Tanvi Misra
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tanvi.bsky.social
Tanvi Misra
@tanvi.bsky.social
3.9K followers 1.8K following 450 posts
writer +/ journo covering migration, cities, justice etc. words in The Nation, Politico Mag, The Baffler, The Nation, The New Republic, etc. teaching @ CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. tanvim.05 on signal. Tanvim27 on insta.
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tanvi.bsky.social
By June, only 24 people were left at the shelter. The gym there, which was lined on three sides with mattresses at the beginning, started to look deserted. Here's some photos from when I was there:
The Fe y Alegria gym - deserted. Games for migrants to play. White board on which a migrant was learning/teaching Spanish and English.
October 14, 2025 at 1:09 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
After legal pushback and human rights critique, Panama released them. Around 60 moved into a shelter run by a Jesuit nonprofit. There they waited for certainty.
On their first day, they got a hot meal and some much-needed reassurance from Father Marco Tulio Gómez, director of Fe y Alegría’s Panama operations. “I told them, ‘You are free here,’” he said. The diversity of languages and disparate cultural habits posed some initial difficulties. But the staff went to great lengths to accommodate them: They made it possible for the women who were uncomfortable sleeping in the open, in the vicinity of men, to use private quarters. During Ramadan, they brought in a local imam for the Muslims. They took the Christians to church. Jharana, who is Hindu, could not avail herself of these benefits, but nevertheless she felt welcomed. For the first time since she arrived in Panama, “I felt like I was in my home with my family,” Jharana said. “Two or so months went by just like this: waiting, waiting,” she said. By the third month, the outside visits became sparse and boredom set in. Without jobs or expendable income, the migrants didn’t have much to do. Some formed their own routines. An Afghan man named Hidayat Zazai, who had served in the Afghan special forces alongside the U.S. military and fled when the Taliban took over Kabul, said that he walked for hours around the neighborhood every day — often returning at dusk. A Nigerian man who fled armed militants back home and, for that reason, only wanted to go by his initials D.R.O., said he tended to keep to himself: work out during the day and take online Spanish lessons in the evening on his phone. “I normally sit alone and maybe make friends with my phone — it gives me company,” he said. The Nepali women walked to local stores for lotions and bright lipsticks; they played Uno nonstop for weeks, until they tired of that too; some days, they picked fights with each other just to have something to do. Jharana was gregarious and outgoing; she tried to find joy in the newness — strange fruit at the market or marveling at scenery. She passed time by making TikToks in the shelter kitchen or in the nearby parking lot of the Super 99 store under a palm tree, lip-syncing and dancing to Hindi and Nepali songs. “We’ve wasted so much time,” Jharana said. “Might as well get some laughs out of it.” She encouraged the others to “to go see things and talk to everyone” instead of stewing in their room, but they didn’t like being told this; they didn’t think there was any point. The Panamanian government had given out 30-day permits to the migrants who remained in the country starting in March, with the option of extending for up to 90 days. These recurring, short-term deferrals created a cloud of protracted uncertainty over the shelter that was perhaps strategic, Father Gomez said. The limbo was meant to wear the migrants down, push them to leave Panama. And it worked. After the first four weeks, the first group that “couldn’t take it” anymore, departed the shelter — frequently traveling north. After that, every month, about ten more followed.
October 14, 2025 at 1:09 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
I was there in June when after months of mistreatment and then, waiting for certainty at a shelter in Panama, Jharana and a few others decided to head back up north.
n a humid evening in early June, Jharana Chhetri said good-bye to the group of people she had come to know intimately over her last three months in Panama. Jharana had freshly showered and wore an orange and white T-shirt with a tie-dye design. She and a small group — two other Nepali women, one of whom was her closest friend, a Nepali boy she had taken under her wing, and a young woman from Afghanistan — were ready to leave what had been their home since March. It was already dark by the time their car backed into the dirt driveway of the migrant-reception center in the outer rim of Panama City. Jharana hugged each person who was staying behind. When some of the women started to tear up, she steadied their shoulders. “Be strong,” she said.
