By Kritika Agarwal
Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the State Department has revoked the visas of more than 300 individuals – including several international students, scholars, and faculty – and was revoking more daily.
Rubio specified that not all individuals who have had their visas revoked participated in campus protests, but noted that “there’s a lot of them now.” Some visa revocations, Rubio noted, were linked to criminal charges or “potential criminal activity.” He said: “If they’re taking activities that are counter to our foreign – to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa.”
In the past few weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have sought to detain or deport students and faculty members from many AAU member campuses, including Arizona State University; Brown University; Columbia University; Cornell University; Harvard University; Tufts University; the University of Colorado, Boulder; and the University of Minnesota. While some of the students were targeted for participating in campus protests, as The New York Times reported, “in other cases, the government’s justification is unclear or appears to be unrelated to the crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters.” A University of Minnesota student, for example, was detained for having an alleged DUI conviction.
Immigration officials are also routinely bypassing school officials by “quietly deleting foreigners’ student records instead of going through colleges, as was done in the past,” according to the Associated Press. As AP explained: “In the past, when international students have had entry visas revoked, they generally have been allowed to keep legal residency status. They could stay in the country to study, but would need to renew their visa if they left the U.S. and wanted to return. Now, increasing numbers of students are having their legal status terminated, exposing them to the risk of being arrested.” AP reported that school officials are finding out about the termination of students’ legal status after running federal database updates.
In addition to ramping up enforcement in the United States, the State Department is also stepping up its scrutiny of individuals prior to their arrival in the country. Rubio sent a cable to diplomatic missions on March 25 ordering consular officers to “scrutinize the social media content of some applicants for student and other types of visas, in an effort to bar those suspected of criticizing the United States and Israel from entering the country.” According to The New York Times, the cable also stated that “applicants can be denied a visa if their behavior or actions show they bear ‘a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).’”
There are some indications that the administration could soon begin penalizing colleges and universities themselves. Last month, Axios reported that the Trump administration “is discussing plans to try to block certain colleges from having any foreign students if it decides too many are ‘pro-Hamas.’” Specifically, the administration is exploring revoking institutional certifications from the Student and Exchange Visitor Program that allow universities to accept student-visa holders. Decertification is a “cumbersome and rare” process, a director of international-student services told The Chronicle of Higher Education.
A senior Justice Department official indicated to Axios that the purpose of pursuing decertification was to hurt universities that have been sites of campus protests by disallowing the enrollment of international students who are a “meaningful source of revenue” for universities. “What you’re going to see in the not-too-distant future is the universities that we can show that were not doing anything to stop these demonstrations in support of Hamas – or encouraged enrollment by activists ... we can stop approving student visas for them, and they can no longer admit foreign students,” the official said.
Kritika Agarwal is senior editorial officer at AAU.