Legal scholar sees immigrant arrests as a 'struggle for the soul of the country'

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. In recent weeks, immigration agents have descended on college campus towns across the country and carried out waves of arrests of international students. Just last week, a video circulated of six ICE agents in masks and plain clothes surrounding and arresting a 30-year-old Turkish Ph.D. student from Tufts University as she stepped out for dinner during Ramadan. She held a valid F-1 student visa but was detained because it had been revoked - reportedly without warning. Her case is not an isolated one. Several arrests have taken place at other universities, too - like Columbia, the University of Minnesota and the University of Alabama, where an Iranian doctoral student was taken into custody after his visa was annulled by the State Department.

To help us understand the legal dimensions of these actions, what they mean not only for international students, but for U.S. visa and even green card holders - really, anyone who wasn't born in the United States - is Daniel Kanstroom, a professor at Boston College Law School and scholar on immigration and human rights. He founded the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic, where law students advocate for migrants, and directs the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project, which explores the long-term impacts of deportation on families and communities. Kanstroom's latest book, "The New Deportation Delirium," examines the sprawling system of deportation in our country since 9/11.

Daniel Kanstroom, welcome to FRESH AIR.

DANIEL KANSTROOM: Thank you. It's good to be here.

MOSLEY: I'm happy to have your expertise on the show today, and I want to start with the case of Rumeysa Ozturk. She is the Ph.D. student at Tufts University. She's from Turkey and is here on a student visa. In this video that circulated last week, we see the arrest unfold. We see a man in a black hoodie and a face mask approach her as she leaves her apartment, and that man grabs her hands, and I want to play a little bit from that video. What we're about to hear is Ozturk sort of scream a little. It appears she doesn't know for a moment what's happening.

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RUMEYSA OZTURK: OK. (Screaming) What's going on? OK. OK. (Speaking Turkish).

MOSLEY: We hear her yelling out, and then we see some other people in plain clothes, who we later learn are ICE officers. They surround her, and one person pulls out a badge. And then they cuff her and take her off. Professor Kanstroom, what was your reaction when you first saw this video?

KANSTROOM: I think my immediate reaction was what I hope would be anyone's immediate reaction, which was horror. This is a very, very extreme example of government power - masked agents, which are extremely unusual in this country, arresting somebody suddenly, without any apparent warning, to what must have been, for her, a terrifying and probably unknown fate, for reasons that she probably had some general understanding of but no specific charging document, no specific warrant, no reading of charges, no explanation. This is a horrible thing to see. And one would think that tactics like this would be limited to the most extreme cases - you know, SWAT teams or hostage situations. But to see a graduate student in Somerville, Massachusetts, pulled off the street - it had to be terrifying, and that was my first reaction. I can tell you about my second, third and fourth reaction as we go forward 'cause I had a lot of different reactions.

MOSLEY: A judge in Massachusetts temporarily barred the deportation of Ozturk. But the Department of Homeland Security said that she was originally detained and her visa terminated because she was in support of the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas. And what they appear to be referencing is an op-ed she wrote that was critical of Israel. Can she be deported for that?

KANSTROOM: Well, this is a kind of unknown situation. What we're going to have to see is the relationship between the government's power to regulate the status of noncitizens who are in this country, especially noncitizens who are here temporarily - although temporarily could mean many years, as it did in her case - versus the general protections of the First Amendment - freedom of speech, freedom of association - and general protections of due process of law and general procedural protections in our government. And those things are going to be tested in her case, among many others.

The government does have enormous power over students who are coming here to study, but the government is also restrained by the Constitution. And we haven't seen this particular provision used very often. In fact, it's quite rare. And so the courts are going to have to sort out how to calibrate that balance. My own feeling is that unless they can come up with some activities that she actually engaged in that were against the law, they may have a hard time deporting her simply for speech or for publishing an op-ed.

MOSLEY: OK. So just so I'm clear, this question that I think continues to come up as we see more and more arrests - whether students who hold a visa have First Amendment rights - I think what I'm hearing from you is it's both yes and no.

KANSTROOM: It is both yes and no. And the provision at issue here, you know, goes back quite a long way and gives specific authority to the secretary of state with a very vague set of standards if the - they call it the alien, but let's say the noncitizen's activities or actions or speech in the United States would have potentially serious foreign policy consequences. And then there's an even higher standard if they're trying to deport somebody for things that would be protected under the Constitution if done by a U.S. citizen. So it hasn't been invoked much precisely because the courts have never really clarified the exact relationship here. But to the extent that there is precedent for this, I think the precedent is rather strong that the First Amendment does not use the word citizen. First Amendment says, Congress shall make no law. And courts have recognized that and have recognized that due process also applies to any person.

