As Trump administration cracks down on campus dissent, union members caught in crosshairs

Members of United Auto Workers picket at UCLA on May File photo by Jeremy Lindenfeld Capital Main This article was produced by Capital Main It is published here with permission As the Trump administration escalates its crackdown on campus dissent unionized graduate students are increasingly caught in the crosshairs A few who are foreign students have had their visas revoked Others have seen vital research funding threatened And trainee activists have become targets of online attacks including from Trump supporters and a senior administration official Allie Wong a graduate trainee at Columbia University a U S citizen and a member of Novice Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers Local has experienced that pressure firsthand Last month she accompanied fellow union member Ranjani Srinivasan as she fled to Toronto fearing deportation The State Department had just revoked Srinivasan s attendee visa inviting her to self-deport and federal immigration agents had repeatedly visited her university-owned apartment Wong remembered the relief she felt after she and Srinivasan who is also a doctoral candidate at Columbia University crossed the confines into Canada It felt like a collective exhale she explained But her relief was short-lived When Wong returned to New York she learned that U S Secretary of Homeland Guard Kristi Noem had posted a video of them in the airport on X calling them terrorist sympathizers Wong who is pursuing a PhD in urban planning has since been doxxed and inundated with threats I ve received death threats rape threats messages of folks saying they hope I m beheaded by Hamas she revealed Over the last sparse years university campuses have become key battlegrounds for labor rights with graduate pupil workers leading organizing drives aimed at improving working conditions A large number of of those same union members have been among the the majority outspoken critics of Israel s war in Gaza Their activism has drawn the ire of lawmakers who often equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism Critics describe the ongoing campaign targeting university budgets and pro-Palestinian trainee activists as a repressive attempt to silence dissent and chill political speech on campuses The attack on universities comes amid a broader right-wing offensive championed by the Trump administration and its allies against so-called woke ideology including diversity equity and inclusion programs in higher development Unions and their members are responding with protests lawsuits and statements condemning the administration and the universities they say are caving to pressure from the president and from Republican members of Congress and their donors More than foreign students and contemporary graduates have had their visas revoked as part of the Trump administration s crackdown on universities Iris Rosenblum-Sellers a graduate participant at UC Berkeley and member of UAW Local noted that the Trump administration s campaign against universities coincides with widespread protests against the administration s cuts to Social Prevention Medicare and Medicaid and that those protesting the targeting of pupil activists are keenly aware of this I think they rightly see the deportations and threats to international participant workers as an effort to suppress the kind of mass response we re seeing to these issues Rosenblum-Sellers noted From Berkeley to Boston more than foreign students and modern graduates have had their visas revoked as part of the Trump administration s crackdown on universities according to figures compiled by Inside Higher Ed Particular like Srinivasan had done little more than publish a insufficient social media posts supportive of Palestinian rights The the bulk high-profile occurrence involves Mahmoud Khalil a former graduate trainee at Columbia s School of International and Citizens Affairs as well as a former UAW Local member who played a central role in negotiating with the administration to end last year s occupation of Hamilton Hall a campus building Last month Khalil was detained by federal immigration agents at his apartment in front of his pregnant wife and he is now being held in a detention facility in rural Louisiana The Trump administration is also threatening to withhold tens of billions in federal National Institutes of Robustness grant funding to research universities Columbia faced the prospect of losing million in NIH grants after the administration s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism imposed a series of preconditions for the funds release The university ultimately complied with all of the task force s nine demands including agreeing to place its Middle Eastern South Asian and African Studies department under administrative receivership Columbia was the first of more than universities across the country to see protest encampments spring up on their campuses In NIH funding supported over jobs in the U S To protect the workforce labor has hit the streets Earlier this month a coalition of unions sponsored dozens of simultaneous Kill the Cuts demonstrations in cities across the country to protest the loss of NIH grants that fund scientific and medicinal research The American Association of University Professors sued the Trump administration in U S District Court in Massachusetts alleging that its detentions of foreign students are violating the First Amendment and terrorizing students and faculty After Khalil was detained the Communications Workers of America rank and file circulated a petition calling for his release and International Union of Painters and Allied Trades President Jimmy Williams Jr wrote in an op-ed in In These Times that this moment is a clarion call for the labor movement Harvard University made headlines last week when its president Alan Garber wrote in an open letter that he would not accede to the Trump administration s list of demands But particular prominent universities have sought to cooperate with the administration and Republican lawmakers a practice Ellen Schrecker a historian of academic freedom has called anticipatory obedience During McCarthyism she commented there were only a select scarce criminal prosecutions but they did have an impact The main thing though was that people were fired and in a large number of cases like in the universities they were blacklisted And that can shut you up pretty rapidly In a letter written from detention last month Khalil blames Columbia University for enabling the Department of Homeland Protection to target him and for bowing to federal pressure citing his arrest by ICE agents who separated him from his family as one example The day before his arrest he d emailed university agents expressing his fear that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home The day after Khalil was taken by federal agents his former union UAW Local publicly demanded the restoration of Columbia s so-called sanctuary status Since it s been Columbia s program not to allow immigration executives on campus without a warrant and mirroring New York City s sanctuary protections not to share the immigration status of students without a subpoena In March the University published a protocol stating exigent circumstances may allow ICE agents to enter university buildings without a warrant The crackdown on scholar protesters has delayed collective bargaining at Columbia According to Wong Local President Grant Miner had been pushing to include protections for international students in the union s contract with the university when he was expelled in mid-March His expulsion other students were either expelled suspended or had their degrees temporarily revoked occurred one day before a session between union negotiators and the university administration on the topic was scheduled to occur Miner was expelled for occupying Hamilton Hall a building that has been occupied at least four times throughout Columbia s history he wrote in The Nation After his expulsion he lost his job his strength benefits and his ability to represent his colleagues On the day of the expulsions Columbia issued a brief declaration on the sanctions imposed by the University Judicial Board While it referenced a process for the anticipated return of suspended students it made no mention of any procedures for reversing expulsions Miner s expulsion Wong explained sends a chilling message that nobody is safe from the Trump administration and nobody is safe from Columbia The national United Auto Workers union described Miner s removal as an attack on free speech and freedom of association If they can come for graduate workers if they can arrest deport expel or imprison union leaders and activists for their protected political speech then they can come for you For your contract For your paycheck For your family And for your rights the union noted in the declaration The National Labor Infrastructure for Ceasefire a grid of seven major national unions including the UAW and over union locals also issued statements opposing the threatened deportation of Khalil and Miner s expulsion and firing and called on the labor movement to reject racist scapegoating and conflating criticism of Israel s actions with antisemitism Columbia University s general affairs office did not respond to Capital Main s repeated requests for comment But Claire Shipman Columbia s acting president did address particular of the broader concerns in an open letter posted on April hours after the letter from Harvard University s president appeared Acknowledging the enormous anxiety felt by international students she wrote that the university would reject heavy-handed orchestration from the cabinet that could potentially damage our institution and undermine useful reforms that serve the best interests of our students and region UCLA lecturer Kristoffer Smemo is a labor historian at a campus that was the site of protest encampments and violent counterprotests last spring He mentioned universities face an existential choice with parallels to the Red Scare-era witch hunts Comply with the Trump administration s demands potentially compromising principles of academic freedom and free speech or resist and threat losing federal funding For him the choice is clear If we give in we re going to end up losing everything Smemo commented That seems to be the kind of knife s edge we re on right now Capital Main is an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports from California on the majority of pressing economic environmental and social issues of our time including economic inequality atmosphere change medical care threats to democracy hate and extremism and immigration Copyright Capital Main