October 14, 2025 at 1:09 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
Lawyers and advocates working with such detainees worry about the complete erosion of due process.
For many detainees, the cumulative effect of the new policies is mandatory, indefinite detention, even after they’ve won in court. This is strategic, lawyers say. “ICE uses incarceration as a litigation strategy,” says Marty Rosenbluth, a Georgia-based immigration lawyer who represents several clients who remain detained after winning relief. The agency is hoping to wear the people it imprisons down until they “just give up and want to get sent back, rather than remain in these god-awful hell holes.” Frances Kelley of Lousiana Advocates of Immigrants in Detention said that her organization has been in contact with least 10 people in their region who remained detained after winning two kinds of relief against being deported to their home country—a withholding from removal order and protection under the anti-torture convention, both of which have higher burdens of proof than asylum. One person was detained for eight months after their ruling. This indefinite detention and uncertainty about whether detainees can even remain in the country contributes “to the psychological torture of ICE detention,” Kelley says. “You don’t know the way out.” Shortly after taking office, his administration started deporting swathes of people to countries where they had no ties, like Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Estawini—and even, after a Supreme Court battle, to South Sudan, a country in the midst of conflict. The court’s June ruling OKing the South Sudan deportations was a “disaster,” says Norris of Immigrant Defenders—it rendered immigration court decisions providing protection from deportation “meaningless” if migrants could nonetheless be shipped “off to some far-flung, war-torn country.” It almost happened to Adriana Quiroz Zapata, a 53-year-old former florist, who was granted protection from being sent back to Colombia after she proved it was very likely she would be tortured there. Zapata re-entered the US in 2022, fleeing rape and physical abuse inflicted by a former partner and his police officer friends. A Texas immigration judge ruled in February that these attacks took place with “the Colombian government’s willful acquiescence.” Despite the court ruling, ICE drove her to Mexico and tried to hand her off to authorities there...“Why did we bother to do a trial and win if you just were going to abandon her as an ‘illegal alien’ in another place?” says Zapata’s lawyer Lauren O’Neal.
September 22, 2025 at 4:34 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
The effect of all this:
An independent psychologist evaluated Laura in June and found her symptoms “far exceed[ed] the threshold” for depression, anxiety, and post traumatic stress disorders, and had “worsened considerably” over her year and a half in detention. Health records show that Laura’s chronic conditions—high blood pressure and a preexisting gastric ulcer—were inadequately treated. ICE treats you like a “living ghost,” she says from detention. “They don’t care if you die.” She cries frequently, during almost every phone conversation. She worries about the future of her children, currently in the care of a family friend, and how her prolonged detention has put immense financial strain on her sister in Canada. “It just goes on and on,” she says.
September 22, 2025 at 4:31 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
Several sources told me this is a result of a July nationwide detention directive:
Past ICE directives, most recently reiterated in 2021, say that the agency should “favor release” of people who have won asylum or other protections “absent exceptional concerns,” even if the government appeals that ruling. Today, ICE appears to either be ignoring these policies, or to have overridden them with new ones that keep them detained. Per a June 24 memo the agency shared in court, agency officials instructed that “field offices no longer have the option to discretionarily release aliens.” Multiple sources in communication with ICE employees say they’ve been informed that all releases of ICE detainees who have won some relief in court must be personally approved by Todd Lyons, the agency’s acting director; deportation officers have been told not to release such detainees and to make at least three attempts to send them to a third country.
September 22, 2025 at 4:22 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
There are no words to describe our outrage over the murder of Anas Al-Sharif and his colleagues as the Israelis boast of their war crimes and genocide in Gaza,” said National Writers Union President Larry Goldbetter. “Journalists in the US are acutely aware of and sickened by these actions. NWU and the 140 unions of the IFJ from every corner of the world stand in total solidarity with the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and the people of Gaza. The international solidarity of media workers, and all workers, will prove stronger than the horrors we witness today.”
