal anything that might make his situation more precarious than it already is.
Last week, Jack received an eviction notice from the landlord of us all, who goes by the name of Uncle Sam. It wasn’t delivered by dark-suited guys in masks, but by email from Penn State’s International Student and Scholar Advising office (ISSA). ISSA was the messenger. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was the outfit that was revoking his right to be in this land of liberty.
He wasn’t told why.
The email informed him that he was “required to depart the U.S. immediately, as there is no grace period.”
Penn State won’t say how many of its 9,000 international students across the Commonwealth have received notifications like the one Jack got. WPSU reported earlier this week that 14 University Park students have had their visas revoked so far: 12 for shoplifting, one for drunk driving and one for possession of weed.
Jack didn’t do any of those things. Again, I’m going to withhold the details, even though ICE must know them already. Suffice it to say that Jack:
a) did not lead or attend a protest or publish something that could be construed as a danger to national security,
b) did not commit an act of violence,
c) made the sort of stupid mistake that many undergraduates make and
d) did not commit the sort of crime that ever gets anyone expelled from the university.
It was, however, the sort of offense that lands one on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “lunatics” list, apparently.
Moppy-haired Jack comes across as a sweet, mild-mannered kid. When I asked him how he reacted, he told me he was “frustrated.” When I asked him how his parents across the sea reacted, he said they were “quite frustrated.”
Jack’s primary concern: how he’s going to finish his bachelor’s degree if he’s off-off-off campus. He’s due to graduate next spring and can take some of his classes online, but he doesn’t think he can take all of them.
Jill – not her real name — doesn’t have that problem. Like Jack, she has lost her legal right to be in the United States, but she’s a doctoral student who has finished her course work. Assuming she’s still in the university’s good graces, she doesn’t need to be on campus to finish her degree. But being deported has blown up her search for a faculty job in the U.S.
I heard about Jill’s situation from her faculty adviser, entomologist Margarita Lopez-Uribe. “We’re letting a very bright scientist leave the country,” Lopez-Uribe told me.
Why? The only thing Jill can think of is that she once forwarded a pro-Palestinian post on social media. Or maybe it was the time she let her car registration lapse.
Jill got her eviction notice on April 4. When she called Lopez-Uribe, she was crying. “It was very distressing,” the professor said. “I tried to calm her down.”
Jill flew home on Sunday. Jack, meanwhile, is in limbo. The immigration lawyer he spoke to has told him he has another week to try to claw back his student visa before he risks arrest.
Jack has, of course, seen the video of the Tufts student who was accosted and cuffed on the street for the offense of doing what I do: signing her name to a newspaper column. I saw the clip as confirmation: We are now living in a police state.
Journalist Masha Gessen, who grew up in Russia and knows a police state when she sees one, came to the same conclusion. The headline on their New York Times column: “Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.”
Thus far, about 600 of the more than 1.5 million international students in the U.S have been sent packing on one pretext or another. That’s a small number, but it’s possible we ain’t seen nothing yet. Truly we must be a pitiful, helpless giant to feel threatened by a bunch of college students.
Maybe you’re thinking, hey, if you break the law, you forfeit your right to be here. But the punishment should fit the crime, no? Would you think it fair to lose your job or do jail time if you ran a stop sign?
We’re not talking about terrorists or gang members here, but bewildered young people whose lives have been upended with no warning, little recourse and not much rhyme or reason. To paraphrase Donald Trump, “When you’re a dictator, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
One of Jack’s professors, whose name I agreed to withhold, expressed a lot more emotion than Jack did in an email she sent me:
“I actually sobbed yesterday when I met with this student – hearing about these cases in the national media is one thing, but knowing a student who is affected hit me hard. I sobbed for their situation and for the state of our country.”
Penn State’s law school offers a list of resources for international students.
