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Abbie Boggs

@abbieboggs.bsky.social
330 followers 438 following 186 posts

Degrees of Empire: Noncitizen Students on the Making of US Higher Education (Fordham UP Fall 2026 - tinyurl.com/448vs7yv) | continuing collaborative work on abolition.university

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Reposted by Abbie Boggs
Jennifer Doyle @fromaleftwing.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Here's the link to Campus Sex, Campus Security: drive.google.com/file/d/1S5vE...
drive.google.com
Doyle Campus Sex Campus Security.pdf
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
i also set aside some time in my classes on tuesday to address the news. it was challenging for me, and challenging for the students. but it was also necessary and reaffirmed what can be so important about the space of the classroom. afterwards several women came up to thank me.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Thinking about this "trust prize" for "academic courage" this morning and a piece in Sapir from the summer on how donors should think about changing universities through a talk I gave at UMass WGSS's 50th anniversary event this weekend. /1
sapirjournal.org
What Donors Should Know About Universities | SAPIR Journal
The post–October 7 reckoning in American higher education began mere hours after the attack. While the blood was still drying in Kfar Aza...
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Shipping from Fordham now. My thanks to @isaackamola.bsky.social and Grace Hong for their generous reviews of the manuscript and these blurbs! Use EMPIRE26 for 25% off too! Degrees of Empire - Abigail Boggs share.google/IFCGRIBTTh2G...
Powerful, timely, erudite and rigorously researched, Degrees of Empire is incredibly prescient in this moment as the Trump regime targets international students for deportation. Readers of this book will come away with an understanding that such authoritarian orientations are inherent to the structure of international education. Indeed, Boggs gives us a framework for understanding the entire sweep of US empire.—Grace Kyungwon Hong, author of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference

Abbie Boggs offers a profoundly structural but simultaneously humane account of the American university. In organizing her study around the figure of the noncitizen student, Boggs reveals how tensions and contradictions between university, state, capital, and empire evolve over time, shaping the very fabric of the institutions we inhabit.—Isaac Kamola, Professor of Political Science, Trinity College, Hartford
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Seems like a quick application of this guidance.
share.google
What Donors Should Know About Universities | SAPIR Journal
The post–October 7 reckoning in American higher education began mere hours after the attack. While the blood was still drying in Kfar Aza...
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Excited to hear from friends that this is out in the world! Looking forward to holding it myself too... It is definitely a much better project thanks to @isaackamola.bsky.social's brilliance and support ❤️
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Useful reporting on Flock cameras on college campuses. Universities are not simply places where immigration enforcement arrives from outside. Their own surveillance systems, policing arrangements, and data infrastructures can become part of the machinery of deportability.
thebulwark.com
Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses
A new campaign against Flock, whose camera imagery and license-plate data are used by law enforcement and ICE to find people.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Good news: a federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to end Duration of Status for noncitizen students and exchange visitors. For now, educational time will not be replaced by a new clock of recurring federal permission.
reuters.com
US judge blocks Trump limits on how long foreign students, journalists can stay
A federal judge ​blocked Trump's administration from implementing a rule that would limit how long ‌foreign students and journalists can remain without applying for extensions.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Essential reading. Especially powerful on how the “good immigrant” and model-minority bargains have always made belonging conditional—and on why this moment demands solidarity that refuses usefulness, prestige, or compliance as the price of belonging. www.aaup.org/precarities-...
Many people assume that when Trump leaves office everything will go back to normal. Congress will restore funding, and a Democratic president will reverse the numerous executive orders and actions that have imperiled immigrant students and faculty. I think that is naive. “Going back” is not the rallying call we need. If these last months have taught us anything, it is that for Asian Americans, the answer cannot be to persuade the government that we remain the good immigrants whose belonging is contingent on our proximity to whiteness. We cannot abandon the Southeast Asian and working-class Asian Americans whose distinct histories of empire, displacement, and state surveillance leave them uniquely vulnerable. Nor should we demand that the state distinguish us from Black and Latinx communities.

