Fearing Trump's visa crackdown, college students race to scrub op-eds

The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper at one of America's most prominent universities, is facing a challenge unlike any in its 152-year history.

- Xavier Martinez

Students—particularly those with-out U.S. citizenship—are asking to have their names removed from articles for fear of backlash by immigration officials.

Some requests are simple: Take down a byline from an old opinion column. Others ask editors to scrub entire articles from websites. In other instances, students who might have been quoted in a published story now want their names removed.

Such appeals have skyrocketed, according to Crimson President McKenna McKrell, 21. The publication recently fielded 10 requests over two weeks, one concerning an article published more than a decade ago.

The nationwide surge began last month after Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national authorized to study at Tufts University, was detained by immigration officials in Massachusetts. The Trump administration said it revoked hundreds of student visas—including Ozturk's—over the students' participation in pro-Palestinian activities.

Ozturk had co-published an opinion piece in support of the Palestinian territories in Tufts's student newspaper a year earlier. The government cited the article as evidence in immigration hearings.

A growing predicament

Now, dozens of editors, at publications ranging from the Stanford Daily to the Alligator at the University of Florida, say students are asking to be anonymized or erased from published content related to the Trump administration and the Israel-Gaza war.

Dartmouth College's student-newspaper editorial board wrote recently that it had received a "tsunami" of such requests from international students.

"Students come to the newsroom, hands clasped, to plead with us to remove their names from our website," the board wrote.