As ICE agents arrest international students at campuses across the U.S., immigration law professor Daniel Kanstroom discusses the human cost. He says the round-ups are designed to "send a message... to scare people, and it's working."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. In recent weeks, immigration agents have descended on college campus towns across the country and carried out waves of arrests of international students. Just last week, a video circulated of six ICE agents in masks and plain clothes surrounding and arresting a 30-year-old Turkish Ph.D. student from Tufts University as she stepped out for dinner during Ramadan.
She held a valid F-1 student visa, but was detained because it had been revoked, reportedly without warning. Her case is not an isolated one. Several arrests have taken place at other universities, too, like Columbia, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Alabama, where an Iranian doctoral student was taken into custody after his visa was annulled by the State Department.
To help us understand the legal dimensions of these actions, what they mean not only for international students, but for U.S. visa and even green card holders, really anyone who wasn't born in the United States, is Daniel Kanstrom, a professor at Boston College Law School and scholar on immigration and human rights.
He founded the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic, where law students advocate for migrants and directs the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project. which explores the long-term impacts of deportation on families and communities. Canstrom's latest book, The New Deportation Delirium, examines the sprawling system of deportation in our country since 9-11.
Daniel Canstrom, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you. It's good to be here.
I'm happy to have your expertise on the show today. And I want to start with the case of Romeza Ozturk. She is the PhD student at Tufts University. She's from Turkey and is here on a student visa. In this video that circulated last week, we see the arrest unfold. We see a man in a black hoodie and a face mask approach her as she leaves her apartment. And that man grabs her hands.
And I want to play a little bit from that video. What we're about to hear is Ozturk sort of scream a little. It appears she doesn't know for a moment what's happening. Okay. We hear her yelling out and then we see some other people in plain clothes who we later learn are ICE officers. They surround her and one person pulls out a badge and then they cuff her and take her off.
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