As the Trump administration escalates its crackdown on campus dissent, unionized graduate students are increasingly caught in the crosshairs. Some, who are foreign students, have had their visas revoked. Others have seen vital research funding threatened. And student activists have become targets of online attacks, including from Trump supporters and a senior administration official.

Allie Wong, a graduate student at Columbia University, a U.S. citizen and a member of Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers Local 2710, has experienced that pressure firsthand. Last month, she accompanied fellow union member Ranjani Srinivasan as she fled to Toronto fearing deportation. The State Department had just revoked Srinivasan’s student visa, inviting her to “self-deport,” and federal immigration agents had repeatedly visited her university-owned apartment.

Wong remembered the relief she felt after she and Srinivasan, who is also a doctoral student at Columbia University, crossed the border into Canada. “It felt like a collective exhale,” she said. But her relief was short-lived. When Wong returned to New York she learned that U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had posted a video of them in the airport on X, calling them “terrorist sympathizers.” 

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