Indian student Ranjani Srinivasan ‘self-deports’ from US after visa revoked over Palestine protests

The Department said that Ranjani Srinivasan “was involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organisation” and left the US on March 11 after her student visa was revoked by the State Department

New York: An Indian student who participated in pro-Palestine protests in the US has “self-deported” herself after her student visa was revoked, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has announced.

The Department said on Friday that Ranjani Srinivasan “was involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organisation” and left the US on March 11 after her student visa was revoked by the State Department.

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A citizen of India, she was a doctoral student in urban planning at Columbia University, the Ground Zero of student protests in support of Palestine and against Israel over Gaza that swept the US last year. The university saw the violent takeover of a campus building, and scores of students were arrested when the university called in the police to quell the protests.

Noem said that it was “a privilege” to study in the US, but “when you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country”. Homeland Security Department said that it obtained a video of Srinivasan using an app of the Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agency to “self-deport”.

“I am glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathisers use the CBP Home app to self-deport”, Noem said. She posted a video of Srinivasan at an airport.

It was not clear if Srinivasan had been arrested in the protests or if she had expressed sympathy for Hamas because many of the protesters were only against Israel’s attack on Gaza in retribution for the Hamas terrorist attack on it.

Self-deporting – or leaving voluntarily before authorities take action – avoids the risk of her being put on a US military aircraft and sent home like the three planeloads of deportees who arrived in India. Srinivasan was doing research at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

According to the school, she has a bachelor’s degree from CEPT University in Ahmedabad and got her master’s degree from Harvard with Fulbright Nehru and Inlaks Scholarships. On the school website, she is shown with the gender-neutral “they” pronoun rather than she.

The site said that she had received support from the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard for her research, “Gold & Cyanide: Family, Caste, and the Post-extractive Landscape at Kolar Gold Fields”.

She had also worked for an environmental advocacy nonprofit in Washington on “frontier communities at risk from climate change” and as a researcher for the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.