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When I arrived to study in the United States, the terrifying spectre of deportation was the last thing on my mind.

As a Brit – a citizen of “the First World” – I was supposedly the beneficiary of the “special relationship” between the US and the United Kingdom.

As awful as it was, deportation happened to asylum seekers from Mexico or Haiti, in a world far removed from the snow-capped hills of Ithaca in upstate New York, home to Cornell University where I study. Or so I thought.

In January, as I taught a class on African American literature, I received a text message that caused me to nervously peer out the window for danger on the street below.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been spotted conducting raids in downtown Ithaca. I had reason to be afraid: the day before, President Donald Trump had signed an executive order asking agencies to consider deporting foreign students who, like me, faced disciplinary action for activism on Palestine.

The order requires universities to “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff” and calls on the secretary of education to provide an inventory of court and disciplinary cases involving alleged anti-Semitism at universities.

Mischaracterising the antiwar protests that took place across US campuses last year, Trump was quoted as saying in a White House fact sheet: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you”.

Trump’s words have since become reality. On Saturday night, ICE immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian who led the encampment at Columbia University, and transferred him to a detention facility in Louisiana, a thousand miles away from his heavily pregnant wife, who remains in New York City. His status as a permanent resident holding a green card did little to protect him.

By taking unprecedented steps to punish students for peaceful activism against Israel’s war in Gaza, universities paved the way for Trump’s order and the raids that have now begun.

These institutions face a fork in the road: they can comply with the order and become complicit in a crackdown on dissent, or they can stand up to Trump and his clan of bullies, protect their students and hold fast to their stated values of freedom of expression.

Universities must demonstrate whether they are for the First Amendment, or against it.

I, myself, was suspended following the student takeover of a career fair in September 2024, featuring Boeing and L3Harris – companies that have supplied Israel with some of the weapons it has used to carry out its war on the Palestinian population – described as genocide by leading human rights groups.

Many of the 100 or so students who took part in the protest were involved in previous actions, including a major encampment that lasted over two weeks and occupations of major academic buildings.

But in an unprecedented move, Cornell singled out 15 of us for suspension, mostly Black, Muslim, Arab and Jewish students.

Four of us are international students and could face deportation. In addition, Bianca Waked, a Canadian Arab student, who was suspended in April 2024 for leading a protest encampment on campus, also faces this prospect.

Though there was no suggestion that my actions were anti-Semitic or violent in any way during subsequent disciplinary proceedings, I was banished from campus and could not go to the library or visit my academic department.

As I live in a private residence on campus, I was effectively placed under a form of house arrest for a month before my suspension was lifted.

All this for taking a stand against the wanton annihilation of innocent people.

Still, I was one of the luckier ones.

Four students were arrested by campus police for shoving and resisting officers, the charges of three of them were either dropped or will be dismissed pending a period without further charges.

At least one student was evicted from campus accommodation, while others were prevented from attending Shabbat or Muslim prayers on campus.

In one high-profile case, Momodou Taal, a fellow British student, was suspended and threatened with deportation.

Experts have warned that the Trump presidency is intent on using Gaza protests as a tool to wage a wider “war on woke” against progressive thought at US universities.

And so by punishing us in this way, Cornell and other universities have left the door wide open for Trump’s book-burning insurgents to run riot.

The suspensions are embarrassing for an institution that prides itself on freedom of expression and a legacy of student protest. Indeed, freedom of expression was the 2023-2024 university theme.

Ironically, while punishing us for a takeover of a career fair, the university still boasts on its website about its progressive history, which includes the 1969 Willard Straight Hall takeover, in which Black students occupied the campus, protesting against institutional racism. On that occasion, Cornell was willing to meet some of the demands of its students and opened the first department of Africana Studies in the US.

The level of censorship at the university became a matter of public embarrassment on February 3, during a keynote lecture by the distinguished activist and academic Angela Davis.

Davis was introduced by one of Cornell’s most senior Black administrators, Marla Love, the dean who oversees the department that handed down my suspension and confinement.

Highlighting that Davis’s work “challenges us to confront the injustices of today”, Love billed the lecture as a meditation on the contemporary relevance of Dr Martin Luther King in tackling “war and militarism, imperialism, human global suffering and governmental abuses of power”. Davis did just that: she challenged injustice, just not in the way the university leadership would have hoped.