Instead, we must confront our own complicity and fight in broad solidarity to ensure that dignity and belonging do not depend on economic utility or social class. That requires acknowledging the indebtedness to the Black freedom struggle that the model-minority myth concealed. For faculty, this means refusing to let our selected achievements become weapons against Black and Latinx claims for justice. For higher education institutions, it demands a defense of international students and scholars as full members of academic and political communities whose rights do not rise and fall with their profitability, prestige, or compliance.
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Reposted by Abbie Boggs
Natasha Lennard @natashalennard.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
"My favorite of the two, however, had nothing good to say about the American security state."... excellent, generous and critical note from our @reproutopia.bsky.social www.patreon.com/reproutopia/...
patreon.com
Eight theses on Gloria Steinem, because goddamn | Sophie Lewis
I think the phrase we’re looking for is social-democratic anticommunism. She was a metonym of the 20th century, which is currently dying. Sh
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
“The chill is the point.” This is what deportability does: it turns immigration status into a mechanism of political discipline long before anyone is actually deported. The ruling matters. But so does understanding the infrastructure that made this fear possible in the first place.
democracynow.org
Stanford Student Newspaper Wins Suit over Trump’s Crackdown on Pro-Palestine Speech
A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of international students in seeking to deport them for their pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israe...
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Lawfare @lawfaremedia.org · 04/09/2026
"The Trump administration’s efforts to detain and deport students, scholars, and others for their advocacy and participation in protests surrounding Israel’s war in Gaza show how habeas can be undermined without ever formally suspending the writ," writes @jonathanhafetz.bsky.social.
lawfaremedia.org
Free Speech, Deportation, and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus
Denying habeas review of detention for protected speech risks accomplishing in practice what the Constitution forbids without actual suspension.
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Adam "I Was Hoping We Could Keep It" Laats @adamlaats.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Wow--the ghost of Bob Jones U v. the USA rears its racist head. Some folks on the right have been butthurt ever since 1983.
npr.org
New proposal may strip tax-exempt status from schools offering race-based preferences
The Treasury Department is proposing a new rule that would take away tax-exempt status from schools and colleges that offer any race-based preferences. It's another escalation in the Trump administrat...
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
In a new piece for The Abusable Past, I reflect on the long process of developing Degrees of Empire and how genealogy and conjunctural analysis changed the history I thought I was writing—and what thinking about the noncitizen student surfaces about the university, the border, and the present.
abusablepast.org
What Histories Does the Present Demand? Genealogy, Conjuncture, and the Noncitizen Student – The Abusable Past
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Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
NEW: French researcher Stephanie Lamy exposes the network of “race realists” who hunted Jason Arday like prey, and the media that fell into his trap. If you think the news cycle has “moved on” from this story, ask yourself why? broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-killin...
broligarchy.substack.com
The killing of a black man
A French researcher exposes the network of “race realists” who hunted Jason Arday like prey and the media who fell into their trap
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
More evidence here that the far right takes academia very seriously, and puts considerable effort into buying its influence: "Vaughan’s [chief of staff at Thiel Capital] broad aim was to build a network of conservative influence at Cambridge and other elite universities"
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Jennifer Doyle @fromaleftwing.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Must-listen. Lamy’s article is the only actual reporting on Arday’s harassment I’ve seen. These folks voiced it so you can listen to it.
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Derek Gottlieb @derekgottliebphd.com · 02/09/2026
"That the university is under attack and that the university is complicit with the very terms of engagement that place it under attack should not be seen as a contradiction. It is the way of the university.” Always read Walcott
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minor compositions @minorcompositions.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
What if defending study didn’t mean defending the university as it currently exists? Abolitionist University Studies asks us to put the institution itself back into question – and to separate study from the university’s claim to own it. Build the impossible. abolition.university/invitation/
abolition.university
Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation - Abolition University
Abolition offers the occasion for thinking about the university in ways that the institution itself might otherwise render impossible.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
@minorcompositions.bsky.social @elimeyerhoff.bsky.social @touchfaith.bsky.social @zsw.bsky.social
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Tom Joscelyn @tomjoscelyn.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
“A Haitian immigrant who had grown increasingly distraught after losing his protection from deportation and being outfitted with an ankle monitor was run over and killed Monday in what his family believes was a suicide.” www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...
washingtonpost.com
Haitian immigrant in Ohio takes his own life after losing temporary protected status, family says
Pierre Damas Bel’s family said he felt humiliated by an ankle monitor ICE officers placed on him after the Trump administration canceled protections for thousands of Haitian immigrants.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
An important ruling. But the problem isn’t only that deportation can be used to punish protected speech. It’s that deportability gives the state extraordinary power to discipline noncitizens in the first place. Equal rights are one horizon; dismantling that power is another.
A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration violated the Constitutional rights of international students when it sought to deport them for criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a 90-page ruling, Judge Noël Wise found that the key legal foundations that the Trump administration had relied on to arrest and deport foreign students were unconstitutional, because Trump officials had wielded them to target students who used their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government did not like.

