By the time my flight reaches the Boston Logan port of entry, it is dark outside. Inside the terminal, a sign reads, “Visitors enter here,” and with it I am reminded of who I am in the eyes of this country. My education in America reducible to that, it appears: a visit. Beyond the sign extends a long queue of fellow international students returning to college from spring break, among them that junior in Winthrop House who sometimes wears a keffiyeh. Eventually, a Customs and Border Protection officer scans my Mexican passport. I watch her mouth stiffen. “Stand against the wall,” she commands.
I request an explanation. She replies impatiently that someone will escort me somewhere soon. Startled by her non-answer, I hold my breath. A few minutes later, another agent approaches; the first officer hands him my passport, and the second demands that I follow him. On our way downstairs, we stop to pick up two other Harvard sophomores, both American, one of whom I know because we took organic chemistry together as freshmen. They explain to me in whispers that they bought a bottle of whiskey at a duty-free liquor store in the Charles De Gaulle Airport: an illicit act, since both are still under 21. The scene feels too absurd to be real. What I am being detained for, I have yet to discover.
For a little under an hour, a third officer examines my documents. He is sitting at his desk, and a large monitor casts blue light on his face. His gaze is fixed on my Form I-20, a document certifying my eligibility to study in this country. He asks me a series of protocol questions: where I am travelling from (the Netherlands), what I was doing there (visiting my best friend), whether I have any sharp objects (no). His gloved hands proceed to inspect my backpack and carry-on. Finally, he lets me go. “You’re good.”
Only in the airport parking lot do I realize that the third officer has kept the folder with my documents, so I rush back to the site where he interrogated me. The back of my neck feels constricted, and my throat begins to tighten. A fourth officer kindly informs me that I must head to a poorly lit, tucked-away room, where a fifth officer yells at me. “What do you want from me?” he screams with anger. Eventually, after a few minutes, he hands me my precious folder.
I arrive at my dorm at 10:50 p.m., my body still shaking. I text my parents, and my dad calls me over WhatsApp. He and my mom take turns on his phone, the three of us threading together more questions than answers. Was I randomly selected, or did they choose me because I am an international student at Harvard? Did I forget my folder, or did they intentionally try to withhold my documents? I had recently begun writing op-eds for The Crimson—should I now self-censor and maintain a low profile, stay quiet?
I’m not in actual danger, I reassure them. Writing one pro-Palestinian article pales in comparison with what other international students have done. Many of them have attended protests—something I haven’t dared to do, not since coming to America. The prospect of losing my visa made me intensely anxious as a freshman, and it was this anxiety that prompted me to join The Crimson’s editorial board during my sophomore fall. I was hungry for a safe avenue to express my ideas. As a former science concentrator, I had only recently found that avenue in writing.
“Calladito te ves más bonito,” my mom says. Her reply is a phrase known too well by any Mexican: you look prettier when your mouth is shut. I know she is saying it out of fear, simply wanting me to stay safe. I feel too overwhelmed and jetlagged to challenge her. I tell her not to worry.
Four days after my incident at customs, six Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University. I was too anxious to leave my dorm that week, obsessively rewatching the surveillance footage of masked, plainclothes officers handcuffing Öztürk and taking away her belongings. It shocked me then that the only evidence wielded against Öztürk was a single op-ed she had co-authored in The Tufts Daily the year prior, a piece in which she called for Tufts University President Sunil Kumar to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and to “divest from companies with direct and indirect ties to Israel.” I, too, had written an op-ed criticizing my university’s investments tied to Israel. It made me anxious that writing could merit such punishment in this country.
I remain confused and overwhelmed by the events that followed. Beginning in April, the Harvard International Office (HIO) hosted multiple “know your rights” information sessions over Zoom. On April 16, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem threatened to revoke Harvard’s eligibility to host international students. Harvard Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick sent an email three days later, encouraging international students to “stay as focused as possible” on our academic work. A close friend, also an international student, started to make bad jokes about ICE agents chasing us down Plympton Street. Our situation became so surreal that it was hard to take things seriously. Eventually, on May 22, Noem called for the Department of Homeland Security to implement her April 16 threat. (It was later blocked by a federal judge, though the Trump administration has appealed.)
Noem declared that many international students are “anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators” who had participated in attacks against Jewish students. Rising hostility toward Jewish individuals indeed constitutes a serious problem, both at Harvard and in America writ large. University initiatives and research elsewhere have laid bare the alienation that many Jews on campus experience—including, though barely mentioned, Jewish students who hold pro-Palestinian viewpoints. But Noem’s order provided no evidence to support her assertion that international students were the culprits. I found this unsurprising. When we “visitors” are already deemed to be “radicalized lunatics” and “troublemakers” by the U.S. president, it is easy to label us as antisemites, too.
A WhatsApp group chat with hundreds of international students exploded minutes after Noem’s order. “I can’t wait for all of this bs from the trump administration to end,” texted one sophomore. “I’m so tired of being frustrated and anxious about their fascism all of the time.”
Feeling stressed, I video-called one of my blockmates. Born in the United States and raised in Central America, she was outside of the country at the time, buying groceries at the supermarket with her parents, all of them seemingly unbothered. “This will all pass,” her mother said in Spanish.
My parents reacted differently. “Start working on your transfer applications,” said my dad, and my mom agreed. I replied that they were getting ahead of themselves, that I would wait to hear from the HIO. I also admitted to them that I no longer wanted to stay in the States after graduation, not if I wanted to be a writer. “What’s most important is that you finish your degree,” my dad reminded me. “Then you can leave the country.”
Almost a month later, on June 23, I received a call from a close friend and Harvard classmate. Like me, she was born and raised in Mexico, so we spent a lot of time together during our freshman year, growing acclimated to life in America. As I picked up the phone, she was crying.
Earlier in the spring, she had been offered an internship at the Secretariat of the Economy in Mexico. Amidst all the uncertainty, however, she had started to doubt whether it was safe for her to travel back to Mexico from the U.S. Looking for support and guidance, she scheduled an online appointment with the HIO.
She would have to think about her priorities, the risks she was willing to take. “Tú qué harías?” my friend asked me. What would you do?
“Se veía harta,” my friend told me—she looked fed up—referring to the overworked HIO advisor with whom she had met. During their meeting, my friend had expressed her concerns about being unable to re-enter the country before the start of the fall semester. Late in May, she published a column in a Mexican newspaper in which she voiced her fear under the current U.S. administration. The advisor told her that she would have to decide what was more important to her: an internship in Mexico or her ability to return to the U.S. She would have to think about her priorities, the risks she was willing to take. “Tú qué harías?” my friend asked me. What would you do?
Her question did not present me with a hypothetical scenario. I had cancelled my plans to visit Mexico City earlier during the summer, worried about winding up in a similar or worse situation than what I had faced coming back from spring break. Knowing my answer would be disappointing, I recommended that she stay in Cambridge.
I thought about the call for days. I kept parsing through the HIO advisor’s reply, thinking about the issues that matter most to me, the risks I am willing to take. At the same time, I struggled to make sense of the reasons behind my silence. I am neither hateful, antisemitic, nor anti-American. Why had I stopped writing? Why should I be afraid?
I see nothing “radical” about rejecting fascism, nor do I see “lunacy” in criticizing an institution’s material complicity in genocide. But this view is just my opinion. Whether publishing it is a form of “troublemaking” has become less certain; it inevitably leads to the much harder question of whether writing holds the potential to change the world for the better.
I hope that it might. Over the last few months, I have learned that silence doesn’t.
