Student Visa Dragnet Reaches Small Colleges

Over the last month, the Trump administration has rapidly ramped up efforts to revoke students’ visas and residency status, and it shows no sign of slowing down.

In the past five days, hundreds of international students discovered that their visas had been revoked. An Inside Higher Ed analysis put the total at roughly 147 and counting across 48 institutions, as of press time Monday.

That number is almost certainly a fraction of the total. It’s not even half the number Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration had revoked as of two weeks ago, for one. But it’s also likely that a large number of student visa revocations are going unreported.

Inside Higher Ed uncovered dozens of visa terminations that have not been reported elsewhere, many of them at regional public universities and small private colleges.

Nine students at Texas A&M had their Student Exchange and Visitor Information System records terminated as of Monday, according to a university spokesperson. Two students at the University of Akron, a public regional institution in Ohio, had their SEVIS status terminated last week and are now working with immigration attorneys, a university spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. Two students at Park University, a small private college in Parkville, Mo., also had their visas revoked.

Many more colleges are reluctant to publicly confirm any student visa revocations, anxious to avoid attracting federal scrutiny and uncertain how to navigate an increasingly fraught legal gray zone. More than a dozen officials at small colleges told Inside Higher Ed that a number of students had their SEVIS status terminated in recent days but requested their institutions be kept anonymous to avoid retaliation and ensure students’ privacy.

Some said only one or two students were affected, but many reported 10 or more; one college official said 25 students’ visas were revoked. The true number of visa revocations, if this trend is an indicator, could far exceed the roughly 160 that have been publicly reported.

The institutions contacted by Inside Higher Ed include underresourced regional public universities, private religious colleges facing steep enrollment declines and a few community colleges. Some of these institutions are supported by one-person international student offices, with very green infrastructure for helping a population of international students, which, in many cases, the institutions only began enrolling within the past decade or so.

They are all keeping a close eye on their SEVIS databases, watching for daily updates on students’ residency status and preparing for all eventualities, from ICE raids on campus to legal challenges from students.

The president of one small faith-based institution, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he’d asked his staff to check their records last Thursday after reading an Inside Higher Ed article about SEVIS terminations. They found three visa revocations, and since then, there’s been a new one almost every day.

The college president added that the students were not terminated for the two reasons typically cited by ICE: past criminal activity or being a “foreign policy threat.” Instead, they were given only a “general” justification, “meaning we have no idea why their visas have been revoked,” he said.

“As an institution, we believe in honoring and obeying the law. It’s very difficult to do that when you don’t quite understand exactly what laws are being applied,” he said. “We feel like all we can do is wait and see, and pray.”

Some anonymous officials at small colleges said their students have fled the country, hoping to avoid a confrontation with ICE and a prolonged stay in a detention center. Others said students sought legal representation to challenge what many immigration lawyers say is unlawful government overreach; over the weekend two unnamed students at California colleges filed lawsuits alleging just that.

One leader of a small private college, who spoke to Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity, said one of their students was informed of her visa cancellation while she was in the hospital, having just given birth.

Peter Thomas, assistant vice president for global services and senior international officer at Campbellsville University, a small Christian college in Kentucky, declined to say how many of his students had their visas revoked. But he said some students’ SEVIS records were terminated for criminal infractions, “even though they were found innocent or the case [was] dismissed.”

“That aspect is even more disturbing,” he said.

Easy Targets

Earlier arrests at Columbia and Tufts Universities and the University of Alabama were largely focused on students and alumni active in pro-Palestinian campus activism. But the latest wave of student visa revocations appears to have little to do with political activity.

Many college officials report that minor traffic violations, sometimes dismissed by courts years ago, have put students into criminal databases that ICE appears to be scouring for targets. A University of Florida undergraduate from Colombia was arrested for driving with an expired license and is now being held in a migrant detention center; university officials say they haven’t heard from him in nearly a week.

Fanta Aw, the president of NAFSA, an association of international educators, said the Trump administration has been able to escalate its visa revocations so quickly in part because of the robust recordkeeping on international students.

Between SEVIS and university compliance documents that record things like academic standing and residency, Aw said, international students are “some of the most tracked people in the country,” documented in a network that has grown increasingly panoptic in the years since SEVIS was placed under ICE jurisdiction following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“There’s no other group that has anything comparable,” she said. “We’re seeing the consequences of that system being used in other ways now.”

Elora Mukherjee, an immigration lawyer and the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, said that while the targeted students at first seemed to be largely from the Middle East, that focus has expanded to a general attack on international students.

“Students’ sense of fear is escalating week by week,” she said.

International student enrollment is already falling in the U.S. Chris Glass, a professor of higher education at Boston College and a member of its Center for International Higher Education, analyzed enrollment data and found that the number of new international students fell this year by more than 11 percent, or 130,000 students—a sharp reversal from the prior upward trend and a potential loss of around $4 billion in revenue.

Much of that loss, Glass said, can be attributed to a significant upswing in visa denials from the fastest-growing countries of origin for international students, namely India and Bangladesh, before Trump took office. That decline is almost certain to get worse, Glass said, as the Trump administration applies its strict scrutiny of student visa holders to visa applicants, prepares a potentially sweeping travel ban and cuts the research funding that draws so many global applicants.

“Universities aren’t thinking this is a one-time thing that will pass. They are seeing this as a reorientation of university policies, a permanent shift,” Glass said. “They are having serious conversations about restructuring their budgets.”

Understaffed and Overwhelmed

Responding to the chaotic moment has been especially hard for international student offices at small colleges. Thomas, of Campbellsville University, told Inside Higher Ed that he’s been “perplexed and very frustrated” by the student visa revocations.

“Students are inquiring about their status … We are not notified, and the only way we know is by searching the SEVIS database,” he said. “I’ve been seeking guidance from [ICE’s Student Exchange and Visitor Program] on what a university should do. For example, do we inform the students of what we find or would we be obstructing justice?”

Aw said that for colleges with small, fairly new international student support offices, it’s crucial for university leaders to get involved in the student visa issues they’re facing.

“The whole university has to be involved in this effort, and that should be an intentional strategy,” she said. “This shouldn’t just be delegated to international offices, especially if there’s just one person working there.”

One international student adviser at a regional public college said they’ve had trouble marshaling their campus resources to do that. When a student’s visa is revoked, he said, there’s no protocol to follow, and the high stakes give way to confusion and paralysis in their four-person office.

“As international enrollment here has grown, our office has been shrinking,” said the adviser, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity out of concern over backlash against his institution. “It’s been a real struggle to handle this alone, and we’re having difficulty getting timely guidance from other university offices, namely general counsel … but because there are so many liability concerns around this, counsel really does need to be involved.”

Many of the small colleges struggling to respond to student visa revocations have come to rely on international tuition dollars to support flagging revenue from shrinking domestic enrollment or declines in state funding. If they lose more to student visa revocations—or experience a decline in international applicants due to the Trump administration’s policies—it could be catastrophic.

The anonymous international student adviser said international enrollment had already been declining because of a difficult job market for visa holders postgraduation. He’s worried the latest challenges will propel the downturn into a nosedive.

“Why would you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and travel to the other side of the world to be educated somewhere that doesn’t value you, or worse, that sees you as a target?” he said. “If [international enrollment] drops off very significantly, there would be programs that would have to re-evaluate if they can continue to function.”

The president of one small private college, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told Inside Higher Ed that their international population had grown to nearly half of their student body in recent years.

“If our international student population were to just dwindle, I worry for the viability of this institution,” he said.