Student Visa Terminations Have Quickly Hit Over Half of All States

Students from California to Ohio to North Carolina are losing their visas with no explanation, being taken off the street by plainclothes officers and finding themselves subject to accusations reserved for terrorists.

As of Wednesday, authorities had revoked the visas of international students in at least 29 states — with officials largely citing a seldom-used 1952 foreign policy statute to take aim at their activism. Others’ visas have been terminated seemingly for past charges like DUIs.

Attorneys and advocates say it seems as though people who have protested in support of Palestinians, those with previous arrests and those with certain political social media posts are the likeliest to have been swept up.

The focus on international students is part of the Trump administration’s larger immigration crackdown and deportation machine, immigration attorneys and policy experts say, with immigrants of all statuses being scrutinized.

“It’s just part of their whole plan about reducing immigration entirely,” said Jath Shao, a Cleveland-based immigration attorney who runs a virtual law firm and represents several international students, most of them Asian. “They come after the small and the weak — people who don’t have as many resources to defend themselves.”

Students and schools say there is mass confusion about the reasons behind the revocations, the legality of the government’s actions and what options those without visas or status now have when it comes to getting their education.

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The State Department began revoking visas last month, targeting foreign-born students at schools across the country. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month that the State Department has revoked hundreds of students’ visas, taking aim at international students who participate in political activism.

“It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio said at a news conference last month.

Those students have included Mahmoud Khalil, of Columbia University, a pro-Palestinian activist and green-card holder, whom ICE arrested and detained in early March, and Rümeysa Öztürk, of Tufts University, whom immigration officials apprehended on the street near the school a few weeks later.

Other cases fall outside the bounds of political protest, like that of Doğukan Günaydın, a Turkish student at the University of Minnesota, who was arrested in front of his home in St. Paul at the end of March because of a 2023 drunken driving conviction.

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Stanford, for example, said it found out about six visa revocations while it was doing a routine check of its Student and Exchange Visitor Information System database, which maintains information about nonimmigrant students and exchange visitors.

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The Department of Homeland Security recently created a task force that uses data analytic tools to scour international students’ social media histories for potential grounds to revoke their visas, three sources familiar with the operation previously told NBC News. They also said that the task force is searching for charges and criminal convictions on students’ records as well.

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The Trump administration hasn’t said publicly why such students are being singled out over others. But immigration attorneys and policy experts say it all goes back to the centerpiece of the Trump campaign: mass deportations. Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney and policy analyst with the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said it is an example of the administration’s taking a “whole-of-government” approach to that immigration strategy.

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In the cases of Öztürk and other students who have been arrested in recent weeks, the Trump administration has cited a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. It allows the secretary of state to deport noncitizens if the secretary determines their presence in the country would result in “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, said it’s also an effort by the government to send a “clear message about who is unwelcome in the United States,” especially since most students appear to be from nonwhite backgrounds.

“U.S. immigration policy seems to be driven by xenophobia, white nationalism and racism right now,” Mukherjee said.

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