MOSLEY: Something else I was just curious about - just a side note - but ICE took Ozturk to a detention center in Louisiana before her attorneys could get a judge to block that transfer. This is the same center where they took Mahmoud Khalil. He's the Columbia University graduate student who was arrested in early March. Why Louisiana, and why that detention center? Is it something about that detention center or something by design?

KANSTROOM: It is something by design, and it's not a new phenomenon. This has been going on for quite some time now in this country, where people have been moved to these detention centers in Louisiana and elsewhere. And originally, I think it was a part of a change in detention of noncitizens who were facing deportation. There had been a use of local facilities, and there were problems with that, by which I mean local jails and state-run facilities. There were all sorts of questions about conditions, so there was a move to try to create more federal detention facilities. But when one asks, why was this particular one situated in a fairly remote area - I believe it's at least a couple hours, maybe more, from New Orleans, as I recall - lawyers have routinely noted two things. One, it makes it incredibly difficult to actually be in touch to visit with a client, which is important if you want to represent somebody. It's very helpful if you can sit in a room with them and look into their eyes, get to know them as a client and have long interviews with them. And second, that particular part of the country and the particular judges in that part of the country tend to be rather supportive of the government and rather unfriendly to lawyers for noncitizens. So it has a reputation as being a difficult place if a person is moved there because so-called habeas corpus petitions have to be filed in the place where the person is actually held. This actually was an issue in Mr. Khalil's case, too, about whether you could bring him back to the place where he has his witnesses and his lawyers and where the alleged activities took place. So there's often a struggle about that. But this is not a new government tactic. However, like many of the tactics that we're witnessing now, it's being used in extremely expeditious ways and often, apparently, with the intent of avoiding a judge's order not to do it.

MOSLEY: I see.

If you're just joining us, we're talking about the latest immigration arrests on college campuses with Daniel Kanstroom, a legal scholar and professor specializing in immigration law, human rights and public policy at Boston College. Our interview was recorded yesterday. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, my guest is Daniel Kanstroom. He's a legal scholar and professor specializing in immigration law, human rights and public policy at Boston College School of Law.

You know, one of the things I want to talk with you about is what you are seeing in your work because you have, as a professor, as a legal scholar, the ability to see the big picture, but then you also have your ear to the ground as part of this Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic, which you founded. Students there provide services for people, like advocating for people who are detained. What are you hearing right now? What are some of the concerns that people are coming into the clinic talking about? What are some of the students seeing that are working with international students and others who may be concerned about their status at this moment?

KANSTROOM: Well, even beyond our clinical programs, what I hear from a range of lawyers throughout the country and from potential clients and from former clients and from family members of potential clients and former clients and from colleagues who are citizens or noncitizens or naturalized citizens or married to noncitizens is a tremendous sense of fear. And I think that is a big part of what the administration has been aiming to do. So the administration has acted on the shoulders of a system that was long recognized as being extremely discretionary, extremely deferential to government power, potentially extremely arbitrary, potentially extremely harsh. I've been writing about this for more than 25 years, and yet we're seeing uniquely extreme examples of it done with a kind of cruelty and a kind of, I would say, gratuitous cruelty, arrogant cruelty that has rarely been seen in the history of this country. And the point of that is to send a message, is to scare people. And it is working.

I just heard this morning about a person who was apparently sent to this prison in El Salvador, who had been under an order from an immigration judge specifically not to be sent to El Salvador. The government has admitted that it was a mistake, and yet they say, well, but there's nothing we can really do about it because now he's in the custody of El Salvador. It's hard to imagine a more terrifying set of facts than that.

MOSLEY: What I'm hearing from you as a legal expert, you believe that this focus on these students who are here legally is a scare tactic. But can you get a little bit deeper into this idea? Because Trump has laid out very clearly during his campaign trail and his first few days of office that he wanted to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. But this focus on students who are here legally, what do these arrests tell us about this larger immigration strategy?

