Detentions of International Scholars at Airports Raise Alarm

Federal immigration officials’ days-long detention of Johns Hopkins University researcher Fatima Ameaka last week has stoked renewed fear among international scholars seeking to travel.

The Department of Homeland Security detained Ameaka while she was boarding a domestic flight at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, claiming the public health scholar overstayed her visa, despite contradictory documents from her lawyer and a pending asylum case. She was transported to detention facilities in Virginia, Louisiana and Texas before her release late Friday, The Washington Post reported.

“No researcher, student, worker, or community member should be subjected to this kind of traumatic detention while boarding a domestic flight,” according to a statement from Zainab Chaudry, the Maryland director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the groups that demanded Ameaka’s release. “Her release is welcome news, but it does not erase the fear and uncertainty inflicted on Dr. Ameaka, her family, her colleagues, and countless immigrants who now worry that ordinary travel could lead to sudden detention.”

On Friday, Johns Hopkins University spokesperson Doug Donovan told The Washington Post that the university was actively working to support Ameaka.

“The university understands the fear and concern this instills in members of our community,” he said.

Ameaka, who initially came to the U.S. from Cameroon on a Fulbright Scholarship, was one of multiple scholars detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as ICE ramps up arrests at airports in what appears to be an ongoing partnership between ICE and the Transportation Security Administration. The surge in immigration actions at airports prompted the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, an immigrant advocacy group, to issue a travel advisory this week encouraging immigrants with pending green card and asylum applications or overstayed visas not to fly without legal guidance.

“This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport,” DHS wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.

Late last month, immigration authorities detained Berhanu Kibret, an instructor at the University of Maryland’s pharmacy school, at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. He was on his way back from an American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy meeting where he received a teaching award, WBAL-TV 11 reported. Kibret remains in detention, despite the university vouching he has valid work authorization. A DHS statement said Kibret is an “illegal alien from Ethiopia” who came into the country legally but overstayed.

“The university is greatly troubled by what has happened,” a University of Maryland, Baltimore, spokesperson told the local news outlet. “Dr. Kibret is a highly valued member of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, community. He is an effective and beloved teacher, and a highly regarded colleague. His detention will certainly generate not only great sympathy for his plight, but also a heightened sense of apprehension here on campus.”

Vahid Abedini, an assistant professor of Iranian studies at University of Oklahoma, was also detained for three days last November on his way to a Middle East Studies Association conference in Washington D.C. At the time, assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin, told The New York Times by text that Abedini had been “detained for standard questioning and was released.”

Abedini described it as a “deeply distressing experience” in a post on LinkedIn and thanked “colleagues at the University of Oklahoma, the Middle East Studies Association, and the wider Iran studies and political science community for helping resolve this.”

Some students have faced similar issues, notably Any Lucia López Belloza, a Babson College freshman, who was wrongfully deported to Honduras as she was traveling home to Texas for Thanksgiving.

These incidents make travel increasingly fraught for international academics. For example, more than 2,000 mathematicians petitioned not to have an International Mathematics Union conference in the U.S. this year because of concerns, including that foreign scholars traveling for the conference might be detained by ICE.

“These developments are deeply distressing and appear to once again flout existing regulations and procedures,” Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “We are monitoring these developments and are hearing about the uncertainty and stress these detentions are generating.”

She emphasized that it’s “essential for higher education associations and stakeholders to continue to challenge the administration’s actions in court and to continue to support their campus members in the face of these actions.”