“In the United States,” Judge Wise wrote, “free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength.“That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation,” she wrote. “This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”

Judge Wise, who was appointed to the Northern District of California by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., effectively declared that a section of immigration law frequently invoked by the Trump administration violated the First and Fifth Amendments, reasoning that the provision was vague and allowed the secretary of state to remove noncitizens for speech and other activities protected by the First Amendment.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
"September 3 has emerged as a pivotal date for international students in the United States on F and J visas...federal court will hear arguments in a lawsuit challenging a new (DHS) rule that limits how long foreign students and exchange visitors can remain in the country."
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
What makes September 3 important for international students in the US on F and J visas
September 3, 2026, has emerged as a pivotal date for international students in the United States on F and J visas, according to multiple reports. On that day, a federal court will hear arguments in a ...
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
NEWS: DOJ announces new lawsuits against Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington for providing in-state tuition to undocumented students. DOJ says this brings them to 21 suits challenging such tuition.
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Elissa Taub @ejtaub.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
This is such a bad idea, it's hard to explain calmly. That it'll likely be struck down eventually is cold comfort when you consider the damage it will do to US higher education in the meantime. For some schools and programs, this will be devastating, maybe even fatal.
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
A 30% cut to international enrollment is lights out at many public R1’s. And: once again, this is not bungling on the part of the administration, or unintended consequences. It is *precisely* the intention.
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andy hines @andyhines.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
"A tenured citizen professor, an international graduate worker, a dining-hall worker, an undocumented student, and a researcher dependent on federal funding confront this crisis from very different positions. A collective defense of higher education has to begin from these differences..."
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
The border is already inside the workplace. Its effects are not confined to those most directly vulnerable to removal. A workplace organized by radically different capacities to refuse, leave, speak, strike, or remain makes every worker more vulnerable. When one category of worker can be disciplined through the threat of deportation, this vulnerability changes the terrain on which all workers negotiate with the institution. The border does not need to threaten everyone equally in order to redistribute power across the workplace.

