The Trump administration is intensifying its scrutiny of US higher education institutions and international students. As of April 14, reports NAFSA, “there have been almost 1,300 reports of international students and scholars either having their visa revoked and/or their record in SEVIS [the database where international student records are stored] terminated, thereby jeopardizing their legal status in the United States.”

Staff working in international departments of universities and colleges across the country report a sense of helplessness as they receive emails telling them to hand over student records or face dire consequences. They are trading stories on private forums and looking for advice on how to resist and protect students. Inside Higher Ed reported on the trend at the beginning of April:

“One student adviser wrote on the forum that they received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security demanding a number of international students’ records and threatening to revoke the college’s visa certification ‘without any chance of appeal’ if they did not provide the records within five business days. Another said they’d gotten the same letter, but their deadline was just three business days.”

When a SEVIS record is deleted, it means the student cannot work, transfer to another school, leave the US to visit their family, or pursue a post-study work opportunity. It can be setup for a student’s legal status being terminated as if a student whose record has been removed performs an action they had been permitted to do when they had a SEVIS record, they can be detained or deported. What’s more, there are many reported cases of students not even knowing their SEVIS record has been deleted. because the government official who deleted it did not tell the school or the student.

University officials speaking on condition of anonymity to Inside Higher Ed said that students’ SEVIS records were being terminated without their knowledge. Some officials found out only by checking the database routinely or by chance.  “We usually check SEVIS once a semester … we don’t usually have to check statuses because we’re the ones who would change them,” one official said. “Now we are making a point to check thoroughly, every day. It’s the only way to protect our students.”

A retired professor who now focuses on immigration law and student visas said the government’s apparent conclusion that it does not need to notify school officials about SEVIS terminations “makes it difficult for colleges to advise their international students.”

Many of our readers work or have worked in the international offices of universities and colleges and therefore know the devotion international counsellors have to the students they work with. The current situation is not only logistically challenging, but also extremely difficult psychologically for both students and staff.

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So many questions

In the first four months of the Trump presidency, international students have been detained or deported on such grounds as:

• A past traffic violation;
• Participation in a pro-Palestine protest;
• Social media posts;
• A determination by the secretary of state that their continued presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences”;
• “Other.”

The ominous “other,” says NAFSA, is accompanied by “a vague reference to a criminal records check ‘and/or’ a visa revocation.”

While the officials who spoke with Inside Higher Ed said that “affected students were almost all Middle Eastern—Turkish, Kuwaiti, Saudi, Iranian—or from majority-Muslim countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh,” NAFSA is reporting that no nationality is being spared: “There is no clear pattern or trend in the nationalities of the affected students … students from all regions of the world are being affected.”

Security undone

Writing in Al Jazeera on 11 April, former US international student and associate professor Somdeep Sen said, “every international student in America today must accept that they may be abducted, detained and deported at any moment for attending a protest, writing an article or expressing a view that upsets the White House or its allies.”

Almost every US college or university that enrols international students (and/or has continued DEI initiatives) is also at risk. So far, billions of dollars of federal funding have been stripped from institutions including Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard – and that is just the start of the list. Their perceived wrongs include not releasing student records, not stopping DEI initiatives, not cutting programmes (e.g., Middle Eastern studies), not terminating positions, and more.

Last week, Harvard provided the strongest resistance to the Trump government’s demands. This week, the US Department of Homeland Security has stripped more funding from Harvard, is planning to revoke Harvard’s tax-free status, and warned that the university will lose its permission to enrol foreign students if it does not share information on some of its students.