Updated April 19, 2025 at 19:43 PM ET
All throughout the last academic year, Brown University buzzed with the reverberations of pro-Palestinian protests. There were regular rallies on the campus Main Green and a hunger strike. And during the course of two protests in an administration building that continued after business hours, 61 students were arrested for trespassing.
But this year, students at Brown say a culture of fear has overtaken the protest mood ever since the school punished demonstrators and banned its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. And they say that's growing with each action the Trump administration takes against the school, including the revoking of visas of campus community members, an expanded civil rights investigation into the school, and the threat of withdrawing $510 million of federal funding.
Palestinian Canadian doctoral student Lifta, identified by a childhood nickname due to her fears of deportation and detainment, said international community members at Brown are among the hardest hit by these crackdowns.
"A climate of fear, intimidation, censorship — that seems to be like the overwhelming atmosphere on campus," she said.
Lifta's concerns have grown more concrete since the Trump administration deported Brown Medical School professor Dr. Rasha Alawieh back to Lebanon. Alawieh was detained at Boston Logan International Airport after admitting to immigration officers that she had been one of the hundreds of thousands of attendees at the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The Trump administration has also revoked the visas of at least one student and several recent graduates on one year professional extensions of student visas.
Even before the news of Alawieh's deportation broke, Lifta canceled her plans to attend a conference and visit family in Canada. She is even asking her father not to come visit to celebrate her recent engagement. He's originally from the Palestinian territories.
"He's an older man, but he's just faced so much persecution at borders his whole life that I worry," she said. "The racial profiling I'm sure is going to be a problem for him, even on a Canadian passport."
Another Ph.D. candidate here on a student visa did not want to use her name out of concern she could be detained or deported by the Trump administration. She said she has secured a prestigious tenure-track position for next year but is considering declining it. She's transgender, and says that in the U.S. she's concerned she could wind up in a men's prison, but back home she "wouldn't be at the same risk of state violence."
She said trans people and Palestinian and Arab students aren't the only international students with concerns they could be targeted.
"There's a sense people feel more at risk generally," she said. "It's also interfacing with fears of funding now, which are tied to immigration, because if they're not able to keep their jobs, they're going to have to leave the country."
Other international students who do not feel vulnerable said they still feel that things have really changed on campus. German doctoral student Immanuel, who asked that NPR only use his middle name out of concerns that Brown could revoke his funding, said that funding sources for things like conferences or language training feel much less secure now.
"It's much less self-evident now that I will be supported by the university," he said.
The school has been preemptively tightening its belt since even before the Trump administration threatened to withhold $510 million in federal funding. This year, it cut Ph.D. admissions in half. And now Immanuel said he might not be able to find funding to study ancient Greek, which is a foundational skill for his training.
Immanuel says his mother, who grew up in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, where travel was heavily restricted and residents were closely surveilled, is coming to visit him this summer. He says it's ironic that she could now experience something similar traveling to the U.S.
"It's funny that my mother will visit here, and now she's facing these things, which she has experienced as a teenager a lot in East Germany," he said. "I'm thinking about, will she be fine traveling here, or will she get into trouble?"
Palestinian Canadian doctoral student Lifta says now is not the time for students to back down on their activism.
"We have to learn how to rebuild the morale in the face of excruciating loss, because we're in a position where we have a duty and obligation to continue," she said.
And after a quiet spring semester, the demonstrations at Brown are showing some signs of reappearing. On Friday, dozens of students protested on the campus Main Green, though one of the organizers, Simon Aron, said an important contingent was missing from the rally.
"This is such a scary moment for students, and even despite international students not being able to come, we still had this massive turnout," he said.
Aron also said the Student Activities Office at Brown had asked organizers to push the protest back one day, because of a concurrent naturalization ceremony that was taking place near the Main Green on Thursday. He said the office was concerned about the potential presence of federal immigration authorities on campus.
It's not yet clear whether Brown University will cede to demands the federal government might make, but last week hundreds of professors at Brown signed an open letter to the school's president Christina Paxson. They called on her to use the school's $7.2 billion endowment to protect against what they called an "unprecedented assault on higher education."
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