A Columbia University doctoral student who expressed support for the “anticolonial liberation movement in Palestine” used the Trump administration’s revamped “CBP Home” app to self-deport to Canada about a week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked her student visa, the Department of Homeland Security announced Friday.
Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and doctoral candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation was “involved in activities supporting Hammas [sic], a terrorist organization,” according to the DHS announcement. The department shared footage from Tuesday of Srinivasan using the “CBP Home” app, the Trump administration’s newly transformed version of the Biden-era “CBP One” app that aims to streamline the self-deportation of illegal immigrants.
It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America.
When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.
I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers… pic.twitter.com/jR2uVVKGCM
— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) March 14, 2025
“We will continue to look for people that we would never have allowed into this country on student visas had we known they were going to do what they’ve done, but now that they’ve done it, we’re gonna get rid of them,” Rubio told reporters Friday morning from the G7 Summit in Canada. “When they said they were coming here to be students, they didn’t say they were coming here to occupy university buildings and vandalize them and tear them apart and hold campuses hostage. If they had told us that, we would never have given them a student visa.”
“In the days to come, you should expect more visas will be revoked as we identify people that we should never have allowed in because they lied to us,” Rubio added. “Every time we have a chance to revoke them, we will, because it’s not in the national interest of the United States for them to be here,” he added.
About two months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, Srinivasan signed a letter alongside other “Scholars of the Constructed Environment,” titled “Palestinian Liberation Is Our Collective Liberation.” The letter declared solidarity with the “anticolonial liberation movement in Palestine” and accused the U.S. and Israeli governments of perpetrating a “cycle of settler colonial violence.”
Srinivasan’s interests include the “historical geographies of capitalism and caste,” while her research focuses include “colonial rule” and “global capitalist restructuring,” according to her university webpage. The recipient of the prestigious Fulbright scholarship earned her master’s degree in “critical conservation” at Harvard University. Prior to beginning her Ph.D. program at Columbia, Srinivasan worked as a project associate at a D.C.-based environmental nonprofit where she “campaigned for critical landscapes and frontier communities at-risk from climate change.”
While at Columbia, Srinivasan was employed as a teaching assistant, according to a university directory. Last fall, she taught a course at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
In a Thursday night statement, Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong wrote that she was “heartbroken” that DHS agents, who presented the school with judicial warrants, had conducted searches in two student rooms.
“I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in two University residences tonight,” Armstrong wrote. “No one was arrested or detained. No items were removed, and no further action was taken.”
DHS also announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested another student, Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank, for overstaying her expired F-1 student visa, which had been terminated on Jan. 26, 2022, for lack of attendance. She was also arrested in April 2024 “for her involvement in pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University in New York City,” according to DHS. Columbia denied that Kordia was ever enrolled at the university.
On Saturday, ICE apprehended Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student activist and foreign national, after the State Department revoked his visa and green card over his pro-Hamas campus organizing. Two days later, Judge Jesse Furman paused Khalil’s deportation proceedings as the federal court considers a petition challenging his arrest. On Wednesday, Furman—an Obama appointee—instructed attorneys for both parties to submit a joint letter on Friday outlining further plans for arguments in the case.
Furman is a prolific Democratic donor, contributing over $20,000 to Democrats, including President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee. He also once threw out a terrorism lawsuit against the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Meanwhile, one of Khalil’s attorneys, Ramzi Kassem, has defended al Qaeda terrorists including Ahmed al-Darbi, an al Qaeda member convicted in 2017 for the bombing of a French oil tanker, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Kassem also defended multiple Guantanamo Bay detainees, including a “close associate” of Osama bin Laden. He went on to serve as an immigration policy adviser to former president Joe Biden on the White House’s Domestic Policy Council.
Srinivasan is not the first immigrant to self-deport this month. Diego de la Vega, an illegal immigrant who served as deputy communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), fled the United States for Colombia, the Free Beacon reported on March 7. He had arrived from Ecuador at age seven and overstayed his visitor’s visa.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
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