KANSTROOM: Well, what it tells us is that a lot of the campaign rhetoric about a problem of undocumented immigration was really not true because I think people in the administration knew, as those of us who've studied the history of this knew, that it would be basically impossible to round up and deport 10 to 15 million people without establishing a massive and extremely expensive and extremely brutal police state. So that agenda was always problematic as compared with the agenda of shutting down the southern border, which I would argue is also quite problematic, but that seemed to be a little more potentially doable. But what we're actually seeing is something quite different, and it's actually a quite different form of deportation. It has different justifications and has different goals. And the goals here seem to be political, not really aimed at immigration enforcement or the undocumented. It's aimed at the documented. It's aimed at, as you say, people here who are students, people here with green cards. I would expect that the next step will be people who have been naturalized citizens. And in this sense, it also dovetails with the executive order that was designed to try to overturn the 14th Amendment grant of birthright citizenship. So you would see a tremendous expansion of government power over the bodies and the minds and the words and the writings of many, many millions of people.

You know, this debate is very old in this country. It goes back to the founding generation. One of the laws that's being used now by the Trump administration - again, I would argue, in ways that will ultimately be challenged, if not overruled completely by courts - was something called the Alien Enemies Act. And that came from a time when the government - in that case, it was the John Adams administration - had great fear about French revolutionaries and Irish revolutionaries. And a couple of laws were passed, the so-called Alien and Sedition Acts. But even at that time, Thomas Jefferson, who opposed this sort of enforcement, said and wrote that the friendless alien has been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment, but the citizen will soon follow or, in fact, has already followed because they were using the so-called Sedition Act against citizens. And every time we've seen these episodes, they tend to have a metastatic quality they expand in dangerous ways because once you let this sort of government power take root, it can be very hard to uproot it. And that, again, is why it's important to note that the First Amendment does not say citizen. The First Amendment is both a grant of rights to people to speak, but it's also a restraint on the power of government to suppress speech and to suppress ideas. And so when you see these attempts to shut people up by intimidating them and terrifying them, that does raise very fundamental questions that this country has had to deal with in recurring ways over many generations, and now we're going to have to fight those battles again.

MOSLEY: Let's talk just a little bit more about some of the things we're seeing in real time. We're hearing stories of students and others preemptively leaving the country, basically self-deporting. Is that also a strategy, basically to get people to leave on their own?

KANSTROOM: It's absolutely a strategy. The administration has been quite clear about it. They've said it repeatedly. Again, they're not the first administration to think of this. You can find this in various historical periods before, but I think the terrorist aspect of it, the threats are quite profound right now. And, I mean, I get calls from people all the time who are asking if they should leave the country. Personally, I don't think we're at a moment where I'm advising people to leave the country. I mean, in general. But I'm certainly advising people to think hard before traveling, and that includes people with green cards, which is pretty unique in my experience. Over many years, there's been a general sense that people who have green cards, that is to say they have lawful permanent resident status, which, by the way, is a status that a person is completely entitled to hold for their whole life if they want to or for some reason, they can't naturalize and become a U.S. citizen.

That was designed to be a stable, protected status, and it is extremely unusual for the government to start digging around in a person's past to find reasons to deport a person with a green card. That, by the way, was one of the unique things that Marco Rubio declared in the Khalil case that he had revoked his green card status. I'm unaware of any provision in law that allows the secretary of state to simply revoke a person's green card status. That person is entitled to a hearing, as I think we will see. And at that hearing, the government is going to have to explain what its reasons were for trying to deport this person, and, you know, we'll see what the evidence is.

MOSLEY: Tell us your thoughts about this action taken against birthright citizenship for anybody born in the U.S. after February 19, 2025. I mean, it's been fought in the court, but it would limit birthright citizenship to at least one parent being a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident to qualify. You've been very critical of this. Talk to me about the ramifications of something like this.

KANSTROOM: Well, first of all, I think it's useful to go back and ask why this country has birthright citizenship in the first place because I think many people think that is kind of odd. U.S. citizenship is such an incredibly valuable commodity. Why do we just give it to people based on the accident of having been born here? That's a fair question. But the answer is important. It was created in the aftermath of the Civil War, primarily to redress a situation in which African Americans, particularly slaves and even freed slaves and even people who had not been enslaved at all, were deemed by the Supreme Court not to be citizens. And the country realized that having a large cohort of people who are excluded from the courts and from the right to vote and all the aspects of citizenship was a very dangerous thing. And it was integral to slavery, but it was also a bad thing in general.