“It was from him]Dr Martin Luther King] that we learned about the indivisibility of justice. It is not possible to call for justice for some and leave others outside of the circle of justice”, she said, before going off-topic.

“I understand that there are those that cannot attend this evening because they have been banished from this community because of their efforts to criticise the anti-democratic forces of the State of Israel”, Davis said.

During the question-and-answer session, Davis’s discussant, an undergraduate student, revealed that the university had barred them from fielding questions about Palestine or, ironically, about censorship on campus. They did so anyway.

After lacerating Cornell for hampering campus protest, Davis, sporting her iconic grey afro, leaned over and asked: “So they gave you a list of topics that you weren’t supposed to talk about”?

“This is really scary”, she added.

While Davis’s talk offered a welcome morale boost to student activists, it will do little to remove the threat of deportation hanging over our heads.

Cornell must offer assurances that it will not work with immigration authorities and the Department of Homeland Security to remove us. Cracking down on legitimate protest and dissent will get it nowhere. It got Columbia nowhere already.

Last week, the Trump administration withdrew $400m in federal grants from Columbia University for supposedly failing to contain anti-Semitism and “illegal protests”. &nbsp, This is the same university that in late April 2024 called in the NYPD to clear a pro-Palestine student encampment. The raid, in which more than 100 were arrested and many beaten up, came days after the then-president, Minouche Shafik, promised to intensify Columbia’s crackdown on student protesters as she fawned before a powerful congressional committee.

All of this is hardly surprising because, after all, “this is America”, a country that, as the hit Childish Gambino song suggests, is steeped in systemic racial violence and overbearing law enforcement.

As non-citizen Black Muslims, Taal and I fall at the intersection of the US’s deep history of anti-Blackness, post-9/11 Islamophobia and now a resurgent xenophobia.

Unless Cornell takes a firm stand, it is unclear if our British passports will save us.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched three years ago has ravaged much of the war-torn nation and killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians.

Both sides have lost enormous numbers of soldiers.

But now on the streets in Russia, some feel hopeful about a possible end to the war and Western-imposed sanctions. Some are optimistic that the hostility with the United States, at its peak under former President Joe Biden, could end as President Donald Trump’s administration works to bring the warring sides to the negotiating table.

Fearing reprisals, all those interviewed in Russia refused to provide their surnames, given Moscow’s crackdown on dissent.

Katherine, a psychiatrist from St Petersburg who protested against the war in 2022, said she supports peace at all costs.

“My clients happily say, ‘Well, the Americans are on our side again. That’s good because America is a great country after all,’” she said.

“Everyone understands that it’s better to be friends with America than to fight. … In general, Russians don’t really like to hate although they know how. In fact, three years of war have not made Russians hate Ukrainians en masse. They rather sympathise with them. And if it’ll be possible not to hate Americans any more, any minute now, then that’s just great too. ”

Elena, also from St Petersburg, said: “Well done, Trump. Let him at least glue them both [Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine] to the negotiating table while he gobbles up their dinners. ”

Washington’s abrupt switch on its Ukraine policy has sent shockwaves through the world.

After a stormy meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy in the White House in February, Washington halted military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv.

Faced with the prospect of shouldering the burden for Kyiv’s defence alone, Ukraine’s European allies were jolted.

French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed deploying peacekeepers to Ukraine as part of a possible settlement and expanding France’s atomic arsenal.

Washington’s new position on Ukraine was welcomed, however, in Moscow.

“The new [US] administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently told Russian reporters.

Freezing military aid is a “solution that could really push the Kyiv regime towards a peace process”, Peskov added.

On March 5, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had once called Putin a “thug” and a “gangster”, described the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war between Washington and Moscow.

Peskov noted that “this completely echoes the position that our president and foreign minister have repeatedly voiced”.

Russian state-aligned media were also optimistic.

“Our idea of peace is clear and obvious: Everything will happen the way we see fit,” the Kremlin-aligned talk show host Vladimir Solovyov said.

“Pay attention that Trump didn’t say anything about Russia’s aggression, didn’t condemn [us], none of the Biden-style insults about Putin – not even close. By the way, I also didn’t hear ‘We’ll stand with you for as long as it takes,’” he said, referring to the former US president who once called Putin a “killer”.

