Aviva DeKornfeld
Appearances
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
She opts on a Zoom call for her appointment with the International Students' Office advisor and starts explaining the situation with a weird email. Meanwhile, Ranjani's roommate is in the other room, braiding her hair, getting ready for the day. Here's her roommate. To protect her privacy, we're not naming her.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Ranjani, in her bedroom. She doesn't hear the knock. She couldn't hear it over the reassurances from the advisor from the International Students Office.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
The scary knocker knocks again. Ranjani's roommate told me she's a citizen and a woman of color who grew up poor, who's had a lot of interactions with the police, none of which she would describe as positive. But she knows what to do. She calls from inside the apartment. What is this about?
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
The advisor eventually unmutes, looking relaxed again. And she tells Ranjani that she's safe. Just don't open the door for ICE. And then she gives her a list of immigration lawyers to contact.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
They don't open the door. And the ICE officers eventually leave. Ranjini has had enough experience as an immigrant in this country to know that ICE is not supposed to show up at your door a day after your visa is revoked. This is not the way things typically work. How it normally goes, you're granted a student visa, and the visa is the thing that allows you to enter the country.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
And once you're here, if you're a student, you can legally stay as long as you're enrolled in school, even if your visa is revoked. But if you stop attending school, then you have to leave the country. This is what Ranjani was turning over in her head with ice at the door. She still had her status as a student. She was still enrolled at Columbia.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
The advisor woman from Columbia on Zoom was telling her there should be no issue. But there was one at her door. Ranjani thought, I have to get out of here. I need to hide.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Ranjani moves to her friend's apartment. She and her roommate decide that it's safer if her roommate doesn't know where she's going, so that should ICE come back, she can truthfully say she doesn't know where Ranjani is. But a few of Ranjani's other friends gather at the new location, and everyone starts calling immigration lawyers to try and figure out what to do.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Meanwhile, the dean of student affairs, who Ranjini first reached out to when she got this suspicious email from the consulate, calls her and says, Oh, I heard about ICE coming to your door.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
She racks her brain for mistakes she might have made, looks back through all her immigration records, but she can't find anything. Day three, Saturday, 6.20 p.m. Ranjani's at her friend's place when her roommate calls her. She tells Ranjani, Ice came back to the apartment. They didn't have a warrant, but they talked through the door. Her roommate recorded it.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Ranjani realizes the situation is not going to go away. The email was not spam. Ice showing up at her apartment, not a fluke. She was being targeted. She'd never heard of this happening to anyone else. The rules, how things normally work, that was changing, but she didn't know it yet.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
And then, the same night her roommate tells her that Ice came back, Ice showed up at the apartment of another student, a Columbia graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil, who had just finished his degree in December. Mahmoud was coming home with his wife that night and locking his apartment door when Ice appeared and detained him, took him away to a detention center in Louisiana.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Ranjani did not know Mahmoud Khalil. She learned he was a leader of the pro-Palestine protests after he'd been detained. And here, a new thought occurs to her. She had liked some pro-Palestine posts on social media. She'd also signed a few open letters and gone to a couple peaceful protests. And one night, coming home from a PhD picnic, she says she accidentally ran into a big protest on campus.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
It was chaotic. She says she got swept up by police officers, along with a bunch of other people. She received two summonses for blocking a sidewalk and refusing to disperse, but they were both dismissed. And now, Ranjini wondered, is that what all this is about? It seemed impossible she'd be targeted so personally for that. But what just happened to Mahmoud Khalil, that seemed impossible too.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Day four, Sunday, 5 p.m. Ranjani gets an email from Columbia saying that the Department of Homeland Security had now terminated her legal status, and the university was disenrolling her. She was no longer a student, no longer a teaching assistant.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Columbia University wouldn't speak to Ranjani's case in particular. But they sent us a statement that says the university follows the law and, quote, takes great care to ensure our legal compliance with all applicable rules and obligations so that our students can participate in the federal student and exchange visitor program. Day five.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Ranjani's lawyers told her she could fight this, but she'd likely be detained for some amount of time, no idea how long. Though, as it would be a federal case, it would probably be at least a year while it wound its way through the courts. The only way to avoid detention, her lawyers told her, was voluntary departure. Ranjani thought, I have some friends and relatives in Canada. That's close by.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Those fears Ranjini had about what might have happened if she'd stayed? Well, two days after she left, at 9.40 p.m.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
