For the first time, an undergraduate pro-Palestinian protester is facing deportation
Yunseo Chung is suing the Trump administration after agents tried to deport her over a pro-Palestinian protest, part of a broader effort targeting non-citizen students.
A Columbia University undergraduate has sued President Donald Trump and members of his administration after federal agents visited her dorm in an effort to arrest and deport her.
Yunseo Chung, 21, is at least the third student to file suit against the Trump administration’s efforts to deport non-citizen students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, which Trump has billed as a strategy to fight antisemitism.
Both Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian protest leader at Columbia who has been arrested, and Momodou Taal, a Gambian-British student at Cornell University who has been told to turn himself in, have sued, saying that that the crackdown represents an unlawful incursion on their rights.
Chung's case is different from the other cases in several ways.
She is an undergraduate, not a graduate student. She is a legal permanent resident who was raised in the United States, where her family lives, after coming from South Korea at age 7.
She did not play a public role as a protest leader. And the Jewish and pro-Israel groups that have amassed dossiers about pro-Palestinian student activists, including Betar US and Canary Mission, had not publicly targeted her.
Betar US has said it turned over hundreds of names of pro-Palestinian student activists to the Trump administration to support Trump’s effort to deport “Hamas sympathizers” on college campuses. It did not immediately comment on social media regarding the reports about Chung.
A representative of the Department of Homeland Security told the New York Times that Chung was being sought for removal proceedings because she had “engaged in concerning conduct.” Federal agents sought her at her dorm and parents’ home and said her permanent legal status had been revoked, according to her lawsuit.
The college protest
Chung was one of several students arrested following a protest at Barnard College earlier this month, which took place after Columbia expelled students who disrupted a class on Israeli history. Hamas literature was distributed during the protest, according to footage shared by those present.
Chung’s lawsuit says she was not inside the protest and that she had been cited for “obstruction of governmental administration” after being unable to move when police ordered a crowd to disperse. A previous disciplinary hearing associated with a pro-Palestinian demonstration last year determined that she had not broken any rules, the lawsuit says.
Trump’s effort to deport pro-Palestinian students has so far divided American Jews. For some, the aggressive moves by the administration are long overdue and send the message that activities that create a hostile climate for Jewish students will not be tolerated.
Others say Jews depend on the First Amendment for their own security and that challenging the tenets of free speech in the name of fighting antisemitism recruits a largely liberal community into a White House agenda that undermines democracy.