And so we created an amendment to the Constitution that guarantees that anyone who's born in the United States, subject to its jurisdiction, which actually means only excluding a very small category of diplomats and Native American Indians, perhaps, and people on warships or invading armies, those people all get citizenship. So we opted for a generous conception of citizenship. And I think that has stood us well. The Supreme Court upheld it in the late 19th century. It's been reaffirmed ever since then in many court opinions. And yet, it keeps coming under challenge for varieties of reasons in particular historical periods. But if we remember why we created it in the first place, then I think that helps us to understand what's so dangerous about trying to remove it.

MOSLEY: Our guest is legal scholar and immigration expert Daniel Kanstroom. Our interview was recorded yesterday. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, we're talking about the latest immigration arrests on college campuses and what they tell us about the legal boundaries of immigration enforcement in the U.S. Just in the past month, several students - some of them here on green cards or student visas - have been arrested and detained with threats of deportation. Joining us to talk about the legality of these arrests is Daniel Kanstroom, a legal scholar and professor specializing in immigration law, human rights and public policy at Boston College School of Law. Our interview was recorded yesterday.

You're advising some people not to leave the country. I've been hearing, anecdotally, colleges and universities - those who hire people who come from other countries - also telling them, don't leave for spring break, things like that. We are also hearing, though, some U.S. residents and visa holders are reporting that when they are trying to come back into the country, that they are being stopped by Homeland Security. Their phones are being checked - social media, emails - upon arrival, being detained for several days. Some have reported being detained for several weeks. Is this something new under the administration? Is - have these always been tactics?

KANSTROOM: Yes. It's new, again, in the extent of it, in the severity of it, in what often seems to be the arbitrariness of it. But the government has enormous power at the border, at the airport, you know, when a person comes to a port of entry. There's basically no place, except maybe on the battlefield during a war, where the government has such unfettered power, such discretionary authority. And the courts have recognized that because much of immigration enforcement is tied up with national security and foreign policy and things like that, where the government is given a free hand. But we've rarely, if ever, seen the government use that free hand in the way that it's happening now. I mean, there were aspects of this in the post-9/11 period, where there was a ramp-up of interrogations and questions and, you know, so forth. So it's - again, it's not totally unprecedented. And the power that's being used goes far back into U.S. history. Cases that were decided in the 19th century and, as I said, even presidents from the 18th century have all built this regime, which many of us worried was dangerous precisely because of the great power that it gives to government. And we'd say, in the hands of an irresponsible government or a reckless government, this could cause real harm. And I fear that that's what we're seeing now.

On the other hand, when we've seen episodes like this in the past, they do tend to pass. One of the main ones, the famous ones, was called the Palmer Raids in 1919 after the first world war. And it was similarly very aggressive, very brutal. Actually, one of the lead deportation agents at that time was J. Edgar Hoover, who ultimately created the FBI out of that incident. And there was tremendous fear in the country. There were anarchists. There were bombs going off in Washington, D.C., and many people were deported, but ultimately, it passed. And then a different kind of regime took effect, ultimately, in the Roosevelt administration that had a very different attitude about how we calibrate these things. And I personally think that this history of this country as basically a welcoming country for noncitizens and immigrants is extremely powerful. And little by little, as examples like the one I described about the person who seems to have been wrongly sent to the prison in El Salvador come out, there is a conscience of the American people that's going to find this quite revolting.

MOSLEY: I was thinking about the possible futures for these college students recently detained. Like, how difficult is it to reopen a case once someone is deported - to basically come back?

KANSTROOM: Yeah, it's extremely difficult. And this is why we created the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project because the government for many years has used deportation as a kind of black hole, where mistakes could be buried and the government could then say, sorry, there's nothing we can do. This is a big problem, and we're seeing it now in the Salvadoran prison example - in a very harsh example of that. And if a person is deported, they can be barred from the United States for many, many years or for life.

MOSLEY: So if a mistake is made, I mean, the challenge of being able to correct that mistake once you've been deported is very, very low.

KANSTROOM: It's extremely difficult to do that. In some cases, it has been possible. But we have had to spend years, sometimes, litigating just to bring back one person who then faced detention when he was brought back to this country, in any case, and ultimately had to have hearings, which took time and resources. The system is set up in such a way that once a person is deported, it's extremely difficult to question that or challenge it. And that's why judges try to prevent what they think may be wrongful deportations before they happen. That's what these - all these temporary restraining orders and injunctions are about. The courts are saying, we need to preserve jurisdiction. There's an entity called the Board of Immigration Appeals that for many years took the position that once a person has been deported - they said this in one major case - they have passed beyond our aid. Now, for a human rights lawyer, that's a very difficult proposition to accept.

