The Trump administration has revoked more than 300 international students’ visas in the past three weeks, according to reporting from Axios.
Yesterday two Ph.D. students with revoked visas were detained by immigration agents and now await deportation: an Iranian student at the University of Alabama and a Turkish student at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
The Tufts student, Rumesya Ozturk, was abducted by plainclothes ICE agents on the street. At a press conference Thursday, U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio said that any international student whose visa was revoked could be forcefully deported in such a manner.
“Once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States,” he said. “If you come to the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it.”
Axios also reported that the administration has discussed using a small arm of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to strip colleges they deem to be “pro-Hamas” of their ability to enroll international students.
“You can have so many bad apples in one place that it leads to decertification of the school,” an unnamed White House official told Axios. “I don’t think we’re at that point yet. But it is not an empty threat.”
The Student and Exchange Visitor Program normally investigates student visa fraud and international student recruiting practices, sometimes withdrawing colleges’ certification to enroll foreign students if there’s evidence that students are primarily enrolling as a pretext to reside and work in the U.S. instead of earn a degree.
Now, the SEVP may be tasked with a very different mandate: punishing colleges that have been the site of large pro-Palestine protests.
“What you’re going to see in the not-too-distant future is the universities … not doing anything to stop these demonstrations in support of Hamas … we can stop approving student visas for them,” a senior Justice Department official told Axios. “That’s one of their biggest cash cows, foreign students. That’s a meaningful source of revenue.”