Tensions between Ukraine and Washington appear to have eased since the fiery exchange in the White House between Trump and Zelenskyy. A team of Ukrainian delegates meeting in Saudi Arabia have agreed to a US-proposed 30-day ceasefire in the war. Russia said  it is studying the developments closely.

A few remained sceptical, however.

“They should do something, but what? Trump says one thing today and practically the opposite tomorrow,” said Evgeniya, who works as a translator and hails from St Petersburg. “Zelenskyy has insecurities, ambitions, … and Putin has a huge country with resources, an idiotic vision of history and crazy friend Medvedev,” she added, referring to former President Dmitry Medvedev, who presented himself as a liberal while in office but is now more hawkish than Putin himself.

Tatyana, a businesswoman from Moscow, despaired.

“Trump is colluding with what Russia has done to its own homeland, its own people, its own economy,” she said.

“Why did Putin collude with Trump? [Putin] is clearly disagreeable. Apart from [North] Korea and Iran and a few other distant countries, no one respects him. … He destroyed so much – so many cities, so many lives – for nothing, for no reason. Huge amounts of money are being invested in the military industry, but what will happen later when the war stops? There will be a bunch of unemployed, penniless people, and in general, it’s very scary. ”

Although Trump’s position towards Russia is worlds away from Biden’s, the new US administration is not entirely sympathetic to the Kremlin.

On Friday, Trump threatened to slap Russia with additional sanctions if Putin fails to take a seat at the negotiating table.

“Since Trump was elected president of the United States and to this day, I try not to indulge in excessive optimism about a peaceful settlement thanks to his efforts,” Alexey Malinin, founder of the Moscow-based Center for International Interaction and Cooperation and a member of the Digoriya expert club, told Al Jazeera.

“The conflict is very serious, the positions of the parties are largely irreconcilable and Ukraine is currently not demonstrating a readiness for an agreeable dialogue without floating castles and rose-tinted glasses. Now we see that Europe also supports Ukraine’s detachment from reality. And Trump himself, despite numerous demonstrative and insignificant curtsies in our direction, can abandon his peace mission at any moment.

“His negotiating approach often consists in the fact that if the opposing side does not agree with him, he changes his approach to intense pressure, where it is unpredictable what the outcome will be. ”

Malinin, however, welcomed Trump’s apparent willingness to hear out Moscow’s demands.

“A stable peace is possible under the following conditions: Ukraine officially abandons its desire to take Russian territories, refuses to join NATO and ensures incomplete demilitarisation: reduces its army, including heavy weapons,” he continued.

“And such an agreement must be officially supported by a wide range of intermediaries: not only the US and European countries but also countries that we trust more – for example, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Qatar and others. ”

However, the apparent US willingness to compromise with Russia may not be shared by Ukraine’s European allies or Ukrainians themselves.

“I think there is a window of opportunity that can be lost,” senior Russian analyst Oleg Ignatov of the International Crisis Group told Al Jazeera.

In April 2024, students across the United States were mobilising to demand an end to their universities ‘ complicity in the genocide in Gaza,

I wrote an article explaining why I saw the emergence of these protests, and especially those at Columbia University’s New York City campus, as a turning point in the global movement for Palestinian rights and liberation.

Now, almost a year later, the federal government is fiercely cracking down on these protests, and punishing the brave souls who played a leading role in them, to protect Israel from scrutiny and conceal its undeniable complicity in its genocide.

This month, Trump’s government, guided by his newly formed multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, announced the cancellation of roughly $400m in federal grants to Columbia University over what it deemed a “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment”.

Further, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio made a promise to revoke “the visas and green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported” – “Hamas supporter” in this context is of course just a code word for anyone who supports Palestinian rights and objects to Israel’s repeated violations of international law.

Rubio’s statement was not an empty threat. Earlier this week, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University who played a prominent role in last year’s Gaza protests there, was arrested by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) at his Manhattan flat, in front of his American wife, who is eight months pregnant. Despite holding a Green Card, he is now being threatened with deportation. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused the former student of “leading activities aligned to Hamas”. It is unclear whether he is facing any actual charges or being accused of a crime that could warrant this treatment.

The information currently available to us about the case of Mahmoud Khalil points to a grim reality: Washington is willing to deport a legal permanent resident for playing a prominent role in protests that were critical of and upsetting to Tel Aviv.