MOSLEY: Can we talk a little bit about immigration courts in the United States for a moment? I know they operate under the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is part of the DOJ. We've all been hearing for years about the need to reform, if for nothing else but for the sheer backlog. I actually was reading that some immigration judges at this very moment are handling something like 5,000 cases. That's astounding. It raises questions about whether the system can actually fairly handle all of these immigration and deportation cases and how often mistakes are made.

KANSTROOM: Yes. This has been a long-standing problem. And the solution had been thought to appoint more immigration judges, particularly at the border, to have more expeditious asylum hearings, which would comply with basic due process norms. Unfortunately, that has not happened. The Congress has not acted for a very long time, so the system has been chronically underfunded for decades. I believe the current backlog in the appellate side of the immigration system, combined with the trial side, is somewhere between 2 and 3 million cases at this time. And cases are being docketed out into the future for years. Nobody thinks this is a good idea. Nobody thinks this is a good system. The question is, what do you do about it? And what you could have done about it and still could do about it is appoint more judges in order to handle the backlog or maybe take a position that after a certain number of years, it's just not fair to continue with a person in proceedings unless it's an extremely serious case. That would be another method of dealing with it. But we do have a problem. I don't think the solution is to eliminate everybody's due process rights and simply deport them, however.

MOSLEY: Something I was thinking about in reading your book, "The New Deportation (ph) Delirium," you really get into some facts that give us greater context. Like, one of the things you write about is the sheer scale of resources that's needed for ICE to carry out their function of arrests. And I was thinking about when I watched the video of Ozturk being arrested in front of her building. They had to, of course, know where she lived. They also had to know what time she'd be home, know her schedule, go through, you know, all of her public records. Lay out for us what goes into this kind of work.

KANSTROOM: It's enormously expensive. It's enormously time-consuming. And I think most importantly, it is taking resources away from other law enforcement initiatives that, at least to my mind, are much, much more compelling and important. I mean, if you have a person who is an actual terrorist or who has actual terrorist connections, that's one thing. But if you're going after people because of things they have written or things they have said while pursuing a Ph.D. in education at Tufts University and using the same level of resources for that, that strikes me as much more problematic.

This has been a problem for deportation from the beginning, and the resources that would be needed to do the kinds of deportations that candidate Trump had talked about - there's no way that we could marshal that level of funding to do that kind of a job. So we have to begin to be a little realistic about what it is we're talking about here. And many countries have recognized this, and this is why many countries have had sort of waves of legalization programs that say to people, well, look, you've been here for 10 years now. Come into the system. If you don't have a criminal record, if you've basically lived a good life and paid your taxes, you know, we can give you some sort of pathway to some sort of stable and legal status, probably even citizenship, over the long haul. But actually, what this administration is doing is the opposite. It's marginalizing people. It's actually seeking to get their tax records in order to facilitate deportation, which makes people not want to pay their taxes and participate in society during the time that they're here. So it strikes me that a lot of this is amazingly counterproductive.

MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, we're talking about the latest immigration arrests on college campuses with Daniel Kanstroom, a legal scholar and professor specializing in immigration law, human rights and public policy at Boston College. Our interview was recorded yesterday. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, my guest is Daniel Kanstroom. He's a legal scholar and professor specializing in immigration law, human rights and public policy at Boston College School of Law.

Professor Kanstroom, as you mentioned earlier, another big headline is the deportations to El Salvador. Just this week, the Trump administration deported 17 people described as violent offenders, and they linked them to gangs. And this follows earlier deportations of hundreds of Venezuelans under similar claims. Now, the Salvadorian government has accepted these deportees in exchange for financial support from the U.S. And some of the challenges is that some of these detainees have - reportedly have no criminal records. Are these expedited deportations in violation of international human rights standards?

