I am an international student. The Trump administration wants to scare me and my peers across the country into submission. No thanks, mate.

Like most international students, I chose to come to America because it’s the land of opportunity. In this place, liberty is not the gift of government but the inalienable right of every individual. The values I revere are now being attacked.

Last Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, accusing the university of maintaining an antisemitic environment and employing racist DEI policies. Secretary Kristi Noem’s letter left some decrying the Trump administration’s treatment of international students as pawns in their assault on elite colleges. They forget that this is the point. As our friends made anxious phone calls to helpless loved ones, the rest of us heard the message loud and clear. 

International students I speak to are scared. They fear lest they displease Mr. Trump by penning their opinions in the pages of student publications. They fear lest their academic inquiry rile the MAGA faithful. They fear lest their condemnation of a foreign government be branded as racism. They fear for good reason.

In March, Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk was grabbed from the street by masked ICE agents, whisked away to a Louisiana detention center in an unmarked car, and threatened with deportation. Why? Because she wrote a pro-Palestinian op-ed in a campus newspaper. 

Secretary of State Rubio made an example of her just as he had done with Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student and permanent resident, earlier that month. Detaining him on the grounds of his presence in the U.S. being adverse to American foreign policy interests, the White House later took to social media with the telling words, “Shalom, Mahmoud.”

Make no mistake: this is political intimidation by a clan of cowards.

A government cracking down on criticism of itself is one thing, but responding in such a way to criticism of another is something even more startling, no matter the political forces. The recent murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in DC shows anti-Semitism is a very real problem. This isn’t it. 

After watching what happened to Khalil and Ozturk, students who had previously expressed contentious opinions rushed to their campus publications in the hopes that editors would delete their pieces or scrub their names. I don’t blame them. The risks if they don’t are real. But intimidation demands subservience.

In the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, I wrote in defense of Israel. Today, with the same principles and affection at heart, we must not turn our backs on Gaza’s innocent sons and daughters. Speak and stay spoken. Before it’s too late. 

The Trump administration is hiding in plain sight. The Heritage Foundation launched Project Esther in October 2024 to stamp out the “anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement’.” Earlier this month, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said that the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus. Whether you call the United States a liberal democracy or a constitutional republic, it doesn’t matter: these moves are profoundly un-American.

When due process is left in the dust, all bets are off. In her letter to Harvard, Secretary Noem conditioned Harvard’s ability to enroll international students on a demand that it hand over “all audio or video footage… of any protest activity involving a nonimmigrant student on a Harvard University campus in the last five years.” That footage, inevitably, will feature more American students than international ones. A man named Gadsden has a flag for you.

Thankfully, Harvard is fighting back. Eventually, institutions like the University of Chicago that have shown the way before will have to do so again. International students–Israelis and Jews among us–are taking the brunt for now, but this won’t be the end of it.

In recent days, many have harkened back to the era of McCarthyism. The events of the last months threaten to trump that, and we must call them out. As the saying goes, if it looks like authoritarianism, swims like authoritarianism, and quacks like authoritarianism…