This is Ranjini's roommate again. She grabs her phone to start recording.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
This time, it's also different because they have campus safety with them, the Columbia campus police.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
The ICE officers are all wearing masks with their comically large bulletproof vests. The campus safety guy in his Columbia University lanyard is just kind of standing around. If there is any question of Columbia working with ICE, it seems like it's answered here. Eventually, they all leave.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Ranjani has been in Canada for just over two weeks now. Columbia still hasn't reached out, since ICE raided her apartment. She has no idea whether she'll be able to finish the degree she was a few months from completing. The degree she's worked towards for the better part of a decade. And Ranjini is only now starting to get some information about what the government says she did wrong.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
The Department of Homeland Security has said that she failed to disclose the two summonses she received last spring when she applied to renew her visa. Ranjini says that was a mistake. She didn't think to include them because they'd been dismissed. And even though she's left the country, the government has not let up.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
She was eating lunch the other day when she got a message from her union rep saying, there's a video of you circulating online, tweeted out by the head of DHS, Kristi Noem. This is the video I thought was worthy of adding to our Museum of Now. Eight seconds of grainy security footage from LaGuardia Airport.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
In it, Ranjani is kind of jog-walking through the airport, pulling her carry-on bag behind her. Alongside the video, Kristi Noem wrote, She celebrated Ranjani's, quote-unquote, self-deportation, as if running to safety was some kind of admission of guilt.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Oh, you're like, why is this random lady tweeting a video of me? A little bit, yes. What was it like for you to watch the video?
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
It's like the perfect five-second snapshot to be like, look, she's running away. But actually, the reason you're walking quickly is utterly mundane.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
The day DHS released the video, they also put out a press release saying that Ranjani was involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization. Ranjani says that's absurd, that she never advocated for violence in any form, and that she was engaged in peaceful protest. I reached out to DHS. They didn't respond to our questions. Thank you.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Day one. Thursday, 8 a.m. Ranjini Srinivasan is not a morning person. She likes to start the day slowly, scroll on her phone in bed. She gets lots of panicked emails from her students. She's a teaching assistant. She's also a graduate student at Columbia University. So, day one, she was in bed when she saw an email. Subject line, visa revocation notification.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
But the wording in the email was weird. It said she may be ineligible for her student visa, but also that it had been revoked. It seems spammy.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Ranjani thought, hmm, okay, this seems to be real. But she's lived here a long time, nine years, and she's had a lot of visas. Things happen sometimes. So she emails the International Students and Scholars Office. They've helped her out with visa stuff before. And also the Dean of Student Affairs, asks for help straightening this out.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Then she grabs her stuff and heads to the office she shares with the other PhDs, where she spends most of her time, to get some grading done. She had 60 student sketchbooks she needed to get through before Monday. That evening, she hears back from the International Students Office, who CCs the Dean of Student Affairs, and tells her, Don't worry, this sometimes happens.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
Oh, so you were trying to distract yourself by grading papers, but then you're like, is this breaking the law itself?
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
They tell her the next available appointment is in five days. Five days felt like too long to wait. The college was telling her that this would all get sorted out easily. But Ranjini has always been fastidious about her paperwork. She has an encrypted folder on her computer for all things visa-related. She's been in the U.S.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
since 2016 and knows almost all her entry and exit dates off the top of her head. She doesn't like loose ends, and she didn't like the idea of waiting five days. So she gets them to change the appointment to the next day. Ranjani's from Chennai in the south of India. In 2016, she was awarded a Fulbright to get a master's in design at Harvard.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
She graduated with a master's from Harvard and then followed her intellectual hero to Columbia to get a Ph.D. in urban planning. Her work focuses on the way that urbanization impacts the labor force. She often went back to India to do fieldwork. But she settled happily in her life on campus. She's made lots of friends, including her roommate, another Ph.D. student.
