U.S. Immigration Post

BY: The Harvard Crimson, CNN, PEN.org August 27, 2019

U.S. Immigration officers cancelled an incoming Harvard freshman’s U.S. visa and forced him to leave the country Friday evening. The Harvard Crimson reports Ismail B. Ajjawi, a 17-year-old Palestinian student from Lebanon, was turned away at the Boston airport because of posts on his friends’ social media feeds.

When Harvard University’s dorms opened their doors to first-year students on Tuesday, one was missing. Ismail Ajjawi, an incoming first-year student, was denied entry to the United States last week, according to the university.”

The University is working closely with the student’s family and appropriate authorities to resolve this matter so that he can join his classmates in the coming days,” Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton wrote in an email to CNN.

US Customs and Border Protection confirmed to CNN that Ajjawi was turned away at the border — but declined to provide any details.” This individual was deemed inadmissible to the United States based on information discovered during the CBP inspection,” the agency said in a statement.

The university’s newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, describes Ajjawi as a “17-year-old Palestinian resident of Tyre, Lebanon.” The Crimson’s report quotes from a written statement attributed to Ajjawi, in which the incoming student describes his encounter with immigration officials at Boston’s Logan Airport.

According to the Crimson, Ajjawi says he was detained for eight hours before being turned away. During that time, an immigration official asked him to unlock his phone and laptop and proceeded to search them for five hours. The Crimson says he was then asked questions about his friends’ social media posts.

According to the Crimson, Ajjawi was told that there were “political points of view that oppose the US” expressed by people he follows on social media. After he was questioned, his visa was revoked and he was sent back to Lebanon.

The development comes just over a month after Harvard’s President, Lawrence Bacow, wrote an open letter to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan expressing concern over the administration’s immigration policies and their effect on Harvard’s academic programs.”

Students report difficulties getting initial visas — from delays to denials,” Bacow wrote in July. International students and scholars, he wrote at the time, “are not just participants in the life of the university; they are essential to it.” He criticized the visa and immigration process as “unpredictable and uncertain

Summer Lopez, senior director of Free Expression Programs at PEN America, issued the following response:

“This is a move so perverse, so grotesque as to defy explanation. Preventing people from entering the country because their friends critiqued the U.S. on social media shows an astounding disregard for the principle of free speech. The idea that Ajjawi should be prevented from taking his place at Harvard because of his own political speech would be alarming; that he should be denied this opportunity based on the speech of others is downright lawless.

“In June, when the state department announced its new ‘extreme vetting’ policy requiring visa applicants to share their social media and email account information, we warned that it would have severe consequences. This case demonstrates all too well the damage these ill-conceived policies can do. Ajjawi defended himself to immigration officials by insisting he had never made a political comment on social media. That should not be the price of entrance to the U.S., let alone that one’s friends should have to censor themselves as well.

“This despicable action also flies in the face of the purpose of international educational exchange, which is to open the mind and expand one’s understanding of the world. Instead, Ajjawi has been shown only the U.S.’s failure to uphold the very values it purports to stand for.”

PEN America has decried efforts by the U.S. government to review social media and email accounts of visa applicants as failing to have any clear security benefit and instead curtailing free expression.