First they came for the non-citizens

First they came for the non-citizens.

Ranjani's horror story about ICE overreach:

Columbia University student ran from Homeland Security, but still doesn’t know why they came for her

Ranjani Srinivasan was busy talking to an adviser at Columbia University when the federal agents first came to her door. The day before she’d got an unexpected email that her student visa had been canceled, and she was trying to get information.

“It was my roommate who heard the knock and immediately recognized (it as) law enforcement,” Srinivasan told CNN. “She asked them ‘Do you have a warrant?’ And they had to say ‘No.’”

“I was stunned and scared,” she said. “I remember telling the adviser ‘ICE is at my door and you’re telling me I’m fine? Do something.’”

They returned another day, also without a warrant, Srinivasan said. Matters escalated when they came a third time, with a judge’s permission to enter the Columbia apartment. By then she had already left the country.

The biggest question for Srinivasan is why they came at all.

Srinivasan had renewed her student visa just a few months earlier, being granted permission for another five years in the United States — more than enough time to complete her PhD in urban planning. She was no stranger to immigration rules, having won a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard University for her master’s degree and then returning to her native India for the requisite two years after.

Her dream acceptance at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation coincided with the beginning of the Covid pandemic, so she started her studies in Chennai, India, before making it to New York City.

By last month, the end of her doctorate was almost in sight, she was grading papers for the students she was teaching and fretting over a deadline for a journal. Far from her mind was a night almost a year before when she got caught up in a crowd.

That evening in April 2024 she’d been trying to get back to her university apartment from a staff picnic when she was swept up in a police operation against a crowd protesting Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, she said.

Srinivasan had only just returned to the US, having been away from Columbia since before the war began and generated passionate protests. “We didn’t really know what was going to happen that day,” she said. “The whole perimeter of the neighborhood had been barricaded.” Unable to prove she lived there, she wasn’t allowed to go to her street, so she ended up circling the neighborhood, looking for a way through, she told CNN.

“They kept shifting the barricades, and then I think around 200 cops descended, and they kind of charged at us. It was absolute confusion. People were screaming, falling, people were running out of the way,” she said. Too small to force her way through the melee, she ended up in a large group of people detained by the police.

She said she was held with the crowd for several hours but never fingerprinted or booked for an arrest. She was given two pink-colored summonses by the New York Police Department — one for obstructing pedestrian traffic and the other for failure to disperse — before being released. A lawyer working pro bono for a number of the students got the summonses dismissed even before she had to appear in court. That means there should be no record against her, and as far as Srinivasan was concerned, she could forget the whole thing.

She did not report the dismissed summonses on her visa renewal.

When asked why Srinivasan’s visa was revoked, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement “these citations were not disclosed.”

That was never mentioned to Srinivasan when she was told her visa had been taken away.

“I did not mean to deceive anyone,” she said. “If I made a mistake, I would have been happy to clarify it to the state.”

But she was never given the chance.


‘A punitive dragnet’

According to local so-called sanctuary laws, federal authorities should not have even known Srinivasan had ever been detained, according to her lawyer, Nathan Yaffe.

“New York City is supposed to have protections in place to prevent people who don’t commit crimes, who haven’t been in any kind of trouble, from getting caught in this sort of punitive dragnet that the administration is implementing here,” he said.

“But clearly the federal government has access to the summons database or to other data that allows them to see even when people aren’t fingerprinted, even when people don’t have any criminal case, even when the only allegation against them is entirely dismissed.”

No one from DHS, the NYPD or Columbia University responded to CNN requests about how federal authorities became aware of this case. When asked about Srinivasan by CNN at a news conference, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said: “I’ll say it over and over again: New York City Police Department, they do not collaborate for civil enforcement.” He said he would look into it but his office has not got back to CNN.

For Srinivasan, the sudden escalation was alarming. She says she had attended protests in her time in the US, but as much to experience American culture as to exercise free speech.

Demonstrators rally outside Columbia University in upper Manhattan on March 14.
But she was seeing others being detained under orders from the Trump administration and was afraid.

“You keep going back, thinking ‘Have I done something?’ And there are no answers there,” she said.

She knew Columbia University graduate student and US permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and put in detention in Louisiana, and did not want to take that risk.

“It was very clear to her, rightly so, that this government would stop at nothing to pursue her, even though their pursuit of her was based on nothing,” Yaffe said.

Srinivasan went to LaGuardia Airport and took a flight to Canada.


Agents searched her home

Government officers, now in possession of a warrant, went back to her apartment.

Four agents, three with their faces covered, spent several minutes inside.

They asked Srinivasan’s roommate to stay in her room. “If not, you can leave,” one agent said, as heard on a video recording taken by the roommate that CNN has viewed.

Another said he would explain the warrant “if you would like to put down your phone.”