KANSTROOM: Probably. It's hard to know. You have to look at these things on a case-by-case basis. But international law, first of all, prohibits the removal of a person to a place where they would be persecuted or tortured. And it looks to me as if the conditions in that facility in general could rise to that level, and I think other human rights lawyers have begun to make those kinds of assessments. Secondly, there are basic norms of fairness and process that people are entitled to because the fundamental principle of human rights law is not, by the way, to say the government does not have the power to control its borders - human rights law recognizes a world of nation states - but to say that when that power is exercised, it has to respect the dignity of the person who is the object of that exercise of massive power. And people are entitled to make their case and to be heard. And that's a pretty minimal thing, I mean, to say, we're deporting you because you're a gang member, and you say, actually, you've got the wrong guy. I'm not a gang member. And if the next place you find yourself is in a massive high-security facility in El Salvador, that is not legal under international law. Now, that, of course, raises the question of whether the United States considers itself bound by international human rights law. But even under the U.S. Constitution or, I would say, especially under the U.S. Constitution and U.S. statutes, a lot of these actions seem extremely problematic, too.

MOSLEY: You've already touched on this a bit, but what are the legal implications of invoking the Alien Enemies Act to justify these deportations? How does it align with historical uses of the statute?

KANSTROOM: It is extremely unique. The statute was passed in the 1790s. And by the way, it was paired with another law that was called the Alien Friends Act. That was the one that said aliens who were, like, affiliated with various ideologies that we don't like can be deported. It was the friends law that was criticized so much by Jefferson and Madison and ultimately sunset. And Jefferson won the election of 1800, and we never heard of that law again because everybody recognized that having a law that would give vast discretionary power to the executive branch to name its enemies or to simply say we're under attack therefore round up all the usual suspects was a problem. So in the three times when the Alien Enemies Act has been used - the War of 1812 and during the Second World War and immediately after the Second World War, in particular - it has been during a time of actual conflict, armed conflict. This extension to the actions of cartels or various other entities is extremely problematic. Now, the courts do give the executive branch a lot of leeway to make these kind of judgment calls about dangers to the peace and security of the country. But where the courts, I think, will intervene is, at the very least, to say that people are entitled to due process.

MOSLEY: I was also wondering about the financial entanglements. Like, how should international law potentially address agreements between countries like the U.S. and El Salvador, where, like, these financial incentives might influence acceptance of deportees?

KANSTROOM: Well, again, the difficulty here is that, as people say, elections have consequences, and the president does have enormous discretionary authority to determine which foreign leaders he or she wants to deal with and how. So these kinds of deals, on their face, are not that unusual. I say these kinds of deals, which is to say cooperation in enforcement. This particular version of it - using a prison system in a foreign country to house U.S. detainees, especially U.S. deported people who are not from that country - that is extremely problematic and extremely unusual.

Now, what are the financial entanglements here? What is President Bukele getting out of this? There's been a lot of speculation about that. There's been speculation about his own dealings with MS-13 in El Salvador and why more Salvadoran gang members have not been deported, but Venezuelans have. Now that Venezuela has agreed to take back Venezuelans who are being deported from the country, maybe that'll stop as to the Venezuelans, but it's all behind a curtain. It's hard to predict, but there's clearly some perceived benefit to both governments in doing this. And by the way, things like this are happening around the world, as well. The United Kingdom tried to make a deal with Rwanda for adjudicating asylum actions. That was ultimately struck down in the legal system. But there are things like this happening in other places, too.

MOSLEY: You say in your book that we will look back and see this whole deportation tactic as a mistake, that it was way too harsh.

KANSTROOM: It gets back to what I was saying, that this has been a recurring struggle. Not to be too grand about it, but I do think it's a recurring struggle for the soul of the country. These issues are really fundamental. What kind of a country are we? Are we actually a nation of immigrants? Does - is that meaningful to us? Do we believe in welcoming new people to participate in building this kind of constitutional democracy that we all cherish, or are we a deportation nation that really judges people and says, we only want certain types of people?

And, of course, once - if you go the latter route, you run into things like this current administration is now saying they want to give refugee status to white South Africans who are fleeing South Africa or who have some fear of being there. It can get very specific that way and, I think, very problematic. I would advocate for a more welcoming stance towards anybody who's fleeing persecution, not sort of being that specific about only people who are ideologically the way that you want them or who fit some sort of a racial or other type of agenda. This has been a struggle from the beginning. Obviously, we're facing it again now.

MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, we're talking about the latest immigration arrests on college campuses with Daniel Kanstroom, a legal scholar and professor specializing in immigration law, human rights and public policy at Boston College. Our interview was recorded yesterday. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today, my guest is Daniel Kanstroom. He's a legal scholar and professor specializing in immigration law, human rights and public policy at Boston College School of Law.

