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The Trump administration is mounting a high-level attempt to arrest and deport a Columbia University student from South Korea with a green card for what her attorneys describe as minor involvement in campus pro-Palestine protests — the latest in the White House’s rapidly escalating deportation campaign targeting non-citizen students for alleged antisemitism.
A lawsuit, filed Monday in New York federal court, calls the operation against Yunseo Chung, 21, an example of “shocking overreach” and an “unprecedented and unjustifiable assault” on free speech rights. The suit seeks to pause any attempts to arrest or deport Chung until the legal action plays out. She is not currently in immigration custody, The New York Times reports.
Attorneys said Chung, who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old, was a casual participant in the campus pro-Palestine protests that occurred at Columbia throughout 2023 and 2024, taking no leadership or public-facing roles, and facing no confirmed violations of school disciplinary policies.
Nonetheless, according to the lawsuit, Department of Homeland Security agents showed up at Chung’s parents’ house on March 9 and said they were looking for the student, an English and gender studies major.
That same day, Chung allegedly got a text from an individual seeking to speak to her on the phone, whom her attorneys later determined was an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Later that night, the suit claims, her attorney got a call from Perry Carbone, the assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who went on to claim the following day that the student’s visa had been revoked by the Secretary of State after Chung was deemed a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. An attorney informed the official that Chung was not in the U.S. on a visa, but rather had permanent resident status, to which he allegedly replied that that had been revoked, too.
The exchange mirrored, nearly word-for-word, one that another Columbia activist, Mahmoud Khalil, claimed took place when ICE agents detained him on similar accusations earlier this month.
On March 13, according to the suit, federal law enforcement agents searched two residences on Columbia’s campus, including Chung’s dorm. The warrant used in the searches cited a federal law meant to prosecute entities who are illegally “harboring” non-citizens.
The warrant accords with recent comments from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who said this month, in a speech about cracking down on campus antisemitism, that the Justice Department is investigating whether Columbia could be found guilty of harboring immigrants without legal status in the U.S.
Chung’s attorneys claim there’s little basis for the claim that the student is a threat to national interests.
In May of last year, the school initiated a disciplinary process against the student for allegedly putting up flyers featuring the university’s Board of Trustees with the words, “Wanted for Complicity in Genocide,” though it later found Chung hadn’t violated any school policies. (Human rights groups have accused the Israeli war in Gaza of being a genocidal attack, a charge which Israel and its ally the U.S. deny.)
On March 5, Chung was briefly arrested outside a campus building at a protest. Her attorneys say that amid the confusion of a crowded demonstration, she inadvertently was unable to follow police directions, and was given a desk appearance ticket for obstructing government administration. The arrest prompted an interim suspension from Columbia against the student.
The protest generated media attention, and online antisemitism watchdog groups published Chung’s name in the days just before the removal process against her was initiated. Monitoring groups have claimed credit for feeding the Trump administration names of activists who’ve later been slated for deportation.
The Independent has contacted the White House, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New York, and the State Department for comment.
“Yunseo Chung has engaged in concerning conduct, including when she was arrested by NYPD during a pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told The Independent via email. “She is being sought for removal proceedings under the immigration laws. Chung will have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge.”
Columbia declined to comment, citing obligations under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Shortly after being sent questions about the suit, the State Department sent The Independent a transcript of a Monday press briefing with Tammy Bruce, a department spokesperson.
“A visa and a green card are not birthrights,” Bruce said, when asked whether visa-seekers should be wary about coming to the U.S. if they planned to engage in disruptive protests. “These are privileges...Every sovereign nation in the world has an interest in controlling who comes in, knowing who’s coming into their country, what their intentions are.”
The administration has targeted multiple non-citizen student activists for removal over their role in Palestine activism, including Khalil, as well Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri and Cornell PhD Momodou Taal, who alleges immigration officials tried to arrest him in the midst of his lawsuit against the Trump administration’s executive orders on immigration and antisemitism. (The government maintains Taal’s visa was revoked over his past record on campus before the lawsuit began, and has accused Khalil of failing to disclose past diplomatic and humanitarian work on his immigration forms.)
The Trump administration has put particular pressure on Columbia, using a threat to withhold $400 million in federal funding as leverage to push the school to adopt a series of sweeping reforms, including hiring more police, reorganizing its Middle East-focused departments, banning face masks, and adopting a stance of institutional neutrality.
The administration has maintained that it’s merely using its influence to force federally-supported universities to uphold their civil rights obligations to protect Jewish students from antisemitism, while critics allege that the White House is using the aegis of stopping antisemitism to silence pro-Palestinian activism protected under the First Amendment
