I’ve lived a lot of life but can’t say I’ve ever had the secretary of Homeland Security tweet a video of me before.

On March 14, a day before the story broke of an international student, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University who fled from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Canada, I received a call from a friend informing me that a video of me accompanying Srinivasan was released and being circulated online by Kristi Noem.

My body involuntarily began to tremble.

Despite my status as a natural-born American citizen and the fact that I had committed no crime, I envisioned a battalion of law enforcement officers dragging me from my apartment and forcing me into an unmarked vehicle, just as they had with Mahmoud Khalil six days before, and just as they have attempted to do with other students on Columbia’s campus.

I didn’t leave my apartment for four days. ….more

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