Did Columbia fail a promising student now facing foreign exile?

Unquestionably, Yunseo Chung is one bright student, the sort most professors would love to teach. Sadly for her, however, the limits of her education at Columbia University are cruelly becoming all too apparent. They may get her tossed out of the country.
The Columbia junior is carrying a 3.99 grade point average, has made Dean’s List every semester since she enrolled, and she’s been involved with the college literary magazine, Quarto, and the undergrad law review. Apparently aiming for a legal career, Chung has also pursued internships at The Urban Justice Center, The Innocence Project and Federal Defenders of New York.
But, thanks to shortcomings in her schooling about the Middle East and, probably, post-adolescent naivete, the Korean-born Chung now is getting a legal tutorial of a sort she could never have wanted. The Trump Administration is eager to deport Chung, who came to the U.S. as a 7-year-old, brought here by a graduate-student father.

“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 CNN. “Chung will have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge.”
The spokesperson said Chung, 21, “is being sought for removal proceedings under the immigration laws.”
The Trump Administration is chasing after Chung, a legal permanent resident of the U.S., because she took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the university last spring and in protests of related student expulsions more recently. She appears to be in hiding.
Her lawyers have brought suit against Trump to enable her to stay in school and in the U.S., which the court papers call her “one and only home.” The suit adds, “Her immediate family lives here, her friends are here, and her plans for the future all include living in the United States.”
Like so many idealistic naifs who took part in the nationwide campus uprising against the Gaza War, Chung appears to be a victim both of Trump’s overreach and political and historical ignorance that abounds among college students. An English and women’s studies major, Chung seems likely to have been driven by an understandable horror at the bloodshed in the Middle East. Her compassion for at least some of the innocent victims is unsurprising, especially for a seemingly sensitive college student.
When she hasn’t been planning to help low-income New Yorkers through the justice center or to free unjustly convicted innocents, she has been dabbling in poetry, fiction and art at the school magazine. If she has had much political or historical schooling at the university, it isn’t apparent.
As with the other protestors, it is likely that Chung’s sensibility has been terribly misinformed, her compassion misdirected.
Recall that some departments at Columbia are hotbeds of anti-Zionism. Has Chung’s coursework has been influenced by that? One can only speculate for now. But one must also wonder whether things would be different if the university had required her – and other protestors – to take coursework that would better inform them about Middle East history. Columbia’s vaunted core curriculum could benefit from some of that.
If Chung were required to take truly fair and balanced studies as the price of returning to classes this year, might she be better off now? If she knew more of the long history of Israel’s victimization by terrorists, of the long legacy of Palestinian failures to respond to peace efforts, would she look differently at things? If she grasped the broader context in which the barbarities of Oct. 7, 2023, are just one horrific part, would she have protested against Hamas, not Israel?
Since the student uprisings, Columbia has been probing the depth of antisemitism on the campus. Just recently, in response to Trump Administration pressure, the school agreed to review its course offerings to make sure there is fairness and balance in them about the Mideast.
Regrettably for Chung, that review is coming too late. She now seems fated to become a poster child for Trumpian excesses in treating student protestors. As her lawsuit argues, “officials at the highest echelons of government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike.”
Certainly, there’s no shortage of evidence for that claim. At a Las Vegas rally in October 2023, then-candidate Trump pledged to “terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities, and get them the hell out of our country.”In response to last spring’s Gaza Solidarity Encampments, Trump said: “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
Chung doesn’t dispute her activity in the demonstrations.
“Since 2023, along with hundreds of her peers, Ms. Chung has also participated in some student protests and demonstrations on Columbia University’s campus related to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the devastating toll it has taken on Palestinian civilians,” Chung’s lawsuit says.
As a result of those demonstrations, Chung has run afoul of Trump’s promises to target “leftist, anti-American colleges and universities,” the document says. It cited White House statements that the president was fulfilling a campaign promise to deport Hamas sympathizers and send a message to “resident aliens who participated in pro-jihadist protests” that the feds “will find you … and deport you.”
Under Trump’s orders, authorities have pursued several high profile cases, at Columbia and elsewhere, along with Chung’s.

Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student and green-card holder who is married to an American, was arrested by ICE about two weeks ago and detained in Louisiana, as The Washington Post reported. One other graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, self-deported to Canada after the State Department revoked her visa. A third reportedly former student protestor, Leqaa Kordea, was arrested and moved to Prairieland, Texas.
People at Columbia aren’t the only ones under the gun. Indian national Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University on a J-1 temporary visa, was detained by ICE last week over social media posts and because his wife, a U.S. citizen, is the daughter of a former Hamas adviser, according to the newspaper. The State Department also revoked the student visa for Momodou Taal, a doctoral student in Africana Studies at Cornell University and pro-Palestinian activist.
And Brown University assistant professor and kidney transplant specialist Rasha Alawieh, was deported to Lebanon on March 14, despite a restraining order to keep her in the country. She admitted to attending the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah on a recent family visit.
To be sure, Chung seems to have been a follower, not a leader, in the Columbia and Barnard protests. Like many others, she is a sheep, not a shepherd.
She visited a campus encampment numerous times in April. Later, in May, she was accused by the school of vandalism for posting flyers on campus saying that trustees were “Wanted for Complicity in Genocide.” But the school dropped the poster matter.
Then this year, when Columbia expelled three Barnard College students – two for disrupting a class in January and one for taking part in a building occupation last spring – Chung was among students who early in March protested the expulsions. She and others were arrested, ticketed and released. Two days after the university suspended her, federal agents knocked on her parents’ door looking for her, and a few days later agents came to her dorm at night to search it.
Alerted by the university that she was being sought, she managed to avoid being caught. So far, she has stayed ahead in a tortuous cat and mouse game. At one point, an agent with Homeland Security Investigations texted her, writing: “Hi, Yunseo. This is Audrey from the police. My job is to reach out to you and see if you have any questions about your recent arrest and the process going forward. When are [sic] available for a phone call?”
According to her lawsuit, Chung’s role in the protests didn’t go much further than running with her peers. The idea that she might compromise U.S. foreign policy interests – a claim in the case against Khalil – seems absurd on its face.
“Ms. Chung has not made public statements to the press or otherwise assumed a high-profile role in these protests,” the suit says. “She was, rather, one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns.”
But it’s clear that Trump is determined to pound an iron fist on protestors, particularly at Columbia. He seems to have a particular loathing for the university, which recently acquiesced to a host of demands he made after cutting $400 million in federal funding from the school.
The government’s actions are sure to sit poorly among many academics. They already are generating heat among some.

“The Trump administration is now trying to deport a permanent resident who has been in the US since she was 7 for what appears to be only a very minor role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations,” ethics and economics Associate Professor Itai Sher of the University of Massachusetts Amherst said on X. “Absolutely chilling to free speech.”
And, even as he has defended the rights of protestors to speak out, the Massachusetts professor has no use for antisemitism. A few weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities in Israel, Sher posted: “It is not antisemitic to go to a protest in support of Palestinians or to be harshly critical of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. However I can never recall seeing the level of antisemitism that I am seeing now.”
An adjunct professor of criminology at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast weighed in, too. “This is frightening,” Kerry Carrington said on X. “Pro-Palestinian Student residents of US born elsewhere targeted for deportation. #2025=1984 Orwell’s dystopia.”
The dean at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, Joel Hellman, added his voice in discussing the Suri detention.
“As Dean, I am deeply troubled by the chilling effect such events could have on freedom of expression on this campus, which is, of course, at the very core of our mission,” Hellman wrote in a note to faculty and staff. “Our commitment to fostering open inquiry, deliberation and debate has not always made for a comfortable campus, but I believe that time has shown that it has played a key role in maintaining our University values. This has allowed SFS to stay true to its commitment to promote diplomacy and understanding in an increasingly polarized world. We expect that the legal system will adjudicate this case fairly.”
Will the system do so in that case and the others?
Soon enough, Chung will have to surface to face the full might of Trump’s government. If the university had truly educated her – and so many others – perhaps she would not be feeling the weight of that crushing burden. One can only hope that she faces an immigration judge who respects free speech and understands idealistic, if uninformed, young people. And, if change can come to Columbia, others may not have to bear such weight in coming years.