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28-03-2025
NEW YORK/ CHENNAI: It had to be spam. That’s what 37-year-old Ranjani Srinivasan thought when she first received an email from the United States consulate in Chennai, the southern Indian city where the Columbia University PhD candidate is from, telling her that her visa had been cancelled.
The email, which arrived at midnight, had slipped past Srinivasan’s tired eyes before she went to bed but on Thursday, March 6, at about 7:50am in New York City, it was almost the first thing she saw when she stirred awake in her Columbia-owned apartment. Still groggy, she reached for her phone, its screen glowing in the dim morning haze.
She turned to her PhD cohort on their WhatsApp group to check if anyone else had received similar emails about their visas but no one had. Now uneasy, Srinivasan promptly entered her details into the US online immigration website. “It said my visa had been revoked. That’s when I started getting scared,” she recalls.
It was the start of 10 days of confusion and fear for Srinivasan that culminated in her name and grainy airport camera image making global headlines after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused her of being a “terrorist sympathizer” on X.
By then, Srinivasan was in Canada, staying with friends and family, having flown out of New York on March 11, four days before Noem’s post, after concluding that she could be arrested even though the US government has still not made clear whether she is accused of any crime. She rejects the suggestion that she is supportive of terrorists, but assumes her visa was revoked because of online support for Palestine as Israel’s brutal war on Gaza continues and she recalls how she spent those final few days in New York before she left, unable to sleep and barely able to eat, jumping at every strange noise, a life she does not want to risk returning to.
The knock on the door
At about 8:30am, she emailed Columbia’s International Students and Scholars Office (ISSO), seeking clarification on what the visa revocation meant for her status in the US. There was no emergency hotline to call.
“When they didn’t reply, I reached out to my dean and adviser everyone. They had to pressure ISSO to respond.”
It wasn’t until late afternoon that she finally heard back. In their written response, the ISSO assured her that she was “perfectly fine” and that her Form I-20, the fundamental document that foreign students in the US need to stay there legally remained valid.
The ISSO then asked her to schedule an adviser appointment. Initially, they offered her a slot for the following Tuesday but when she insisted the matter was urgent, the office moved the meeting up, scheduling it for the next day, Thursday, March 7.
At 10:30am the next day, she logged onto a Zoom call with the ISSO representative, who reassured her again that her Form I-20 was still valid.
“The moment I got this info, I felt much lighter,” Ranjani recalls. “I started planning when I could go back to the field [for research].” In December 2024, her visa originally set to expire in August 2025 had been renewed until 2029. She wondered about possible reasons why her visa had been revoked.
“Maybe they just gave me too long of a visa,” she remembers thinking.
“All these things were running through my head. I was also considering whether I should resume teaching my 60 students, start working again on guiding them” but 10 minutes into the Zoom call, there was a knock on the door.
Her American flatmate, who was at home at the time, felt there was something unusual about the knock. “Without opening the door, she asked them to identify themselves,” Srinivasan says. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