“We have a warrant to search this premises for electronics, documents related to Ranjani Srinivasan,” continued the officer who identified himself as coming from “Homeland Security” as the roommate recorded. “Did you get enough video?” he added.

The officers left, taking nothing for evidence.

A DHS news release heralded Srinivasan’s departure but did not mention unreported summonses, instead alleging she was “involved in activities supporting Hamas.” The release was headlined: “Columbia University Student Whose Visa Was Revoked for Supporting Hamas and Terrorist Activities Used CBP Home App to Self-Deport.” The app, introduced the day before Srinivasan left, includes a feature for immigrants without legal permission to be in the US to inform the government they intend to depart.

There was also a damning post on X from Secretary Kristi Noem: “It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country. I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers use the CBP Home app to self deport.”

Yaffe said the statements about Srinivasan were “absolutely false.”

“She has basically been a private person, pursuing her studies and pursuing her career,” he said. “She’s been a student, and they not only took that away from her in the sense of forcing her out of the country … but they also took away her privacy, obviously, and made her the huge public face of this campaign of repression that they’re undertaking with the deliberate desire, as the administration has said, to send a message to other students.”

Srinivasan also takes issue with how she was portrayed. She denies using the CBP Home app, saying it wasn’t on her phone and anyway her device was almost dead at the airport. “I didn’t even know the app existed. I just left,” she said.

As for her politics, she said: “I’m not a terrorist sympathizer, I’m not a pro-Hamas activist. I’m just literally a random student … It just seems very strange that they would spend so much, vast resources, in persecuting me.”

For now, she’s trying to stay optimistic about getting back to her life and doctorate. She was due to complete it in May. She hopes somehow Columbia can reenroll her so her five years of study with them is not for naught.

But she’s unhappy with the actions of the Ivy League school, which has made policy changes apparently to address demands from the Trump administration since she left. The interim president of Columbia University stepped down the following week.

“I do think that Columbia should have protected me against this. I think that that’s part of their mandate,” Srinivasan said. “When you’re attracting these international students to come and study at Columbia, when you go and do outreach all across the world to attract the best and the brightest, you have a mandate to protect them.”

She might be an expert in planning, but Srinivasan is not trying to look too far ahead and is set on two goals.

“I want my PhD. I want my name cleared.”

Elon setting fire to Tesla and whining about it

This Dean Blundell post is the best summary of the whole Elon/Tesla dumpster fire (with whiny Elon audio to boot):

I’ve seen some wild shit in my day, but nothing—nothing—prepared me for the leaked audio of Elon Musk sobbing to Donald Trump about Tesla’s nosedive. The world’s richest man, the guy who’s spent years cosplaying as Tony Stark, was reportedly bawling his eyes out in the Oval Office, begging the former President to save his crumbling empire.

Tesla’s stock, once the darling of Wall Street, is getting hammered. As I write this on April Fool’s Day (ironic, right?), TSLA is sitting at $222.15 after a brutal 15% drop in a single day last month—the worst since 2020. That’s down from a mid-December peak of $480, a jaw-dropping 50% haircut in just a few months. Investors are bailing, sales are tanking, and the public? Oh, the public hates Elon right now. Like, spray-paint-swastikas-on-Cybertrucks level hate. And this audio? It’s the sound of a man who knows the jig is up.

I’ve got no sympathy for the guy. Elon’s spent years building Tesla into a symbol of innovation, a middle finger to Big Oil, and—let’s be real—a cult for tech bros and stock pumpers. But he’s also spent the last year tying himself to Trump tighter than a MAGA hat on a hillbilly rallygoer, and that’s where the wheels started coming off. The backlash isn’t just loud; it’s visceral. Protests are popping up everywhere—hundreds of them, from Seattle to Miami, London to Berlin. The “Tesla Takedown” movement hit all 277 U.S. showrooms last weekend, with crowds chanting “Elon Musk, shame on you” and waving signs like “Honk if you hate Elon.” They’re not just mad; they’re organized. And they’re hitting him where it hurts: his bottom line, with the goal of “ZEROING” Tesla stock.

The numbers don’t lie. Tesla sales in Europe dropped 45% in January compared to last year—76% in Germany alone. Australia’s down 72%. China, a key market, is slipping too, thanks to competition from cheaper EVs and Elon’s cozying up to far-right politics. Used Tesla prices are cratering—Cybertrucks are fucking DISASTER —and trade-ins are at record highs, according to Edmunds. Owners are ditching their cars, slapping bumper stickers on them that scream, “I bought this before Elon went nuts.” Hell, even Sheryl Crow sold hers. That’s how toxic this brand’s gotten.

