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The Trump administration is continuing its attack on university students across the nation, as hundreds of visa holders and students with permanent residencies are being told they are no longer welcome in this country.
Without a chance to plead their case, students are receiving notifications from the Department of Homeland Security’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System database informing them that their record is terminated. This means their legal status is invalid and they need to vacate the country.
For some students, they suspect they’ve been targeted due to their proximity to political protests. However, others have been terminated without any ties to political activity at all. As a matter of fact, the only thing these students could point toward that could potentially be a reason for targeting is a past traffic violation.
One student told the Guardian that she received the notification because she was “identified in [a] criminal records check” for two traffic tickets that were later dismissed in court. Another student’s visa was revoked from a dropped charge more than three years ago, while someone else was booted from the country for driving on a suspended license.
Related | Inside Trump’s devastating attacks on higher education
“Students weren’t given any chance to explain their situation. As long as the system flagged them, what we believe is a kind of criminal screening trigger, they were terminated under one broad directive,” Shenqi Cai, a California immigration attorney and managing attorney at Lashine Law, told the outlet.
These revocations started rolling in last week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he had revoked over 300 student visas. Rubio has made it pretty clear he doesn’t hold these students in high regard.
“Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” he said to reporters, adding that he “hopes” to “get rid of all of them.”
The administration’s anti-immigrant approach in higher education could have a dire impact on the funding that keeps these universities running. There are over a million international students at U.S. universities, and their tuition is usually more than the tuition of an American student. For the 2023-24 school year, they contributed $43.8 billion dollars to the nation’s economy, The New York Times reported.
However, it’ll be hard to convince students to come to the U.S. to study if they’re only promised a high price tag and discrimination upon entry.
As Rubio tears through the immigrant community in higher education, Trump is also targeting universities as a whole. Schools like Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and many more are being hit by massive billion dollar funding freezes as they struggle to fight against Trump’s demands.
The president started withholding payouts under the claims that pro-Palestine protests created antisemitic environments on campus. Then, he began to say that hiring and admission practices were “race-exclusionary,” according to a press release from the Department of Education.
For the University of Pennsylvania, Trump suspended $175 million in funding over the school’s alleged stance on transgender women in sports.
In some cases, universities are caving to get their money back.
Columbia agreed to overhaul its protest policies, security practices, and the Middle Eastern studies department. Meanwhile, the University of Pennsylvania said in a statement that they comply with the NCAA’s policies regarding transgender people in sports. It’s unclear exactly when Penn—where famous trans swimmer Lia Thomas attended—began enacting those policies.
And as schools lose more of their students who pay large sums to grace their hallways, it may be even harder for higher education to resist the demands.
As Trump and Rubio label these scholars as “lunatics” and “terrorists,” graduates of these universities are being snatched off the streets and placed in ICE detention centers thousands of miles away from their homes.
Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident and student activist at Columbia, was the first of many. He still sits in a detention center awaiting trial. Multiple other students have been abducted and taken to ICE facilities.
“They approached her and started grabbing her with their faces covered. They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles,” one spectator said when watching the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University.“It looked like a kidnapping.”
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