August 12, 2025 at 4:50 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
Like…. wtf?
July 3, 2025 at 11:55 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
They were denied medication, medical care, hygiene products, privacy, proper food, and access to calls, per the complaint.
May 14, 2025 at 2:58 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
Both plaintiffs are moms with U.S. citizen children who were held for way longer than the 12-24 hours this facility is meant for, per the complaint. amicacenter.org/app/uploads/...
May 14, 2025 at 2:56 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
The facility has been the subject of civil rights complaints in the past (although it’s not an outlier in that sense) www.dhs.gov/sites/defaul...
Pg 1-2 of the link
May 4, 2025 at 6:31 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
Just as a reminder, ICE has arrested, detained and deported hundreds of US citizens in the past. www.gao.gov/products/gao...
April 17, 2025 at 11:27 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
This is a very new tone of messaging coming from the USCIS social media. As a reminder USCIS is not a law enforcement agency like ICE or CBP, but you can see the direction the Trump admin is taking it in.
April 15, 2025 at 6:59 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
Before his TRO was declined, Momodou Taal
told me his lawsuit was a stress test for American values like those enshrined in the first amendment. But when he announced his departure two days ago, he said he did not feel safe anymore.
In this context, Taal told Jewish Currents before ICE came to arrest him, lawsuits like his were functioning as a last resort “stress test” for the values the US claims as its bedrock, not only those pertaining to immigrants but also those enshrined in the First Amendment more broadly. But for Taal, at least, the stress test has failed. On March 31st, the day he announced his departure from the United States, the activist wrote that while his legal team was keenly preparing a second petition to halt his deportation, he was no longer certain that a favorable ruling would guarantee his personal safety and freedom to express his beliefs: “I have lost faith that I can walk the streets without being abducted.” As Taal left the US, he sounded a warning note for those who remained. What began as an assault on Palestine activism is “being used to wage a wholesale attack on any form of expression that challenges the oppressive and exploitative relations in the US,” he wrote, warning: “For every person who has remained silent, just know you are not safe either . . . If you have been led to think that your safety is only guaranteed by state kidnap, repression, deportation, the slaughter of children, and the suppression of the global majority, then let Gaza’s shards of glass be your mirror.”
April 2, 2025 at 5:24 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
Those who are from, or study, the rest of the world feel a sense of foreboding.
The moves also signal that the university may later accede to other anti-immigrant demands from the administration, such as its unprecedented call to hand over a list of pro-Palestinian protestors’ names and nationalities to the Justice Department as part of civil rights investigations. Students and faculty who come from—and study—other countries that don’t guarantee basic freedoms see these patterns with a familiar dread. “We know what authoritarianism does. We know how it operates, and we know its costs,” said the Columbia faculty member. “That’s the reason we came here, to have the academic freedom to pursue the topics that we want to pursue.” To be in the same position again here in America is “another kind of distress,” they said. “You’re like, ‘Oh, I know how this film is going to end.’”
April 2, 2025 at 5:22 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
They're not just affecting students but also faculty.
Some noncitizen faculty are also worried about becoming targets, and reported being afraid to keep studying and teaching subjects that relate in any way to histories of colonization and decolonization—even if their work is not about Palestine. One told Jewish Currents of canceling an event lest it be construed as pro-Palestinian, though the material concerned another part of the world. A March 25th First Amendment lawsuit filed by a group of unions representing university professors listed many such examples of its noncitizen members self-censoring on social media, canceling plans to attend academic conferences abroad, withdrawing from organizing with public-facing forums, and not attending protests out of “fear that their lawful advocacy will lead to arrest and deportation.” The Trump administration’s policies, the suit argued, are “terrorizing students and faculty,” an observation confirmed by campus affiliates who spoke to Jewish Currents about being afraid to be in their classes, offices, and on-campus homes because ICE could come looking for them there. This climate of fear had such a marked impact that, as per emails reviewed by Jewish Currents, Columbia’s provost, dean, and department chairs had to order students and faculty to attend classes in-person in the days after Khalil’s arrest, communications that only heightened many students’ and faculty’s sense of being abandoned at their most vulnerable. A faculty member who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation told Jewish Currents that because the university is not just a site of study but also an employer and landlord, it “has multiple vectors through which it can make us vulnerable”—vulnerabilities that it was doing little to mitigate, and in fact appeared to be exacerbating.