And the violence? It’s next-level. Charging stations torched near Boston. Shots fired at a dealership in Oregon. Molotov cocktails in Colorado. Swastikas scrawled on cars from Pasadena to Clermont. Trump’s calling these folks “domestic terrorists,” threatening 20-year sentences in El Salvador’s mega-prison, but it’s not slowing down. If anything, it’s escalating. The progressive group Indivisible’s out there with protest guides, and Hollywood’s jumping in—John Cusack’s railing against Elon, and Valerie Costa, a Seattle organizer, got personally targeted by Musk on X with zero evidence. He’s lashing out, and it’s pathetic because he’s pathetic.

Cioran's History and Utopia

A few weeks ago, I read Cioran's History and Utopia in roughly two sittings. I like his first two essays best in their maniacal dissection of humanity reminiscent of Nietzsche's Übermensch, the Gnostics or simply foreshadowing our current times. Semi-random excerpts:

I pity those who have never conceived a dream of excessive domination, nor felt the times seething within themselves. In the days when Ahriman was my principle and my god, when I thirsted for barbarism, I brooded over the cavalcades within myself, hordes provoking one sweet catastrophe after the next! Foundered as I have, nowadays, in modesty, I nonetheless harbor a weakness for tyrants, whom I always prefer to redeemers and prophets; I prefer them because they do not take refuge in formulas; because their prestige is an equivocal one, their cravings self-destructive; whereas the others, possessed of a limitless ambition, dis guise its aims under deceptive precepts, retreat from the citizen in order to rule over conscience, to occupy it, and, once implanted there, to create permanent ravages without incurring the reproach, however merited, of indiscretion or sadism. Compared to the power of a Buddha, a Jesus, or a Mohammed, what does that of the conquerors signify?
Abandon the notion of glory unless you are tempted to found a religion!

The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the major intuition of ancient mythology.

Every undermining labor exalts, confers energy; whence the urgency, whence the practical infallibility of vile sentiments. Envy, which makes a fool into a daredevil, a worm into a tiger, whips up our nerves, ignites our blood, communicates to the body a shudder that keeps it from going soft, lends the most anodyne countenance an expression of concentrated ardor; without envy, there would be no events, nor even a world; indeed it is envy that has made man possible, permitted him to gain a name for himself, to accede to greatness by the fall, by that rebellion against the anonymous glory of paradise, to which-any more than the Fallen Angel, his inspiration and his model-he could not adapt himself. Everything that breathes and moves testifies to the initial taint. Forever associated with the effervescences of Satan (patron of Time, scarcely distinct from God, being merely
His visible countenance), we are victims of this genius of sedition who persuades us to perform our task as living men by rousing us against one another in a deplorable combat, no doubt, but a fortifying one: we emerge from torpor, enlivened whenever-triumphing over our Higher Impulses-we become aware of our role as destroyers.

He who has suffered humiliation will never forget its effects and will know no rest until he has put them into a work capable of perpetuating its pangs. To create is to bequeath one's sufferings, wanting others to enter into them, to assume them, to be impregnated by them, and to live them over again. This is true of a poem, this can be true of the cosmos. Without the hypothesis of a feverish deity subject to convulsions, giddy with epilepsy, we could not explain a universe that . everywhere shows signs of an original sputum . . . . And we divine the essence of such a God only when we ourselves suffer fits such as He must have known at the moments He came to grips with Chaos. We are reminded of Him by everything in ourselves that resists form or good sense, by our confusions and our delirium: we join Him by supplications in which we dislocate ourselves in Him and Him in us, for He is close to us whenever something in ourselves breaks down and when, in our fashion, we too measure ourselves against Chaos. A summary theology? Contemplating this botched Creation, how can we help incriminating its Author, how-above all-suppose Him able and adroit? Any other God would have given evidence of more competence or more equilibrium than this one: errors and confusion wherever you look! Impossible to absolve Him, but impossible, too, not to understand Him. And we understand Him by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune. His enterprise bears the stigmata of the provisional, yet it is not time He lacked in order to finish things off. He was, to our misfortune, inexplicably rushed. By a legitimate ingratitude, and to make Him feel the brunt of our ill humor, we set about-experts in counter-Creation-deteriorating His structure, rendering even messier a work already compromised from the start. Doubtless it would be wiser and more elegant to have nothing to do with it, to leave it as it is, not to exact reprisal for His own incapacities; but since He has transmitted His defects to us, we cannot show Him much solicitude. If, all things considered, we prefer Him to humanity, this does not exempt Him from our resentment. Perhaps we have conceived Him only to justify and regenerate our rebellions, to afford them a worthy object, to keep them from spoiling and dwindling, reinforcing them by the inspiriting abuse of sacrilege, an answer to the arguments and seductions of discouragement. We are never quite finished with God. Treating Him on equal footing as an enemy is an impertinence that fortifies, stimulates, and how much we must pity those He has ceased to annoy.