It seems the current administration is so committed to pleasing Israel and crushing students ‘ objections to genocide that it is willing and eager to stamp on core American rights, values and liberties.

But this unprecedented crackdown is also indicative of the success of these protests. Trump is willing to risk so much to silence the anti-genocide cry coming from American universities because these protests – once dismissed as meaningless “noise” on campuses detached from wider society – have succeeded in toppling a critical pillar of Israel’s well-established public relations strategy in the West.

Student protests put the Palestinian struggle at the top of the national agenda, and encouraged many Americans who are normally oblivious to the events in the Middle East and get their news and commentary strictly from pro-Israel sources, to pay attention to what’s happening in Gaza.

As they started to pay attention, many realised Israel is not a democratic oasis in a region full of war-crazed barbarians as it has long pretended to be, but a colonial outpost, an apartheid state currently enacting genocide upon a captive population.

As people turned to on-the-ground sources to understand what students on American campuses are so passionately protesting against, the contrived image of Israel as a moral force “merely defending itself from terrorists” has crumbled. This is not just sentiment. In a Gallup poll published this month, Americans ‘ support for Israel polled at an all-time low, and sympathy for the Palestinian plight was at an all-time high. The American administration’s ongoing clampdown on student protesters is a testament to its desperation to save this crumbling facade.

In its efforts to silence criticism of Israel on American campuses, the American administration is following a well-worn playbook. Taking its cues from Tel Aviv, it is conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and then claiming it must stamp out anti-Zionism just like it works to stamp out anti-Semitism, in the name of public safety and “shared values”.

This script has gained increased traction in Congress since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. In December 2023, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a measure (House Resolution 894) that rejects the “drastic rise of anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world” and then goes on to “clearly and firmly” state that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. In so doing, it classifies any criticism of the state of Israel and its actions as an attack on the Jewish people.

The efforts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism to silence pro-Palestinian activism and malign those supporting Palestinian rights as hateful are also gaining ground in universities amid the Trump administration’s crackdown.

In January of this year, faced with two lawsuits that accused it of not doing enough to prevent anti-Semitic harassment on its campus, Harvard University agreed to adopt a broad definition of anti-Semitism to reach a settlement. This definition – a product of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) – considers certain cases of anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli criticism as anti-Semitism. Many universities facing similar lawsuits, or merely scared of attracting the ire of the Trump administration and losing federal funding, are expected to follow suit.

But none of these are proving enough to stop the people in the West from recognising the truth about Israel.

For many years, Israel managed to sell itself to the American public as a small but proud democracy, heroically fending off existential threats. But the carnage unfolding in Gaza has forced Americans – and the Western world – to reckon with the horrifying truth behind that tale. The Israeli military’s indiscriminate shelling and ground invasions have laid waste to the entirety of Gaza, decimating families and turning schools and hospitals into rubble.

Far from a small outpost of “civilisation” in a “barbaric” region, Israel is a ruthless US-backed nuclear-armed power with one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world, attacking Indigenous people to keep them imprisoned in a small corner of their own land. It uses a largely American arsenal to regularly “mow the lawn” in Gaza and the West Bank, steal more land by expanding its illegal settlements, and keeping Gaza under a land, air and sea blockade.

As a genocide in Gaza unfolded over the past year and a half, photographs of dismembered children filled timelines as protesters across the US, and especially in university campuses, put the tragic realities of life under US-supported Israeli occupation under the spotlight. What is left of Israel’s carefully curated image began to crumble.

Politicians who support the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism claim they are doing so to combat hatred. Yet, we see, time and again, how these same forces remain silent when Jewish activists are expelled from protests or face police violence for standing with Palestinians. If their genuine concern was anti-Semitism, they would be equally committed to defending the rights and safety of Jewish people who align with the Palestinian cause. Instead, they use the mere whisper of “antiSemitism” to smear entire protest movements, all while funnelling billions in aid to a foreign government that has systematically denied Palestinians their humanity and statehood for more than seven decades.

The truth is, the student activists at Columbia – like those at countless other universities – did not invite oppression or orchestrate some campaign of hate. They stood up for Palestinian human rights. They urged their institution to stop profiting from, or ignoring, the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. In return, the federal government is punishing them and their school with savage fury, ensuring no academic institution dares replicate their protest without risking financial devastation.