April 2, 2025 at 5:20 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
Obviously, the revocations/arrests + the spectacle around them is working in exactly the way ideological deportations are meant to:
These fears are widespread. “International students, undocumented students, students who have tenuous immigration status are extremely scared,” said Elora Mukherjee, a professor of law and the director of the Columbia immigration clinic. As they try to protect themselves, such students are stepping back from certain academic work and censoring their own political speech. “They are concerned about whether or not to post on social media,” Mukherjee said. “They are asking, ‘Should I attend a demonstration or not?’” An international student who asked to be anonymous for fear of reprisal told me that the recent arrests had sowed particular confusion and fear among campus activists. “The organizers, who are a small but committed crowd—they have been very severely affected by all that has happened,” the student said. They are “pretty worried about the repercussions of doing anything right now—even of having a meeting that is going to discuss what the best course of action now would be.” According to Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian and the author of Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States, this is the way that silencing via immigration enforcement has historically worked: While the share of people banned or deported for their views may be small, she said, those numbers “do not capture the ‘chilling effect,’ the fear and intimidation resulting in self-censorship.”
April 2, 2025 at 5:19 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
And here's what a former consular officer told me about the strategic ways legal powers already on the books are being used:
In pursuing these moves, the Trump administration is strategically using the broad legal powers of the State Department on the one hand, and the enforcement capacity of the DHS, and its sub-agencies ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), on the other. The former has long possessed enormous discretion with respect to visas in particular. “The standards for revoking a visa have always been largely arbitrary, as long as the Secretary of State says so,” said Josef Burton, a former consular officer and board member of the Consular Accountability Project, a group seeking to protect the rights of visa holders. Consular decisions aren’t open to appeal or review, and other agencies can use a State Department decision as a basis for taking further action. On the other hand, if the person is already inside the country, or at its gates, the State Department doesn’t have the authority to remove them—which is where the DHS comes in. “The State Department is laundering essentially unlimited executive authority through [the DHS],” said Burton, referring to how CBP agents can revoke valid visas and turn people back at airports and other ports of entry, while ICE can trigger removal proceedings inside the country by arresting, detaining, and deporting people. After 9/11, DHS agents used these powers, as well as the “ideological exclusion” provision of the Patriot Act, to block a broad range of visa holders, including scholars. In recent months, these agencies have started reprising that role amid pressure from the administration to ramp up detentions and deportations, at and inside the border. “People who have done nothing—no activism, no public speech, maybe an Instagram—are getting searched, detained, and deported at airports because every CBP agent, frothing Trump supporter or not, has been told that what DC wants to see is ‘Hamas supporters’ refused entry,” Burton said. “People who have done nothing—no activism, no public speech, maybe an Instagram—are getting searched, detained, and deported at airports because every CBP agent . . . has been told that what DC wants to see is ‘Hamas supporters’ refused entry.”
April 2, 2025 at 5:18 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
When Trump took office, he quickly lay the groundwork for what we're seeing, based on a roadmap that was laid out last year.
