With secret moves against international students, feds spread fear
On college campuses, an untold number of international students are navigating their days without knowing whether they are about to be kicked out of the country.
Dozens of universities reported a new wave of student visa revocations over the weekend, the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign against international students. The move comes after the administration said it would use all the information at its disposal to help identify international students to deport for their anti-Israel protests, which the government alleges support Hamas’s goals.
The administration has not said how many student visas it has revoked or why affected colleges were not notified. So far, about a dozen students, some whose identity remains unknown, have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to various groups tracking the detentions.
The furtiveness shrouding the revocations and arrests is fueling the fear that almost any immigrant could be targeted, with no warning, for protesting the Gaza-Israel war, or for something as minor as a traffic violation.
Compounding the fear and confusion are deep-seated concerns that the Trump administration’s deportation actions violate First Amendment and due process rights.
“It’s never been the case that the government would go in and terminate someone’s status before the proceedings were allowed to happen and the student had their day in court,” said Adam Cohen, a partner at Siskind Susser, an immigration law firm. “What’s happening now is unprecedented.”
President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to close the southern border and deport violent criminals has quickly expanded to include hunting down legal immigrants, stripping them of their immigration status and, at times, imprisoning them in secret locations with little due process.
“People are terrified,” said Elora Mukherjee, a law professor and the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “The developments over recent days send a message loud and clear from the Trump administration: International students from many parts of the world are no longer welcome in this country.”
The administration says that in some cases it is correcting excesses from the previous administration, which Trump blames for not curbing pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
Many of the arrests have occurred without the students or their universities understanding the reasoning for the action, according to their lawyers, student groups and universities. In recent days, some of the university officials discovered that their students’ visa status had changed because they went to look at the database.
The State Department did not respond to questions about the most recent revocations but referred to Tuesday’s department briefing, where spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters that she wouldn’t outline the number of student visa revocations or their motivation, calling the situation “fluid” and the reasons for revocations “personal and private” for the affected students. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond.
While the federal government has broad discretion in immigration enforcement, it must grant due process to citizens and noncitizens alike. Similarly, the First Amendment applies to anyone on American soil, not only citizens.
Federal agencies involved in the removal effort appear to be basing their enforcement actions on the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, according to Trump administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Under the act, the secretary of state can deport noncitizens for a wide range of foreign policy reasons, including if the U.S. has reasonable ground to believe it would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for that person to remain in the country.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March told reporters that if students are behaving in ways that are counter “to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa.” He said that he had signed off on the revocation of “at least” 300 visas, but it was unclear how many were student visas. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he said.
Rubio has denied that the arrests were about freedom of speech.
When asked why the administration did not notify some students ahead of their arrests, a spokesperson from the State Department said the government is “not generally required to notify an individual of a visa revocation, but we do so when we determine it is practicable.”
But the spokesperson added that in considering visa revocations, authorities examine all information at their disposal, including databases containing records across the U.S. government, to find information “indicative of a potential ineligibility under U.S. law.”
Because the cases are so new, many of the government’s legal arguments have not been fully aired. But at its highest level, the administration is positioning some of the students who protested the Israeli state as terrorist sympathizers working to advance the goals of Hamas.
After the first high-profile arrest of a student who protested the Israel-Gaza war - Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian who was a green-card holder - Trump posted on social media that it was the “first arrest of many to come.” He called for arresting more students whom he called “terrorist sympathizers,” writing that their presence is “contrary to our national and foreign policy interests.”
The government’s interpretation of the 1952 statute appears to conflict with a provision in the law, passed by Congress in 1990, that states that it may be used only in unusual circumstances and “sparingly” if the deportation stems from a foreign national’s speech.
Such arguments are likely to arise in students’ legal cases against their arrests and deportation, lawyers say.
Before March, that provision, known as “foreign policy deportability grounds,” was invoked only 15 times out of the more than 11.7 million removal cases in the U.S., according to Mukherjee, the law professor at Columbia, one of 150 lawyers and other immigration advocates who submitted an amicus brief in Khalil’s case. Of those cases, only four resulted in removal, she said.