Academic freedom is therefore a labor condition. The freedom to teach, research, speak, organize, and move requires material security sufficient to exercise those capacities. Immigration status distributes that security unevenly across the university workforce.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Many thanks to the editorial team at @journalspectre.bsky.social for getting this work on universities, labor, and immigration policy into the world!
spectrejournal.com
The University’s Deportable Workers – Spectre Journal
Abigail Boggs details how US universities have become instruments of mass immigration enforcement and what it would mean to transform them into sites of abolitionist sanctuary.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
1/ Been thinking about Trump’s attacks on birthright citizenship, especially the new August 6 order, alongside his administration’s treatment of noncitizen students. They look like separate projects, but I’m interested in what connects them: how long is foreignness supposed to last—and for whom?
whitehouse.gov
Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ends Birth Tourism and Protects the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship
SAFEGUARDING AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP AND ENDING BIRTH TOURISM: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed two Executive Orders to continue to protect the
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Just published a piece in The Conversation on the new student visa rule limiting the duration of stay, a change that sounds technical, but will be vastly impactful for students and universities!
theconversation.com
A seemingly technical change to international student visas could disrupt teaching and research at US universities
US colleges and universities hosted nearly 1.2 million international students in the 2024-25 school year, an all-time high.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
In the scheme of US history, the choice of Liberia is wild.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Who would have guessed?
nytimes.com
Trump Officials Ignored Their Own University Investigations, Lawyer Says
A former Justice Department lawyer says Trump administration leaders ignored findings that elite schools, including Brown and Columbia, hadn’t broken the law as they pressed them into deals.
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Mother Jones @motherjones.com · 07/08/2026
The report, shared exclusively with Mother Jones, reveals an administration pulling all levers to completely reorient the immigration system. The sweeping goal appears to be destabilizing the lives of noncitizens in the United States and boosting deportations.
motherjones.com
The quiet war on immigrants, round two
Exclusive: Sen. Edward Markey's new report says the system hasn't been torn down—it's been hollowed out.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
1/ Academic freedom is not equally free. For noncitizen students and scholars, the First Amendment operates inside an immigration system that can make speech costly, precarious, or grounds for removal. Two cases now before the First Circuit make that structure unusually visible.
share.google
Knight Institute Urges Appeals Court to Uphold Ruling Invalidating Trump Policy of Deporting Pro-Palestinian Protesters
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Joey Fishkin @fishkin.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
When we don't adequately fund public universities, and instead force students to take out loans, what we as a society are really doing is borrowing money from the younger generation—their hard-earned future income—to fund a necessary project that benefits us all: building an educated society.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
1/Interesting split is emerging in the cases of Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Badar Khan Suri: when immigration detention is understood as retaliation for political speech, can a noncitizen challenge that detention in federal court?
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Patrick Bresnihan @pbresnihan.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Students from Gaza being denied visas to study here because they can't supply original bank statements or account for gaps in their education. Shameful. www.rte.ie/news/educati...
rte.ie
Concern over study visa refusal rate for Gazan students
Concern is growing in Irish universities over a high rate of refusal of study visas to students in Gaza who are due to take up college scholarships in Ireland this September.
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Adam "I Was Hoping We Could Keep It" Laats @adamlaats.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
School people: ICYMI, I just figured out I had a *gift link* to this article! Trump's private-school subsidy is coming January 1. The history is grim:
slate.com
Financial Hell Is About to Break Loose in American Schools
School funding is about to drop off a fiscal cliff. Costs will stay the same. What then?
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
So much appreciation for the AAUP's important work!
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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
"We found that at least 150 institutions of higher ed... are using Flock’s surveillance network.. many campus police departments have facilitated immigration related investigations, even when they are located in sanctuary states and are legally prohibited from doing so" by @torinmonahan.bsky.social
doi.org
Flock on campus: university police as appendages of a national policing apparatus
Dangerous new forms of networked surveillance are gaining traction with police departments across the United States. One popular example is Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR)...
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Got a useful question on the thread about student visas as to whether it's contradictory, from an abolitionist perspective, to describe the university as "a sanctuary for knowledge." The answer, for me, is both yes and no. Sharing an elaboration here.🧵
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AAUP @aaup.org · 22/07/2026
OUT TODAY, the AAUP just released the first comprehensive account of how the Trump administration has taken the same playbook it's used on law firms & foreign governments & turned it on American universities. US higher ed has, in effect, become a target of a massive extortion racket. 🧵
aaup.org
New Report on Extorted Compliance Charges “Massive Extortion Racket” Against Higher Ed
A new AAUP report, "Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance," exposes how the Trump administration has extended its pay-to-play approach to gov...
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Glad to see commentary on the duration of status rule change from here too! "As with many of the administration’s directives, the Duration of Stay rule is harmful, but it is also clarifying for the academic community about what it must do to preserve its integrity."
academicfreedomontheline.substack.com
New International Student Visa Rules Squeeze Academic Freedom
Following their now established playbook, the Trump administration is using administrative rules to transform higher education and erode academic freedom.
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
I can't stress this enough. This was their POLICY and PLAN. I've been saying it for months. I know that you all know this. I hope that the people who are losing their benefits understand too. Brooke Rollins et al have been saying that this is their desire and intention for months.
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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
On 7/17, the Federal Register published a new rule to tighten the conditions on student visas. Now it goes to Congress for review and likely applications starting 9/15. My students are getting official emails and starting to ask questions, so wrote up some observations based on my research: 1/
newsweek.com
DHS formalizes major student visa changes: what to know
The Trump administration said the changes will apply to student, exchange, and foreign media visa holders.
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
NEW: The Trump admin finalized a regulation which makes the largest changes to the student visa process in 50 years, along with changes to rules for exchange visitors and international journalists. 🧵on some of the most consequential changes set to go into effect in September.
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