Recent videos on social media showing immigration agents taking people into custody unnerved Aditya Harsono, who had himself come to this country from Indonesia on a student visa. But he said he presumed that the media was probably exaggerating the extent of the Trump administration’s actions.
His understanding shifted in late March, though, when a supervisor at the hospital where he was working in western Minnesota summoned him downstairs, and two federal agents put him in handcuffs.
“Everything kind of shattered,” said Mr. Harsono, who learned that his student visa, which had allowed him to earn a master’s degree in business administration and to then stay for a year to work, had been revoked because of a misdemeanor property destruction conviction. Mr. Harsono, who is married to an American citizen and has applied for a green card, has been held in a county jail since and faces deportation.
The people affected include students involved in activism over the war in Gaza, whom the Trump administration has characterized as disruptive. Some others, including Mr. Harsono, appear to have lost their visas as a result of criminal convictions, some for relatively minor offenses.
Few of the students being held have spoken publicly about their situations. But Mr. Harsono, 34, described in phone interviews from the jail where he has been held for weeks the shock of his arrest and the way that his visa revocation has upended his family. And his wife, Peyton Harsono, told of difficulties she now faces taking care of their 8-month-old daughter, Adalet, while working as a social worker at a drug-treatment center.
Ms. Harsono, a Minnesota native, said the family has lost health insurance that had come with Mr. Harsono’s job as a supply chain manager at the hospital. As their savings dwindle, Ms. Harsono, 24, has been pleading for help on a fund-raising site, calling “the trauma of this separation unbearable.”
The State Department declined to respond to questions about Mr. Harsono’s case. In a statement, it said, “The Department of State will continue to work closely with the Department of Homeland Security to enforce zero tolerance for aliens in the United States who violate U.S. laws, threaten public safety, or in other situations where warranted.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently said the government had nullified the visas of students involved in disruptive forms of activism, including acts of vandalism. “When we identify lunatics like these, we take away their student visa,” Mr. Rubio said. “No one is entitled to a student visa.”
After moving to the United States in 2015, Mr. Harsono received a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from Southwest Minnesota State University, which he attended with a scholarship funded by the Indonesian government. During his years in America, Mr. Harsono said he pursued a passion for hip-hop by recording music, read history books and sometimes took part in peaceful protests over police misconduct.
He enrolled in the school’s M.B.A. program in 2022, and met Ms. Harsono in the residential complex where they both lived.
She was instantly smitten, she said, adding, “When you know, you know.”
In July 2022, Mr. Harsono was charged with destruction of property for drawing graffiti on four trailers that belonged to a food company.
Repairing the damage cost less than $500, a court document said. Mr. Harsono pleaded guilty to misdemeanor destruction of property and agreed to pay $485, which included a fine and court fees, records showed.
Speaking on the phone from Kandiyohi County Jail, roughly 95 miles west of Minneapolis, Mr. Harsono said he was remorseful about what he had done. He said that he loved painting murals and had a lifelong passion for street art, and had wrongly presumed that the trailers were abandoned.
The couple married in the fall of 2023. The following year, they applied for Mr. Harsono’s green card and soon settled into a routine, juggling the demands of parenthood and new jobs. Money was tight. Sleep was scarce. But everything seemed to be going well, they said, until Mr. Harsono’s arrest at the hospital on March 27.
The State Department revoked Mr. Harsono’s visa at the request of officials at the Department of Homeland Security, according to a memo from March 23 signed by John Armstrong, a career diplomat. The 2022 property damage arrest, the memo said, showed that Mr. Harsono “now poses a threat to U.S. public safety.”
Mr. Armstrong wrote that the State Department would not notify Mr. Harsono about the revocation before agents took him into custody, citing Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “operational security.”
The day after his arrest, the Department of Homeland Security issued a document setting in motion deportation proceedings, stating that Mr. Harsono was subject to deportation because he remained in the United States after his visa was revoked a few days earlier.
Mr. Harsono said that the immigration officials who drove him to jail inquired at one point how someone from Indonesia, an archipelago famous for its beaches, had wound up in Minnesota, a place with unforgiving winters. The agents’ jovial conversation, Mr. Harsono said, felt starkly at odds with his mood, which he said has worsened over the weeks in a jail unit that houses 16 people.
“I haven’t had fresh air and sun light,” he said last week.
During his time in custody, Mr. Harsono said he has reflected on the reasons he chose to study in the United States. He said he had regarded it as a country that values multiculturalism and freedom of speech.
Mr. Harsono said he feels that the country has changed in significant and ominous ways. Even if he were to ultimately get a green card, Mr. Harsono said he questioned whether he would ever feel safe and at home here. “America is no longer a democracy,” he said.
He said that he despairs at the thought that, should he be deported, he might be barred from visiting the country his wife and daughter call home. He has begun to consider, he said, how his wife and daughter might fare if they all were to move to Indonesia.
In only a matter of weeks, Ms. Harsono said her husband has missed out on several milestones for their baby daughter. Adalet has begun to sit up unassisted, to get around in a rolling baby walker and to say the word “dada” for the first time when her father called from jail.
“She’s gotten so much bigger,” she said.
During a court hearing on April 10, an immigration judge ruled that Mr. Harsono could be released on bond, citing his eligibility for a green card, according to his lawyer, Sarah Gad. But the government blocked his release while it appeals the ruling, so Mr. Harsono remains in custody.
In addition to the graffiti arrest, Ms. Gad said that a government lawyer mentioned in court that Mr. Harsono had been arrested in 2021 during a demonstration against police violence. Prosecutors dismissed the charge he faced, a misdemeanor for violating a curfew, the lawyer added.
Ms. Harsono said she struggles to contemplate what would happen if her husband is ultimately deported. Living without him feels excruciating. And, having never traveled abroad, she said the thought of moving to Indonesia is unthinkable.
“I’ve rarely been out of the state,” she said. “The farthest I go is South Dakota.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
