Editor’s Note: Jackson Mills, one of the writers, was a student on this Maymester course.
Professor Steve Swerdlow arrived in Kyrgyzstan with his Maymester class expecting to spend the next two weeks teaching the course on human rights in the Central Asia country as he has done since 2022. The students were beginning the first leg of a two-country trip through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Instead, he was denied entry on the spot.
“As soon as I got in front of the passport window, the migration officer looked at her screen, called someone over, and I was whisked away into another part of the airport,” Swerdlow said in a May interview with an Annenberg Media reporter who was one of his maymester students.
The agent led Swerdlow, an associate professor of the practice of human rights at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, to the State Border Service office. When he got there, he said, three officers told him he was banned from the Kyrgyz Republic “by order of the security services.”
The agent alleged Swerdlow had been banned in 2024, which was the – something Swerdlow had no knowledge of.
He and his students had just arrived on a flight from Istanbul to Bishkek, a trip he said he made regularly for decades. The ban came as a surprise.
He formerly worked as a Central Asia Researcher at Human Rights Watch, where he focused on human rights abuses in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but was based in Bishkek. An American citizen and graduate of UC Berkeley Law, Swerdlow had spent most of his career working on issues related to torture and minority rights in the post-soviet region.
As agents ordered Swerdlow to get back on a plane to Istanbul, his 16 students were left in Kyrgyzstan under the supervision of the American University of Central Asia, but without any USC professor.
“I had high-fived him maybe like five minutes before he got taken away,” said Sophie Boxwala, one of the students in the course who witnessed him being stopped at the airport.
Boxwala, a junior majoring in political economy, said one of her friends joked about Swerdlow getting deported while the group waited. It wouldn’t be until several hours later that the course’s teaching assistant broke the news to them: Swerdlow had not been let into Kyrgyzstan.
Annenberg Media reached out to USC for comment, and did not receive a response by the time of publication.
The first few hours at the airport
Meghan Piker, a junior majoring in intelligence and cyber operations, said she at first did not think much of it when she saw Swerdlow being led away by Kyrgyz authorities.
After waiting for two hours in buses outside the airport, she started to worry.
“The thought started to rise, like okay this is really weird,” Piker said.
The students were taken to their hotel by representatives of the university partner for the Maymester. After a few hours, they got the news that they would not be seeing their professor in Kyrgyzstan.
“I was just like there has to be no way that in my first ever study abroad, my teacher gets deported,” said Vin Harris-Myers, a junior studying occupational therapy.
Harris-Myers said despite not having her professor present, the course went smoothly and she felt safe during her time in Kyrgyzstan.
After Swerdlow was sent back to Istanbul on a flight he said the Kyrgyz government booked with his money, Turkish police showed him a written document justifying his ban from Kyrgyzstan.
Kyrgyz law requires that if someone is denied entry to the country despite having a valid passport or visa, they have to be notified of the decision in writing by the state agency that made the decision – in this case, the State Border Service.
Swerdlow said Kyrgyz officials wouldn’t show him the document when he requested. When Turkish police escorted him off the plane after arriving in Istanbul, he snapped a photo of the document and all that it listed for his refusal of entry: “Not Permitted to Enter or Exit.”
As of publication, Swerdlow said he still had not received an explanation beyond that phrase.
He suspects his previous work for Human Rights Watch in the region, as well as his continuing human rights activism, may be the reason.
“The only reason given was very Kafkaesque,” Swerdlow said. “The basis for not allowing me entry was that entry was closed to the Kyrgyz Republic.”
Annenberg Media made multiple attempts to contact the Krygyz Embassy to the United States, through email and phone, and received no reply. The U.S. Embassy to Kyrgyzstan said they cannot comment on the issues of private citizens.
Not the first ban
Syinat Sultanalieva, a researcher in Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, said the lack of explanation given for Swerdlow’s ban makes it difficult to appeal.
“His entry is closed, why is it closed? Supposedly it has to do with something he did in 2024,” Sultanalieva said. “How is he supposed to counter this if he isn’t clear on what exactly it is that he’s been charged with?”
The Ombudsman Institute of the Kyrgyz Republic, responsible for oversight of civil rights and freedoms, reached out to the State Border Service “seeking information on whether a decision to deny entry into the territory of the Kyrgyz Republic had been issued, the legal grounds for such a decision, the procedure followed in adopting and documenting it, and whether the foreign national was informed of his right to appeal the decision,” a spokesperson for the Ombudsman Institute told Annenberg Media.
The Ombudsman Institute has not told Annenberg Media whether it received a response.
Swerdlow’s case comes amid other recent cases involving human rights advocates. Ilya Nuzov, head of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk at the International Federation for Human Rights, was denied entry in December 2025.
In addition to Swerdlow and Nuzov are British journalist Chris Rickleton, who was banned from Kyrgyzstan in December 2017, as well as Mihra Rittmann, a senior Central Asia adviser at Human Rights Watch, who was banned in 2015.
Who banned Swerdlow?
The ban was particularly surprising to Swerdlow because he had confirmed meetings with members of Parliament, the Ombudsman and the Ministry of Culture — all seemingly unaware that he was not going to make it into the country.
“We had done about a year’s worth of preparation and already had confirmed a whole series of meetings with the government,” Swerdlow said.
The document Swerdlow photographed listed the State Border Service as the agency ordering his denial of entry.
“I had no idea that this would happen. I have lived and worked in Kyrgyzstan for much of the last 15 years,” Swerdlow said. “We had done about a year’s worth of preparation and already had confirmed a whole series of meetings with the government.”
While he said they claimed he was put on a blacklist in 2024, Swerdlow believes the reference to a 2024 ban was a last-minute attempt to justify his denial of entry.
“I think the security services has just been cracking down, not only on professors or academics, but really anyone broadly related to human rights or journalism,” Swerdlow said.
What now?
The students reunited with Swerdlow in Kazakhstan, where he flew after spending a week in Istanbul. Swerdlow worked with USC to change when the students would go there for the second leg of the trip, so that he could get to them earlier.
The course went on as planned – a section of the Maymester where students would’ve travelled to eastern Kyrgyzstan to see the internationally renowned Issyk Kul lake had to be cut, but the depth and breadth of the coursework remained the same for students.
“I had such an amazing time. It’s a country that’s so rich in culture and people and, unfortunately, because of this whole deportation our trip got cut three days short,” Boxwala said. “We were actually supposed to stay in yerts and see horseback riding and falconeering.”
While in Kazakhstan, Swerdlow got in contact with Klara Sooronkulova, a Kyrgz attorney and former justice on the Constitutional Court of Kyrgyzstan, who agreed to represent him in a civil lawsuit he is filing against the Kyrgyz Republic.
He said that she has filed multiple petitions with the Border Migration Agency requesting a justification for his entry denial, but that they have both refused to provide a comment and said it is not their burden.
Swerdlow said that throughout the experience, the students were his central concern.
“I like to say that while the Kyrgyzstan government deported me, they gave my students an amazing lesson in human rights,” Swerdlow said.
For Boxwala, the course still ended up great — and perhaps better, with Swerdlow’s ejection serving as an on-the-ground learning experience.
“I know it’s a risky situation to not have a professor with you in the country, but I never felt unsafe and I don’t think any of my peers felt unsafe,” Boxwala said. “We just kind of jumped straight into the action and learned how to be human rights activists by ourselves before reconnecting with Professor Swerdlow.”
Edited by Katherine Contreras Hernandez & Scott Hills