This American Life
857: Museum of Now
The university randomly paired them together years ago, and they've since become close. Every year, the two of them take a family portrait with Ranjani's cat, Cricket, and send it around as a Christmas card. Day two, Friday, 10.30 a.m. Ranjani's in her bedroom.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Towards the end of the special, Daniel says, if you break up with someone after watching this, please let me know. He's been keeping a rough tally of his breakup stats ever since. To date, between the people who come up to him in person, the tweets he's tagged in, the DMs he gets on Instagram, he estimates that as many as 30,000 couples have split up after seeing his show.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
The thing I don't understand is the stuff Daniel says in a special, most of it is not particularly novel. His jigsaw analogy isn't that far from a lot of the stuff you might find in a self-help book. Like the idea that you should be happy and whole on your own and you shouldn't settle. That's the thing people tell you about love.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
So what is it about this guy and the way that he delivers this familiar message? Why is it so effective? I wanted to talk to some of the people who broke up after watching Jigsaw. And let me tell you, they were not very hard to find. I heard from over 50 people from all over. The U.S., the U.K., Australia, Italy, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates. I spoke with eight of them.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
And there is a real fervor to Daniel's fandom. People speak about him breathlessly, with a kind of awe. They'll quote lines from his special like it's scripture or something. One person said she and her friends say, in Sloss we trust, as their motto. And there are a lot of people out there walking around with Puzzle Piece tattoos.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Most of the people I spoke with have watched a special over and over to fully absorb the teachings. Some returned to it in moments of doubt after breaking up with their partner. And what's crazy to me is that no one I talked to had had any immediate plans to break up with their partner when they first sat down to watch it.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
I came away from those conversations with a couple of theories as to why Daniel's message hit so hard. And I want to tell you about one person in particular, Charlotte, because her story encompasses all of them. Charlotte watched Jigsaw back in 2018, shortly after it came out. She's from East London and, like everyone I spoke with, got together with her husband when she was super young.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
She was 20, still figuring out who she was. And Charlotte, like the others, just kind of thought, I guess this is what it feels like to be in a long-term relationship. It was flat. Just flat. Charlotte had been with her husband for six years when she sat down one night to watch a special, alone.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Right after watching the special, Charlotte tells her husband, you need to see this. Which, interestingly, was another thing so many of the people I spoke with did. Charlotte told me she hoped it would prompt her husband to take a hard look at their relationship, like it had for her. No such luck. He spent the whole hour on his phone, scrolling, not listening at all.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Wait, you showed him how many people had broken up as a result of this special? As like a nudge? Yeah.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
It sounds like you were kind of trying to tee him up to break up with you. Is that right? Yeah. But he was not paying attention.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
So how did Danielle manage to break through to Charlotte? She says part of it was that she was just caught completely off guard. She had no idea what she was getting into when she decided to watch Jigsaw. Everyone I spoke with said something like this, that the fact that the advice came in the form of a comedy special made it easier to hear, like wrapping a pill in cheese for an unsuspecting dog.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Another thing about Daniel, he's super prescriptive. Charlotte wasn't happy, but that low hum of dissatisfaction she felt, it never quite seemed like enough to blow her life up over. But in a special, it's like Daniel reached out of the screen and grabbed Charlotte by the shoulders and told her, actually, that is enough.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
And you'd never had a friend or a family member say it that directly to you? No.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Not at all. Charlotte's younger sister hated how different Charlotte was whenever her husband was around. But her sister never told her outright to break up. Her mom understood that she was unhappy and making a lot of sacrifices in her marriage, but would also say things like, I'm not going to tell you what to do.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
whenever Charlotte's family and friends observed that she didn't seem particularly happy with her husband.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Do you think it was easier to hear the message from Daniel because he was a stranger?
