After more than 100 students disrupted an on-campus job fair last week, Cornell University vowed to suspend all of them. For Momodou Taal, the promise came with an additional worry: deportation.
Taal, a 30-year-old British graduate student and a prominent voice in Cornell’s pro-Palestinian protests, said this week that he is facing possible deportation as the university threatens to revoke his student visa.
Some on Cornell’s campus see Taal’s case as a telling example of how colleges are ratcheting up pressure on pro-Palestinian protesters this fall. Administrators say they have tightened policies to try to curb the chaos of last spring, while some students and faculty have raised alarms about what they see as a crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech.
Cornell’s interim protest policy, last updated in March, requires students to pre-register for overnight encampments and promises to respond to infractions of the policy “without resorting to force” by suspending violators. Officials plan to release a new draft policy this month. Cornell also has a new interim president, Michael Kotlikoff, who took office in July.
At the career fair last week, over 100 students marched to the Statler Hotel, located in the heart of Cornell’s campus, in support of a student-backed referendum calling for the university to cut financial ties with weapons manufacturers and other companies supporting Israel’s war in Gaza and demand an immediate ceasefire. According to The Cornell Daily Sun, the independent campus newspaper, protesters delivered the referendum to a Boeing representative at the fair, who took down the company’s tables about 20 minutes later.
Protesters had also intended to deliver the referendum to L3Harris — a technology manufacturer named in the student referendum — but the company’s table was empty.
Four days after the demonstration, Kotlikoff said he would hand down “immediate suspension or employment sanctions up to and including dismissal” to students who were in attendance. According to Kotlikoff, demonstrators knocked “off an officer’s body-worn camera,” “screamed into bullhorns and banged cymbals, pots and pans, resulting in medical complaints of potential hearing loss,” and “shouted profanity, disrupted display tables, and alarmed students who had been talking with employers.”
In a separate statement issued shortly after the event, the university said protesters “pushed and shoved” police officers, made guests feel “threatened,” and “denied [students] their ability to experience the career fair.” Reporters from The Cornell Daily Sun said they did not observe any physical violence toward law enforcement but did describe distress among recruiters, students, and administrators at the event.
Nick Wilson, a junior and student organizer for the Coalition for Mutual Liberation, a collection of on- and off-campus pro-Palestinian organizations, said Kotlikoff’s threat of mass suspensions is “a radical escalation” of the university’s response to student protests.
“That’s 150 angry parents. That’s 150 students missing from classes,” Wilson said. “I think he understands the kind of crisis that would create on campus, and we’ll see if he intends to follow through on that.” Wilson was among the six students suspended by Cornell for protesting in the spring. He said his suspension has been deferred as long as the university doesn’t accuse him of additional conduct violations.
While Kotlikoff said he would refer students “who engaged in criminal activity” to local authorities, Matthew Van Houten, the district attorney for Tompkins County, where Cornell is located, has said his office will not prosecute those arrested during protests.
Nationwide, student protesters suspended by their colleges in the past few months have faced extensive conduct proceedings, been required to write lengthy apology letters, and had their diplomas withheld. But for international students like Taal, suspensions also could put their student visas in jeopardy.
Under a post-9/11 federal policy, colleges are required to enter all student visas into a government database, and update entries if there are any changes to the visa’s status. International students who have been suspended more than once are in violation of federal regulations, and could have their student visas rescinded.
Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana studies who has attracted a large online following for his activism, was first suspended in April for participating in a student encampment and staying past the university’s 8 p.m. curfew. Cornell temporarily suspended him and barred him from returning to campus. Taal posted on X at the time that the suspensions were “a means of bringing down the encampment“ and “deliberately targeted students with precarious positions such as visa status.”
According to reporting by the student newspaper, Cornell police reported Taal to the administration after the job fair for violating the trespass order that accompanied his first suspension. The university’s student-conduct director then called him into a same-day meeting, The Cornell Daily Sun reported, where she handed him a physical copy of the trespass order, told him his student visa was being terminated, and referred him to a senior immigration adviser.
Joel M. Malina, a spokesperson for Cornell, wrote in an emailed statement to The Chronicle that colleges are required to terminate visas for any student who is not permitted to be enrolled due to a disciplinary action. Colleges, Malina continued, “can disallow enrollment and bar a student from campus, but do not have deportation powers.”
On Tuesday morning, Taal wrote on X that “the university is subverting their own processes. They will claim it’s not a deportation but effectively it is.” In an earlier post on Monday, he wrote, “I had no chance to dispute the charges, nor see the evidence or appeal. They informed me that I am effectively being deported by the weekend.” He didn’t respond to requests for an interview on Tuesday.
Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a Ph.D. student in English and a colleague of Taal’s in Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center, told The Chronicle that Taal is still in the United States and has not yet been unenrolled from the university. Thomas-Johnson said he believes Taal’s deportation would set “a dangerous precedent” for administrators’ responses to campus activism.
Cornell spokespeople did not respond to a question about whether the university has previously revoked an international student’s visa for violating campus policies during pro-Palestinian protests. They also did not answer questions about whether it had identified or suspended other attendees of the demonstration and how long Taal’s suspension would last.
Taal’s case has been met with swift pushback from community members and advocacy groups. The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil-rights and advocacy organization, condemned Cornell administrators’ actions on Tuesday. A petition calling on the university to reverse his suspension had been signed by over 2,700 students and faculty as of late Tuesday, according to Thomas-Johnson. A student demonstration is planned for Wednesday.
Wilson, the student organizer, said he believes Taal was a target because university officials perceive him to be a leader in student protests.
“Momodou has an international platform,” Wilson told The Chronicle. “He’s a very vocal advocate for Palestine on this campus and around the country, who has publicly represented, without fear, the coalition’s interests in the past. … It’s a shot to intimidate other students out of getting involved in pro-Palestinian activism.”