The secretary of state’s declaration that he may have revoked 300 or more visas “would be a sea change in how the foreign policy deportability ground is being used,” Mukherjee said. “If he’s invoking it based on people’s speech, it’s a clear violation of the First Amendment.”
Most of the arrests and some of the visa revocations appear focused on pro-Palestinian protesters who had criticized Israel, but not all.
One Russian researcher appears to have been pulled aside upon her return to the U.S. for failing to tell customs agents at the Boston airport that she was carrying frog embryos for a project. Another student lost their status after being stopped for driving under the influence, according to the DHS.
International students are some of the most documented and surveilled individuals living in the U.S. They are regularly tracked by the government and their academic institutions, which require regular updates to their status.
For those reasons, it’s easy for authorities to find them, immigration lawyers say.
“They are targeting not just people who are here illegally, they are going after people who have legal status here and have expressed views that the administration deems as harmful to its goals,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a former commissioner at Customs and Border Protection. “They’re taking things to a whole new level.”
Trump has long expressed his distaste for the campus protesters who spoke out against the war in Gaza and, in some cases, occupied campuses. He has teed up his desire to lash out at them for months.
In a social media post last month, the president called Khalil, the Columbia graduate student, “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.” Before he was detained, Khalil did not have any warning that his student visa had been revoked.
Khalil’s attorneys and associates have said that he was simply protesting Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza and that he is being targeted for legally protected speech. He is in a detention facility in Louisiana. His wife, an American citizen, is due to give birth this month.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University who co-wrote an op-ed for the Tufts Daily calling for the university to acknowledge what she called the genocide of Palestinians and to divest from companies with direct ties to Israel, was taken by surprise when she was arrested on her street by masked immigration officials. Video of her arrest was recorded on a security camera and has been viewed millions of times, spurring widespread outrage.
DHS and ICE investigations had concluded that Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans,” according to a statement from the DHS.
The actions have alarmed even conservative commentators.
David Bier, who runs immigration studies at the right-leaning Cato Institute, said, “It’s pretty frightening for the government to assert the ability to arrest, detain and remove people based on First Amendment-protected speech.”
Bier worked as a staffer for Rep. Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho) from 2013 to 2015 as part of an effort to pass comprehensive immigration changes. “It’s creating a climate where the government can now put its hand on the scale and tip the debate using force,” he said, “which is exactly what the First Amendment is supposed to protect against.”
While Rubio must sign off on each visa revocation, the administration last month started a “Catch and Revoke” initiative to use an AI-powered dragnet to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terrorist groups.
The effort, first reported by Axios and confirmed by The Washington Post, involves reviewing tens of thousands of social media posts from student visa holders, scouring for evidence of sympathy with Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
That effort resulted in hundreds of noncitizen students receiving emails in recent weeks, immigration lawyers estimate, informing them that their immigration status had been revoked and that “remaining in the US without a lawful immigration status can result in fines, detention, and deportation.” The messages told students that they may be sent to a country other than their country of origin, according to the text of one such email shared with The Post.
The emails warn recipients that deportations can take place at a time that does not allow the person being deported to secure their possessions or conclude their affairs in the U.S.
“The language is scary and it is explicitly designed to get people to self-deport,” said Cohen, the immigration lawyer.
The effort is twofold, he said. “They’re probably doing it that way because it takes a lot of resources to put these students into removal proceedings. And this is a way to fast-track the process and try to keep it out of the courts.”
But such efforts to avoid judicial intervention spurred even greater concerns that the administration has stripped the affected students of their due process rights.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, recently penned an article calling the government’s actions a danger to civil liberties. “We can protect the civil liberties of Jewish students even as we preserve the civil liberties of those who protest, harass or attack them because they are innocent until proven guilty,” he wrote.
Aside from the legal questions surrounding the government’s position, the most tangible effect of the opaque tactics is the widespread fear, experts say.
This type of government action “creates a reign of terror by fueling uncertainty and menace,” said Marci Shore, a history professor at the University of Toronto who studies the intellectual underpinnings of autocratic movements. “It is reminiscent of the darkest historical moments, when people can be taken away and shut away, with nobody having access to them, and you don’t know for how long.”