In March 2025 the federal government began seizing non-citizen students and scholars for their Palestine advocacy. Mahmoud Khalil — a Columbia graduate and encampment negotiator, a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen — was arrested by ICE in his university housing and flown to a Louisiana detention center, the administration invoking a rarely used Cold War-era provision letting the Secretary of State deport anyone whose presence he deems adverse to foreign policy. Days later, masked plainclothes agents took Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk off a Somerville street — video of the arrest circulated worldwide — her sole identified offense an op-ed she had co-authored; Columbia's Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested at his own citizenship interview.

The courts pushed back through the spring: federal judges ordered Mahdawi released in April, Öztürk in May, and Khalil in June 2025, finding the detentions raised grave First Amendment problems — Khalil had been held over three months, missing his son's birth. But the releases were bail, not vindication: the deportation cases ground on, and the message to every non-citizen in the movement had been delivered by the arrests themselves — the modern Turner and Buford logic, applied to student visas and green cards.