It had to be spam. That’s what 37-year-old Ranjani Srinivasan thought when she first received an email from the United States consulate in Chennai, the southern Indian city where the Columbia University PhD candidate is from, telling her that her visa had been cancelled.
The email, which arrived at midnight, had slipped past Srinivasan’s tired eyes before she went to bed. But on Thursday, March 6, at about 7:50am in New York City, it was almost the first thing she saw when she stirred awake in her Columbia-owned apartment. Still groggy, she reached for her phone, its screen glowing in the dim morning haze.
