PEC Condemns the Attack on International Students in Michigan and Across the U.S.

The Lansing Area Peace Education Center condemns the current administration’s actions to terminate visas of international and immigrant students across the U.S., including at Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, Central Michigan University, and other universities and colleges around the state. Hundreds of students across the country have had their visas and status abruptly revoked, effectively uprooting their lives and access to education. This comes on the heels of the detention of Mahmoud Kahlil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal, and others targeted with no rationale other than for their dissent for the United State’s institutional complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The actions of Homeland Security to revoke student visas is a blatant attack on our system of higher education, our rights to due process, and our first amendment right to free speech. Have no doubt, the extension of the current administration’s anti-immigrant agenda to constrain and silence students who protest genocide, apartheid, and illegal occupation, is an effort to chill speech, stymie protest, and sow fear in anyone who opposes social injustice and rejects fascism.

The administrative leadership of too many U.S. universities, including the public universities of Michigan, have walked hand in hand with those seeking to dismantle the integrity of higher education as we know it. In giving credence to and promoting the misguided notion that antisemitism drives the protests and demands for divestment on U.S. campuses against Israel’s genocide in Palestine, universities greenlighted punishing, draconian policies on their students, faculty, and staff. Punitive measures taken by universities to crush dissent on campus, including suspending students, revoking their degrees, dissolving student groups, firing faculty, and authorizing police brutality on peaceful encampments, have opened up higher education to the recent cruelties of the Trump administration. If not rectified, our system of higher education will continue to weaken its own ability to resist authoritarianism for the foreseeable future.

We call on all universities to do everything in their power to preserve all students’ rights to free speech and to protect their international and immigrant students from being unjustly targeted and detained for exercising that right. Casting student protestors and international students as terrorists for denouncing a genocide has brought on all of us a form of tyrannous oppression that is determined to erode academia. Academic freedom to advance the honest and true narratives of human history has always endangered the will of authoritarian regimes. The response of Michigan universities, and of institutions of higher education across the U.S., must not be capitulation to authoritarianism and acquiescence to fascism; it must be in defense of students in solidarity with the oppressed.