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SOURCE:CNN- AUTHOR:M.J. GDNUS
For hundreds of thousands of people every year who dream of studying or researching in the United States, a student visa is the golden ticket.
Now, for hundreds of people already at US colleges and universities, it is turning into a one-way ticket back to their home countries as President Donald Trump’s administration continues an aggressive effort to revoke visas and push academics out of the country – whether voluntarily or in handcuffs.
Visa programs in the US are complicated, with many requirements and conditions, and the State Department says it has broad powers to terminate them.
How do student visas work?
Coming to the United States for anything but tourism usually means wading through an alphabet soup of visa types – more than two dozen for people who do not intend to become permanent residents of the US.
But only three apply to people from other countries who plan to study in the United States. An F-1 visa is used by students attending an academic institution like a high school or college. The much less common M-1 visa applies to students in a vocational program.
To accept students with those visas, an educational institution first must be certified by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit, or ICE, through the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, known as SEVP.
In its disputes with Harvard University, the Trump administration has threatened to decertify the university from SEVP unless it agrees to give the Department of Homeland Security detailed disciplinary records on its international students – part of a broader White House effort to bring elite US colleges into lockstep with its political ideology. If Harvard is dropped from the program, it would not be able to accept students on an F-1 visa, with existing F-1 students traditionally allowed to seek a transfer to another US school.
Additionally, many people with educational plans come to the US on a J-1 “exchange visitor” visa. This path includes not just academic study but also a “cultural component” supervised by a US organization approved by the State Department, a list that includes thousands of educational institutions. Professors, researchers and physicians typically come to the US on a J-1 visa.
Although it comes with more strings attached than the F-1 visa, some students prefer the J-1 because it allows their spouses to work in the US, said Lisa Murray, exchange program director with the non-profit American Immigration Council.
“Many prestigious scholarships, fellowships or grants are specifically tied to J-1 sponsorship,” Murray told CNN.
All three types of educational visas use a government online database called SEVIS – the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System – to allow colleges and universities to provide legally required information to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security about international students at their institutions. That information includes the student’s address and confirmation of their academic work.
“US higher education institutions take the responsibility of enrolling international students and complying with SEVP requirements very seriously and understand the consequences of not doing so,” Fanta Aw, CEO of the non-profit Association of International Educators, said in a statement.
“Institutions have codes of conduct and disciplinary measures in place to address student conduct which may result in terminating a student’s SEVIS record as outlined by SEVP, just as there are established grounds for the government or the institution to withdraw its certification.”
When can a student visa be revoked?
While a person’s legal status – their ability to remain in the United States – is determined by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, visas are issued by the State Department and can be revoked for a number of reasons, including violating laws and providing false information on an application. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual makes clear a visa holder does not have to be formally charged with any crime before a visa can be terminated.
“The Department may revoke a visa when it receives derogatory information directly from another US Government agency, including a member of the intelligence or law enforcement community,” the manual says.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has terminated hundreds of visas under a rarely used provision that allows for revocation if a person’s presence in the US “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
In the move’s wake seems to be a two-tiered system to get affected students to quickly leave the country. First, the State Department revokes a visa, then ICE tells the student to leave immediately or, in at least one case, finds and detains them.
Tufts University doctoral candidate Rümeysa Öztürk was confronted last month by federal agents on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, and handcuffed as she shrieked in fear and confusion, as seen in surveillance video viewed around the world. Though Öztürk’s F-1 visa had been revoked four days earlier, she hadn’t gotten notice of it before her arrest, says a petition filed by her lawyers in federal court in Boston challenging the legality of her detention.
Öztürk was “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson has said, without specifying the alleged activities. Her lawyers say she is unfairly being punished for speaking out in favor of Palestinian rights.
Many foreign students now targeted for deportation say they have done nothing criminal or controversial in the US other than publicly support the Palestinian cause in the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
And removal orders for students have not just affected visa holders. Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Madawi – pro-Palestinian activists at Columbia University – are now fighting deportation after the State Department ordered revocation of their permanent legal resident status, commonly known as a “green card,” and arrested them in March and April.
Reasons given for ejecting students go beyond protests
More than 100 international students who have had their visas revoked claim the government is “stripping them of their ability to pursue their studies and maintain employment in the United States and risking their arrest, detention, and deportation,” a lawsuit filed on their behalf in federal court in Georgia states.