Two days after Khalil’s arrest, Trump wrote on Truth Social that ICE had “proudly” apprehended and detained the student, whom he described as a “radical foreign pro-Hamas.” “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump warned. In forecasting his administration’s intention to intensify the campus immigration crackdown, Trump was doing little more than echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a plan released as part of the group’s “Project 2025” vision for a second Trump term. Project Esther was billed as a strategy to “combat antisemitism” on college campuses, with a specific focus on protests opposing Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza. “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement’ is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN) that is trying to compel the US government to abandon its long-standing support for Israel,” it said, recommending that visa-holding faculty and students who met these criteria should be found in violation of their immigration status. Shortly after Trump took office in January, he signed executive orders to make this vision a reality, including one that directed the government to go after “foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats” and a second to “combat anti-semitism.” The fact-sheet related to the second order explicitly promised to “deport Hamas sympathizers and revoke student visas.” The executive orders laid the foundation for a series of policy shifts. On March 6th, Axios reported that the State Department had launched a “catch and revoke” program, which would use a mix of tactics—deploying artificial intelligence to scour students’ social media, matching visa databases and arrest records, and sifting through “Jewish students’ lawsuits”—to single out and revoke the visas of international students deemed to be “pro-Hamas.” (When asked by reporters, the State Department spokesperson did not confirm or deny that lists made by external organizations were being used to revoke visas.) According to government disclosures in Taal’s court case, some of the agents doing such enforcement work include members of the ICE department typically tasked with digging into transnational crime, who are now “proactively” scouring “open-source” information (like social media and news articles) to identify possible targets; as a result, it was ICE that first approached the State Department regarding the Cornell student activist’s legal status. The issuance of new visas is also informed by these executive orders, according to recently leaked internal memos, which show that Rubio making it “mandatory” for his consular officers to screen visa applicants with “extra vigilance” for potential grounds for denial—including for “public advocacy for terrorist activity or a terrorist organization,” and, most strikingly, “conduct that bears a hostile attitude toward US citizens or US culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).”
April 2, 2025 at 5:16 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
All the times they called in police to make arrests and took harsh disciplinary actions, they were putting international and immigrant students at risk. In addition, as one undergrad student pointed out, it didn't help that they looked the other way re; doxxing and compiling lists.
Something that is getting lost in the story is that Columbia called the cops on protesting students the same week that Khalil was taken,” said an international student at Columbia, a doctoral candidate from South Asia, who asked for anonymity for fear of targeting. Additionally, Columbia undergraduate Alex Bronzini-Vender said, universities have “essentially expedited” ICE’s identification of pro-Palestinian students by doing nothing to prevent Zionist actors from doxxing them. “Mahmoud Khalil was abducted shortly after his targeting by a digital harassment campaign by a small group of pro-Israel students and faculty, one of whom deliberately sought to draw Marco Rubio’s attention,” he said. Now, this infrastructure of university-based repression has become a potent weapon in the hands of an administration intent on using the full might of the US immigration system to deport noncitizens—and, ultimately, to silence dissent.
April 2, 2025 at 5:14 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
One faculty member I spoke to at Columbia had this to say re; why it is a battleground —> “It's Columbia because it's a university with a receptive Board of Trustees, and it's the university, because the university is the site that authoritarianism has the most to be afraid of.”
Targeted students and faculty believe it’s no coincidence that universities have become the primary battleground in the administration’s bid to curtail dissent through deportation. “The university is the site that authoritarianism has the most to be afraid of,” said a Columbia faculty member who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. At the same time, the leaders of such institutions have signaled their willingness to collaborate in silencing anti-war protests on campus, making their schools inviting terrain.
April 2, 2025 at 5:12 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
It zooms out re: some of the other prominent cases we've seen so far, including that of Momodou Taal from Cornell, who recently decided to leave the country.
