Federal authorities have arrested college students and professors at various universities in the United States ever since the Trump administration initiated measures against individuals believed to have ties to Hamas or expired visas.
The administration is currently encountering legal disputes surrounding at least two incidents of student detentions, although this figure is anticipated to rise in the near future.
According to national security and human rights attorney Irina Tsukerman, speaking to Fox News Digital, these apprehensions are not arbitrary law enforcement actions. Instead, they form part of a broader domestic security strategy that includes probing universities for enabling illegal behaviors such as antisemitism, violence, supporting terrorist groups, and other transgressions that have caused significant distress and fear among students, faculty, and the public.
Tsukerman noted that President Donald Trump signed executive orders to combat antisemitism on college campuses and illegal immigration soon after taking office, so the arrests “should have come as no surprise.”
ICE detained an unnamed, international graduate student at the University of Minnesota last month.
The university said the student, who was enrolled at UM’s Carlson School of Management, was arrested at an off-campus residence.
“This is not related to student protests,” a senior DHS official told Fox News Digital in a statement at the time. “The individual in question was arrested after a visa revocation by the State Dept. related to a prior criminal history for a DUI.”
Tsukerman, the national security and human rights lawyer who spoke with Fox News Digital, said “no one has an automatic right to enter the” United States.
“It can be reviewed by the U.S. government. It can be denied on the basis of security threats it presents, and even if you are a legal resident, if you lie on your application, or if you engage in repeated acts of violence or other criminal offenses, or even if simply travel out of country for longer than the law provides, you can be denied a path to citizenship and you can be deported, and we are seeing that,” she explained.
Questions do remain, however, about the recent deportations and how they will impact free speech on college campuses.
ICE detained an unnamed, international graduate student at the University of Minnesota last month. (University of Minnesota)
“There are many people who are concerned that while the Trump administration is doing the right thing in reviewing individuals who may be presenting a danger to the country and to fellow students and faculty on campuses, the way to go about it is not necessarily clear,” Tsukerman said.
She also suggested the arrests and deportations could “backfire with future administrations” that “hold a completely different ideological or political line and who decide that a different political perspective is unfounded and people should be deported for that reason.”
“If you start mass deportation based simply on ideology alone and without weighing in on how much of it is crossing the line of outright extremism and how much is simple political disagreement, you can create a very uncomfortable climate that becomes unwelcoming to people who can contribute, who can change their minds, who could be persuaded by better education and who can evolve as they study or work in the United States,” she said.
Fox News’ Alexis McAdams, Danielle Wallace, Rachel Wolf, Sarah Rumpf, Cameron Arcand, Christina Shaw and Pilar Arias contributed to this report.
