A Life 'Shattered': A Minnesota Man Who Lost His Visa Talks About His Detainment

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/us/minnesota-student-aditya-harsono-visa.html?unlocked_article_code=1.B08.kuGS.lQuGt_UPUYTl&smid=url-share

A Life ‘Shattered’: A Minnesota Man Who Lost His Visa Talks About His Detainment

An Indonesian man with a student visa and an American wife thought he would soon get a green card. Now, he could get deported over a 2022 arrest.


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which had allowed him to earn a master’s degree in business administration and to then stay for a year to work, had been revoked because of a misdemeanor property destruction conviction.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.

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.”