"Rather than silence dissent, the government's actions have only emboldened voices demanding that basic rights be respected here, in Palestine, and beyond," says CUNY CLEAR attorney Mudassar Toppa.
Last week Secretary of State Marco Rubio estimated that he had already signed about 300 letters to revoke visas from students and other visitors to the United States.
“I don’t know actually if it’s primarily student visas,” he told reporters “It’s a combination of visas. They’re visitors to the country. If they’re taking activities that are counter to our foreign, to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa.”
He said he would not be revealing the criteria by which the administration was selecting people for deportation.
“We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people,” said Rubio.
“The administration is deliberately opaque about the criteria they are using to select its targets for deportation in order to sow panic among international students and stifle advocacy for Palestinian human rights and liberation,” Mudassar Toppa, a staff attorney from CLEAR, a legal nonprofit and clinic at CUNY School of Law, told Mondoweiss.
“The administration hopes that the chaos and uncertainty behind how this policy is being implemented will silence the voices of non-citizen students who advocate for a free Palestine and encourage them to voluntarily leave the country to avoid the specter of being abducted, detained, and deported,” he continued. “As we’ve seen, rather than silence dissent, the government’s actions have only emboldened voices demanding that basic rights be respected here, in Palestine, and beyond.” (more...)
Trump administration says it has revoked at least 300 visas for Palestine advocacy
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