Some of the students targeted never were protesters and or charged with a crime, plaintiff’s attorney Dustin Baxter said.
“Not only would they revoke the person’s student visa – even if there was no conviction, if there was just an arrest, and sometimes there wasn’t even an arrest, there was just an encounter and maybe a ticket – they would revoke the student visa,” Baxter said.
Some foreign students say the first notice they received about their visa revocation was not from ICE but their school. Meanwhile, many universities got no formal notice of their students’ visa revocations and found out only by seeing a student’s name in government records, school officials say.
After four students and two recent graduates of Stanford University in California had their student visas rescinded, the “University learned of the revocations during a routine check of the SEVIS database,” it said in a statement on April 4.
That marks a major change from the way that system historically has been used, an immigration attorney told CNN.
“Up until Trump took office, it was really up to the designated school officers to initiate that revocation in SEVIS,” said Jeff Joseph, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “What we’re seeing now is that ICE is doing it themselves.”
Government warns students they’re being watched
Since Trump’s second term began, the administration has put out warnings that the government has its eyes on people living in the US on visas.
“US visa screening does not stop after a visa is issued,” the State Department said in March in a Facebook post. “We continuously check visa holders to ensure they follow all US laws and immigration rules – and we will revoke their visas and deport them if they don’t.”
Traditionally, the expiration of an exchange visitor visa does not mean a person is immediately considered to be in the country illegally. In fact, the State Department’s website advises J-1 visa holders, “If your visa has expired and you do not plan to travel outside of the US, you do not need to renew the visa.” ICE tells F-1 visa holders, “You can stay in the United States on an expired F-1 visa as long as you maintain your student status.”
But a number of students who have been told via email by the Department of Homeland Security their visas were revoked are getting the message they must “self-deport” within seven days if they want to avoid being arrested.
“Do not attempt to remain in the United States. The federal government will find you,” one such email says, according to Boston immigration attorney Nicole Micheroni, who said she received the message apparently intended for a client.
While Rubio has publicly touted efforts to revoke student visas, the State Department has been tight-lipped about individual decisions.
“Due to privacy considerations, and visa confidentiality, we generally will not comment on Department actions with respect to specific cases,” an agency spokesperson told CNN in response to questions about several cases.
Before a person in ICE custody can be deported, several steps can be taken, including exercising the right in many cases to petition the Board of Immigration Appeals. But the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2024 that visa revocations are almost never appealable.
“Congress granted the Secretary (of State) broad authority to revoke an approved visa petition ‘at any time, for what he deems to be good and sufficient cause,’” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote.
A student visa holder “who violates a term or condition” of their legal status cannot apply for another visa until being out of the country for at least five years, according to State Department guidelines.
How many student visas does the US approve?
Hundreds of thousands of new student visas are approved every year, according to the State Department, many of them for people extending existing visas or changing to a different type of visa as their educational status changes.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a nephrology specialist and an associate professor at Brown University, was deported in March after ICE said she returned to the US from a trip to her native Iran, where she attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Alawieh originally came to the US on a J-1 visa to study at three American universities over six years but changed to an H-1B visa for skilled workers when she took the position at Brown, according to a court filing by her lawyers.
The total number of student visas issued peaked in 2015, when nearly 1 million visas were approved. The approvals for F-1 visas dropped 27% the following year, according to State Department figures, then barely cleared six figures in 2020, when Covid travel restrictions and a temporary suspension of processing at embassies and consulates sent the numbers plummeting.
Student visa approvals have returned to pre-Covid levels, but 2024 figures were still less than three-quarters of the 2015 record. Hundreds of institutions of higher education cited “social and political environment” in the US, as well as “feeling unwelcome,” as factors in declining international student enrollment during the first Trump administration, the non-profit Institute of International Education found.
Trump’s tone on international students has changed dramatically since the earliest days of his presidential ambitions.
“When foreigners attend our great colleges & want to stay in the US, they should not be thrown out of our country,” Trump tweeted in August 2015, two months after launching his first campaign with a famous escalator ride at Trump Tower.
A decade later, his administration has canceled more than 1,000 scholars’ visas – and counting.