What are some things that you're hearing about or some actions - deportation actions - that you might be hearing about, if any, that are not making the news? Because the president's plan to deport millions of people would, I would guess, also include more than just these individuals or sending people to El Salvador.

KANSTROOM: Well, there's so many things happening that it is hard to stay on top of them. But one has been a rescission of parole status that was granted to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans during the Biden administration. And that is a status that is a legal status, and it was promised to be for a certain period of time. But the Trump administration is trying to remove that summarily, rendering many, many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who are legal suddenly subject to being called in and removed. So that's one thing.

Another thing is we are seeing ramp-ups of stops of people on buses, on the streets. We're seeing that in various neighborhoods in Boston, asking for people to show papers. And the administration has promulgated another kind of interim rule, saying that people who are noncitizens need to register their addresses and carry papers with them if they have such papers. But that, of course, raises the question of what are the rest of us supposed to do. Because I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and I don't have - I have a birth certificate, but I don't carry it around with me.

So then the question is, well, who is actually going to be stopped and asked about this? And you start seeing obvious racial and ethnic disparities in enforcement and who is stopped and who is questioned. That's a serious set of problems. They say, well, we're seeing incursions into what were formerly protected spaces - churches, schools, hospitals. Those were off-limits in every prior administration. And now this administration says, well, let's just leave it up to the agent in the field to decide if it would be reasonable to go into that church and pull somebody out for deportation. We just had a case in Massachusetts where a person was pulled out in the middle of a criminal trial and taken away for deportation. And the judge overseeing that case is actually threatening to hold the ICE agent in contempt of court because the judge said, look, I'm trying to enforce criminal law here, and you have impeded that state function.

MOSLEY: I mean, so is the recommendation, then, we all carry our passports with us?

KANSTROOM: I'm not recommending that. Personally, I think that if you are a U.S. citizen, you have the absolute right not to answer any questions by the police or ICE agents or anybody else. Now, of course, if you're traveling abroad, that's a different situation if you come through an airport. But if you're walking down the street or on a bus, you don't have to answer those questions. But, you know, declining to answer those questions could get you into some kind of a scuffle or some kind of a problem, and that's exactly why we should not allow government to undertake these kinds of initiatives to say, show me your papers or to be stopping people at random on the street. They're supposed to have a reasonable suspicion before they pull anybody aside, but that is not always the case, and it's often not the case.

MOSLEY: The Trump administration is also now going after some law firms who have defended some of his perceived enemies. What does that look like behind the scenes? Like, what's the chatter within legal circles, and what are your fears regarding that action?

KANSTROOM: Well, this is quite unprecedented, and I think it takes me back to Jefferson saying that the friendless alien is the subject of the experiment, but the citizen will soon follow. Because this and some of the attacks that are being made on universities, not just for the Israel, Palestine, and antisemitism stuff, which is quite complicated, but also for DEI initiatives and various vague questions about policy and what's been going on. It all seems very ideological and uniquely heavy-handed. I think in the legal community, it's provoked two reactions. One is on some sides, there's been acquiescence.

But I think on many other sides, it is actually spurring a kind of solidarity and resistance because, I mean, there's cynicism about lawyers, of course. But in my experience, many people do want to become lawyers and become lawyers because they actually believe in law, which means believing in a certain amount of justice and a certain amount of evenhandedness and a certain amount of restraint against government actions to tilt the scales and to intrude in civil society with an ideological agenda. This was why we look back on the McCarthy era, and very few of us think that was a good time in American history.

MOSLEY: Professor Kanstroom, what are you recommending everyday citizens take into account as they watch all of this news unfold?

KANSTROOM: My recommendation is to understand that while this particular moment is extremely fraught and, for many people, extremely terrifying, we have seen moments like this in U.S. history before, and they tend to inspire great solidarity and great forms of activism and resistance, which ultimately have led to legal reforms, important court decisions and a greater understanding of the rights of all of us.

MOSLEY: Daniel Kanstroom. Thank you so much.

KANSTROOM: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

MOSLEY: Daniel Kanstroom is a legal scholar and professor at Boston College.

Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, Grammy-winning songwriter singer and guitarist Jason Isbell, who is described in Variety as the poet laureate of American rock. His new solo album includes songs about the breakup of his marriage to singer-songwriter and violinist Amanda Shires. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF JERRY DOUGLAS' "KING SILKIE")

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