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Daniel's a stranger. This, I think, is another reason why he's able to cut through. Because there's no embarrassment when you hear what he thinks about your bad choices, the way you might feel with a friend. Daniel is a neutral party who can point out a problem on his way out the door, entirely uninvested in what happens next.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
I think there's one more reason so many people split up after watching Jigsaw. Maybe the most important factor in all this. I first heard about Jigsaw when it came out in 2018. At the time, I was in a relationship with someone who was pretty clearly not a good match for me long term. And so when I heard how many couples this special was breaking up, I thought, no way am I watching that.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
I know it'll happen. My relationship will never survive this. I'm not in that situation anymore. So recently, I decided it was finally safe to see the show. And I have to say, I was totally right to be scared of it. There are moments in there that I know would have gotten me back then. Like this terrible thought about being in a relationship that you don't know how to leave.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
I have to say, I totally had that thought in my 2018 relationship. And it's not even that you want the other person to die so much as you just kind of want them to evaporate. Because breaking up with them just feels impossible. I had never said this thought out loud before watching the special. I didn't even know this was a thought other people had.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
And hearing it laid out in such a bare way, I know it would have been impossible to ignore. That's the thing about this show. The jigsaw analogy is a sound that only people in quietly unhappy relationships can hear. If what Daniel is saying reaches you, it's because there's a little radio tower in your head, tuned to receive his message.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
David was in a situation that so many people find themselves in at one point or another. He was in a relationship that, by every metric, was pretty good. And yet, somewhere in the back of his mind, he found himself wondering if it was good enough. David was 24 and had been dating his girlfriend for three years at that point.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
And the niggle being like a little hint of doubt? Is that what that is?
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
One night, David's at a party without his girlfriend, talking with some people. And his friend Daniel, who's newly single and thrilled about it, starts telling everyone about his grand theory of love. He'd just come up with it. The theory went like this. Our life is like a jigsaw puzzle. And as we grow up, we slowly piece the puzzle together, bit by bit.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
But the thing is, we've all lost the box to our individual jigsaws, so none of us know what image we're trying to make. So we start with the four sides, our family, friends, job, hobbies. And then we're all taught that the piece at the very center of the jigsaw, the one we need to complete the puzzle, is our partner. And this is the important part.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
People are so desperate to find their missing puzzle piece that sometimes they try to cram a piece that obviously doesn't fit or strip out other parts in order to make room for that centerpiece. Because they believe that to be better than being alone. David is listening to all of this.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
David hadn't ever considered breaking up with his girlfriend, because there was nothing to break up over. But hearing Daniel talk about this jigsaw analogy, David begins to panic.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Oh, you literally asked him that. What do I do?
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Daniel's analogy worms its way into David's brain. Once it's there, he can't shake it. So he breaks up with his girlfriend. And he actually explained the jigsaw analogy to her, as if anyone wants to hear that they're a misshapen puzzle piece, which he tells Daniel the next time he sees him. How did it feel when he told you that they'd broken up because of what you'd said?
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
This is Daniel, David's friend. Another friend of theirs, who also heard Daniel's analogy. He broke up with his partner, too. Daniel had hit on something. He's a comedian, Daniel Sauce, maybe you've heard of him. And feeling the wind of his friend's breakup under his sails, Daniel starts trying out this bit in bigger venues.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
He told it on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, performed it for a month straight.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Daniel felt like, oh, this little party trick works with strangers too. He started touring with it, performing all around Scotland.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
How long had they been married, do you know?
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Then there was the 19-year-old girl who brought her parents to the show in an attempt to make them realize they were miserable together. It worked. She asked him to autograph their divorce papers, which he did, happily. Then Daniel started taking the show abroad.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
So funny that people want to show you their divorce papers. It's like a cat bringing a dead, you know, bird to your doorstep. Like I made it for you.
This American Life
856: You’ve Come to the Right Person
Daniel eventually turned this analogy into an hour-long special called Jigsaw. It's on Netflix. And the part in the special where he talks about love and couples stuck in bad relationships honestly feels more like a TED Talk than traditional stand-up.