As the Trump administration escalates its crackdown on campus dissent, unionized graduate students are increasingly caught in the crosshairs. Some, who are foreign students, have had their visas revoked. Others have seen vital research funding threatened. And student activists have become targets of online attacks, including from Trump supporters and a senior administration official.

Allie Wong, a graduate student at Columbia University, a U.S. citizen and a member of Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers Local 2710, 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 student 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 student at Columbia University, crossed the border into Canada. “It felt like a collective exhale,” she said. But her relief was short-lived. When Wong returned to New York she learned that U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security 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 said. 

Over the last few years, university campuses have become key battlegrounds for labor rights, with graduate student workers leading organizing drives aimed at improving working conditions. Many of those same union members have been among the most 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 student 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 education.

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.

Iris Rosenblum-Sellers, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and member of UAW Local 4811, noted that the Trump administration’s campaign against universities coincides with widespread protests against the administration’s cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and that those protesting the targeting of student activists are keenly aware of this. “I think they, rightly, see the deportations and threats to international student workers as an effort to suppress the kind of mass response we’re seeing to these issues,” Rosenblum-Sellers said.

From Berkeley to Boston, more than 1,400 foreign students and recent graduates have had their visas revoked as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities, according to data compiled by Inside Higher Ed. Some, like Srinivasan, had done little more than publish a few social media posts supportive of Palestinian rights.

The most high-profile case involves Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs as well as a former UAW Local 2710 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 Health (NIH) grant funding to research universities. Columbia faced the prospect of losing $400 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 100 universities across the country to see protest encampments spring up on their campuses. In 2023, NIH funding supported over 400,000 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 medical 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 this 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 some 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 said, “there were only a select few criminal prosecutions, but they did have an impact. The main thing, though, was that people were fired, and in many cases, like in the universities, they were blacklisted. And that can shut you up pretty quickly.”

In a letter written from detention last month, Khalil blames Columbia University for enabling the Department of Homeland Security to target him and for bowing to federal pressure, citing his arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who separated him from his family, as one example. The day before his arrest, he’d emailed university officials 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 2710, publicly demanded the restoration of Columbia’s so-called sanctuary status. Since 2016, it’s been Columbia’s policy not to allow immigration officials 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 student protesters has delayed collective bargaining at Columbia. According to Wong, Local 2710 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 — 21 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 health benefits and his ability to represent his colleagues.

On the day of the expulsions, Columbia issued a brief statement on the sanctions imposed by the University Judicial Board. While it referenced a process for the potential return of suspended students, it made no mention of any procedures for reversing expulsions. 

Miner’s expulsion, Wong said, 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 said in the statement. 

The National Labor Network for Ceasefire, a network of seven major national unions (including the UAW) and over 200 union locals, also released 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 public affairs office did not respond to Capital & Main’s repeated requests for comment. But Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, did address some of the broader concerns in an open letter posted on April 14, 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 government that could potentially damage our institution and undermine useful reforms that serve the best interests of our students and community.” 

UCLA lecturer Kristoffer Smemo is a labor historian at a campus that was the site of protest encampments and violent counterprotests last spring. He said 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 risk losing federal funding. For him, the choice is clear.

“If we give in, we’re going to end up losing everything,” Smemo said. “That seems to be the kind of knife’s edge we’re on right now.”

---