Srinivasan is only the first known case among a growing number of visa holders targeted on ideological grounds. The State Department has recently said that it has revoked more than 300 visas; at least a handful of the revokees have also been apprehended by ICE. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on March 14th that a Palestinian student at Columbia whose visa had expired in January, and who was arrested in pro-Palestinian protests last year, was picked up by ICE off campus. That same day, a Brown University transplant surgeon on a work visa was turned back at Logan National Airport in Boston, despite a court order temporarily blocking her deportation. On March 17th, a scholar at Georgetown University, whose wife is Palestinian American and the daughter of a former Hamas adviser, was arrested by masked agents outside his home in Northern Virginia and whisked off to a detention center in Louisiana. On March 20th, the Justice Department contacted British Gambian Cornell University graduate student Momodou Taal, who had sued the Trump administration after Khalil’s arrest on first amendment grounds, relaying ICE’s request that Taal give himself up for deportation. (After a motion to get a court to halt the deportation failed, Taal announced that he would leave the country.) On March 25th, masked ICE agents in plain clothes arrested a Turkish Tufts doctoral student on a street off campus in Somerville, Massachusetts. On March 27th, an Iranian student from the University of Alabama was reportedly also detained. And these detentions, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, represent only the tip of the iceberg. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses,” he said at a press conference in March. “Every day I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.” (The State Department would not provide further details on the number of visas revoked when asked by Jewish Currents, and ICE declined to say how many international student records it had terminated.)
April 2, 2025 at 5:11 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
The piece starts with the case of Ranjani Srinivasan, the Indian doctoral student at Columbia who was dis-enrolled after ICE cancelled her status, even though she didn't have to be legally speaking.
Agents returned the next day, March 8th, and, mistaking the flatmate for Srinivasan, insisted through the door that “we were here yesterday, we’re here today, we’re going to be here tonight and tomorrow.” The flatmate sent an email to the university administration that day about how the “harassment” by ICE was affecting her, the international students in the building, and even the building doorman—an immigrant himself. Columbia replied with an acknowledgement of the concerns, but it was not clear that it took steps to address them. Instead, on March 9th, the international office emailed Srinivasan to inform her that not only had ICE terminated her student record and officially cancelled her legal status—which meant she would need to leave the US or risk detention, deportation, and future entry bans—but also that, despite there being no legal requirement to do so, Columbia had also withdrawn her enrollment. She needed to vacate student housing or face “appropriate proceedings,” the email noted. “I was stunned,” Srinivasan told Jewish Currents. “I could not believe that Columbia would allow this to happen.” From that point onward, she said, administrators “cut contact” with her. (Columbia did not respond to a request for comment.) Scared, Srinivasan fled to Canada on March 11th.
April 2, 2025 at 5:09 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
that's important ^ because attorneys suspect ICE is going to use these overcrowding, lengthy detentions to push back on local policies limiting detention/enforcement.
Amica attorneys believe that the Baltimore detentions may be part of the effort to push for more ICE facilities in the face of local opposition. Maryland’s Democratic-controlled legislature passed the Dignity Not Detention Act in 2021, which required ICE to close down all four of its detention centers in the state. And after the Trump administration rolled back constraints on ICE activity in “protected areas” like courthouses, schools, churches, and hospitals, an emergency bill seeking to impose such limits at the local level is currently under deliberation in the State Legislature. “Now ICE isn’t going to get the Maryland legislature to change, but I think they will use this in rhetoric to say, ‘Well, we have to hold people here because Maryland will comply with federal law or won’t help ICE.’” Lukens said. “That’s nonsense. This is really about overcrowding because of over-enforcement.”
March 17, 2025 at 3:24 PM
tanvi.bsky.social
hen I approached ICE for comment, they said that holding cells were not subject to regular detention standards + they had health services on site - but did NOT respond to follow-ups about the 12-hour rule that applies specifically to holding cells.
ICE said its holding cells were not subject to national detention guidelines but did not respond to questions about whether it is violating the standards specific to holding cells. A spokesperson wrote via email that the agency “remains committed to enforcing immigration laws fairly, safely, and humanely, and ensures that holding facilities operate in full compliance with federal laws, agency policies, and established standards to uphold the well-being and dignity of those in our custody.”
March 17, 2025 at 3:22 PM